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Apr. 10, 2025 Associate Professor of Urban Studies Kafui Attoh is the longest-serving professor in his department. In 2013 he joined the Joseph S. Murphy Institute (which became SLU in 2018) after receiving his Ph.D. in geography at Syracuse. Before that, he double-majored in geography and Spanish as an undergraduate at Macalester College in Minnesota. […]

Apr. 10, 2025 When Elee Ballinger decided to leave her small town amid the redwood forests of northern California for college, she opted for a true urban experience: attending Hunter College, living in Brooklyn, and working for the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG). Being a part of SLU’s Community Semester program this spring, […]

Mar. 13, 2025 For Dani Lopez, a social entrepreneur and student in the Urban Studies Master’s program, the challenges of her youth plus lessons learned from working as a financial aid administrator led her to co-found a company to improve social services delivery. Launched in September 2024, Lulo is a free app designed to enable […]

Mar. 13, 2025 Prof. Rebecca Lurie shared this photo of a 1961 telegram from Eleanor Roosevelt inviting her activist mother (with a typo in her last name) to a gathering at Roosevelt’s townhouse in Manhattan. Eleanor’s husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, died in 1945. More below. Women make up half the world’s population. How does […]

Feb. 13, 2025 Every weekday at 7 a.m., Joana Oliveras punches in for her shift at Baruch College. Over the next seven hours, she will clean all the bathrooms on two floors, empty the trash, and more. Joana, a Bronx native, works at the college as a custodial assistant. No one would have predicted it, […]

Feb. 13, 2025 . Union Semester participant Adin Feder, right, with fellow SLU student Gabriel Slidders, left, and LiUNA Local 79 Director of Organizing Oona Adams, at a rally on Feb. 5 demanding that Empire State Realty Trust use union labor. Adin Feder lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. After getting a bachelor’s degree in English, […]

Dec. 19, 2024 Sonia Rodriguez has held one job for 26 years, and she loves it. She’s a senior registration clerk in the Bureau of Disease Control of the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. She’s a member of the clinic team that provides people with free testing for sexually transmitted diseases and infections […]

Nov. 15, 2024 Below are reflections from students who worked on this fall’s political campaigns, and who responded to outreach from SLU staff. We welcome additional input, especially from those who worked for other political parties and campaigns not represented here. Together, the SLU community is making meaning of election outcomes. An open discussion was […]

Nov. 1, 2024 Natasha Bartley is near the home stretch of obtaining her master’s degree in Urban Studies at SLU. An employee of the city Department of Transportation for a decade, Bartley enrolled to boost her climb up the job ladder. She’s focused on getting that diploma in hand and seeing it enhance her career. […]

College athletes bring in millions of dollars of revenue to their schools, but only in recent years have legal authorities opened the door to viewing them as college “employees” rather than students. SLU Assistant Professor of Labor Studies Cameron Black, however, has found that Black college athletes involved in 20th-century protest movements often were managed […]