In the span of a dozen years, Matthew Desmond has made the academic leap from ASU undergrad to renowned researcher of entrenched poverty and social inequality.

On Monday, the Harvard sociology professor was announced as one of 24 winners of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, commonly known as a “Genius Grant.” Each recipient of the grant earns $625,000 to further his or her work.

For Desmond, that means he can further his research on worldwide eviction and the impacts on the child-welfare system.

In 2009, he and a team of 10 scholars commenced research on the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, a groundbreaking work that culled court records, ethnographic fieldwork and collected questionnaires from approximately 1,000 households to design a portrait of the high rates of eviction and the ways in which it disrupts the lives of low-income families.

Desmond spoke to ASU News about his reaction to the award, his research and how ASU was the starting point for his life’s work.

Question: How did you react to the news of winning the Genius Grant?

Answer: I received a phone call from the MacArthur Foundation a few weeks ago and was sworn to secrecy. At first I was in disbelief and thought they were pulling my leg. Then I realized they were serious. The funny thing was I took my kids to lunch that day and I wanted to tell them about this great thing that happened. My daughter wanted to talk about “Star Wars,” and my son wanted to discuss Luke Skywalker. So that was the experience on the day we found out.

Q: How did Arizona State University prepare you for the work and research you conduct today?

A: I’m originally from Winslow, Arizona, and when I came to ASU I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I started taking these classes in justice studies and communication, and some of the narratives of the stories I heard haunted me. The family I grew up in, the money was always tight but there was always social mobility that could be gained through education. What I learned in the classes at ASU unsettled me so much that I wanted to figure something out. I worked all through college, but when I wasn’t working I was studying in the library, trying to figure out the contours of poverty. I also got involved in community service at ASU and worked with outreaches that dealt with poverty like Habitat for Humanity. At the end of my four years, I even started an outreach organization that dealt with the homeless population around the Mill Avenue area so I could get to know them on a more personal level. I see ASU as fundamental in introducing me to those issues and shaping my work.

Q: You once stated that eviction is a “cause rather than a symptom” of poverty. Can you explain that?

A: A lot of times when you think about eviction, you think of it as a consequence of poverty. “You lose your job, you get evicted.” Eviction is this harshness that you encounter, but we don’t think of it as something that actually drives poverty. That’s a big thing we’re running into when examining the data. Getting evicted is a very stressful event — it causes you to miss work, it directly affects job performance and it can also result in being fired. This is just one example of how the outcome of eviction can actually make people poorer. People end up moving to poorer neighborhoods, even more dangerous neighborhoods and in worse housing than they were before. The reason for that is because eviction often ends up in civil court and comes with a record. Landlords are now using eviction records as a screening technique, and because of that many families are excluded from opportunities to get better housing.

Q: One of your other findings was that poor families used to turn to kin for help, and now poverty-stricken families are turning to strangers to form brief and intense relationships for assistance, creating a network of “disposable ties” to meet pressing needs.

A: The disposable-ties theory is that a half-century ago you might turn to your family for help and swapping money and goods daily to help try and make ends meet. I loan you $25 today and you feed me tomorrow … that’s how it worked. It didn’t end their poverty, but it allowed them to survive. During the study period I saw people reaching out to virtual strangers to meet their fundamental basic needs. There could have been family around to help, but I didn’t see it. I saw how people need the help of strangers and when they were helped, it accelerated their friendships. Often these friendships did burn out because of the trying conditions. Maybe incarceration or federal policies on family play a role in this and why things have changed, but it’s a very interesting question to pursue.

Q: What are some of the emotional issues that eviction can cause in a person that the public might not know or understand?

A: One thing that I think everyone should understand is that eviction affects the entire community. In the African-American areas of Milwaukee, one out of 14 people are evicted every year. That’s a lot of people, and there’s a constant turning over in neighborhoods. It dwarfs the opportunity to build strong community ties and affects civic engagement. It also affects crime. We’re just now starting to realize all of these issues, and municipalities are starting to understand this as well. On a personal level, eviction is a very traumatic event. You lose all of your possessions and then you’re out on the street. You are literally starting over. Then there’s the toll that it takes on one’s spirit. One thing we’ve found is that eviction is tied to depression, and it seems to have a real effect on mental health. The moment itself seems to leave a really deep impression on happiness, so it has these consequences that are multi-dimensional and sticky.

Is it time to cut a deal with Japan on whaling?  

The three-decade international moratorium on commercial whaling isn’t working. Animal-rights activists insist the ban remain absolute, while the three rogue nations still pursuing the world’s largest mammals refuse to quit hunting.

Leah Gerber, a marine conservation biologist, professor at Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences and founding director of ASU’s Center for Biodiversity Outcomes, floated the idea of a compromise in the September issue of scientific journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.    

Rebounding whale populations, the predominance of other threats, and stubborn stakeholders make the moratorium a “failed management system,” Gerber said. The past 30 years of the International Whaling Commission’s conversation has been stalled by disagreement on the ethics of killing whales.

“It really boils down to an ethical argument: that it’s not right to kill a whale,” said Gerber (pictured left). “Personally I don’t like the idea of killing a whale, but that’s my value, and other people have other values. Insisting on our values in discussions about whaling has resulted in a global stalemate.”

Changing course and allowing Iceland, Japan and Norway to legally hunt under regulations and monitoring might break the current stalemate. Currently Japan whales under a loophole allowing for scientific research. The other two countries hunt whales commercially in protest of the ban.

“If our common goal is a healthy and sustainable population of whales, let’s find a way to develop strategies that achieve that,” Gerber said. “That may involve agreeing to a small level of take. That would certainly be a reduced take to what’s happening now.”

Since the moratorium was declared in 1982 and begun in 1985, whale populations have rebounded across the board, Gerber said.  

“Overall the whaling that’s happening is not threatening any population,” she said.

“With the exception of the J stock (a population that lives in the East China Sea, the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea) of minke whales, current levels of take are fairly sustainable.”

The appetite for whale meat has been on the decline in Japan. An April 2014 poll by Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s newspaper of record, revealed that 14 percent of respondents occasionally or rarely ate whale meat. (Thirty-seven percent said they never ate it.) Consumption in Japan peaked in the 1960s and has steadily decreased; today, whale-meat consumption is about 1 percent of its peak, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

The Japanese have argued that it’s part of their cultural heritage. They also call American protests hypocritical because Alaskan Inuit tribe members hunt whales every year.

Leah Gerber (right) and one of her doctoral students, Yaiyr Astudillo-Scalia, process a biopsy sample from a humpback whale, collected last March off the west coast of Maui, Hawaii, for better understanding mating behavior of humpbacks based on hormone analyses of the samples. Photos courtesy Leah Gerber

Norwegians have eaten whale meat since medieval times, but that habit has slowed in more recent times. Whale was served in school cafeterias and as military rations during the 1970s and 1980s, making it the mystery meat for a generation who won’t touch it anymore. It’s seen as something your grandparents ate. (Oddly, it’s enjoying a renaissance among young Norwegian foodies.)

The 2015 catch netted about 700 tons of whale meat, while the Norwegian market won’t bear much more than 500 tons.

“Good catch is all very well, but we have challenges in the market,” Åge Eriksen, CEO of a seafood supply company, told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK last year. “We’ve got more meat on land than we can sell, and it is not a desirable situation.”

Minke whales in the Southern Hemisphere have such a large population that taking a few wouldn’t be a big deal, Gerber said.

The media perception of whaling is often that it’s evil, but there are worse threats to the whales' livelihoods, Gerber said. For instance, she said that whale mortality numbers are also driven by the mammals being hit by ships. For instance, blue whales off the coast of Long Beach, California, simply didn’t know to get out of the way of ships, according to a Stanford University study released in April. Because they are the biggest creatures in the sea, they’ve never had to avoid threats.

Bycatch entanglement, where whales are snagged in nets, and contaminants in seawater are two other serious threats.

“For most populations, whaling actually makes up a pretty small fraction (of whale deaths),” she said, pointing out that International Whaling Commission members know this. “We don’t have to agree on everything, but let’s take some baby steps.”

Violent action by animal-rights groups has not had an effect, either.

“A lot of the (non-governmental organizations) like Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd raise a lot of money in advocating for saving whales by chasing whaling vessels in the open ocean,” Gerber said. “What success has that had?”

Japanese whaling delegates have said they’re open to compromise arrangements, Gerber said.

“The animal-rights groups, on the other hand, are like, ‘Nope. My deal or nothing.’ To me, it’s not the best way to lead to change.”

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Scott Seckel

Reporter , ASU News