Louise Levesque Lopman

Areas of Expertise

Feminist Phenomenology; Qualitative Research; Gender, Globalization and Social Justice

Email: lopman@brandeis.edu

Current Project

“El Salvador Not For Sale: Voices of Women Maquila (Sweatshop) Workers,” explores the impact of the neoliberal economic model on Salvadoran women’s lives and documents their emerging leadership in creating an alternative model based on self-determination. The project is based on interviews with workers, labor and union organizers, human rights activists, and Legislative and U.S. Embassy Officials in El Salvador.

Biography

Louise Levesque Lopman is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Regis College where she also chaired the Department of Sociology, and established the Women’s Studies Program which she directed in 1987-1992.  She was awarded many Regis Faculty Research Grants, and was the first faculty member to receive two Kaneb Scholar Awards in 1999 and 2001.  Louise was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women in 1990-1992 and a Visiting Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University in 1993-1994.  She also served as Program Chair of the Society of Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (SPHS) in 1989, Co-chair of SPHS in 1990-1991, and member of the SPHS Editorial Board in 1995-2001.  

Louise has been a Scholar in the Women’s Studies Scholars Program at Brandeis since 1993, and she was a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Hadassah Brandeis Institute (HBI) in 1997-2002.  Her research and scholarship interests more generally include:  feminist phenomenological sociology and qualitative research of women’s subjective experience of corporate globalization within contexts of race, gender, ethnicity, and social class.

Education

Ph.D., Brandeis University

M.A., Brandeis University

B.S., Boston University

Representative Publications

Lopman, Louise.  “Listen, and You Will Hear: Reflections on Interviewing from a Feminist Phenomenological Perspective.”  Feminist Phenomenology.  Eds. Linda Fisher and Lester Embree.  Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000. 103-32.

Lopman, Louise.  Claiming Reality: Phenomenology and Women’s Experience.  Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988.

Links

Behind the Label

Campaign for Labor Rights

CISPES: Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador

Clean Clothes Campaign

International Labor Committee

Maquila Solidarity

Sweatshop Watch

UNITE! Stop Sweatshops Campaign

United Students Against Sweatshops