Profile

Lisa Dodson is a Research Professor in the Sociology Department at Boston College focusing on race, class and gender; low-wage work/family and two-generation social mobility; and moral economy. Her recent coauthored report, funded by the Ford and Annie E. Casey Foundations on How Youth Are Put At Risk by Parents’ Low-Wage Jobs (2012) examines the interaction of youth development, family stability, and parents’ low-wage jobs.Her forthcoming article “Stereotyping Low Wage Mothers Who Have Work/Family Conflicts” (Journal of Social Issues) explores working-poor mothers’ views about how class and race influence employment policy and ignore critical care needs of children, disproportionately children of color. Professor Dodson specializes in field-based research, conducted in collaboration with community organizations and national networks, to integrate knowledge and lived experiences of low-income people in the development of public policy. Her most recent book The Moral Underground: How Ordinary People Subvert an Unfair Economy (The New Press, 2010) was based on eight years of research that uncovered cross-class alliances and themes of American resistance in response to growing economic inequality and family care crises. Her earlier book Don’t Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America (Beacon Press, 1999) integrated eight years of field-based research to uncover an alternative account of welfare reform, told from the perspective of hundreds of single mothers and their children. Lisa Dodson’s research has been funded by the Ford, Annie E. Casey, Kellogg, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations. She has been interviewed and her research has been used by numerous popular and scholarly publications, includingThe New York Times,Huffington Post Live, The Boston Globe, Chronicle of Higher Education, The American Prospect, The Ed Show, Alternet, and YesMagazine. Dr. Dodson teaches courses on collaborative research methods, poverty in the US, and carework and inequality. In the past she has presented research findings in numerous US Congressional hearings and to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as well academic, community, labor, and human service organizations around the country.