Lisa Dodson
Research Professor
Ph. D., Brandeis University
Professor Dodson is a public sociologist whose research interests include poverty, public policy, and low-income work and family life. She also specializes in collaborative research methods, conducting inquiry that includes the thinking of people “under study.” Professor Dodson came to Boston College from the Radcliffe Public Policy Center at Harvard University, where she taught and conducted policy research from 1996 to 2002. In the past she has presented research findings in US Congressional hearings and to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as well as in many community organizations, labor groups, schools, and public health forums. In collaboration with other Sociology faculty, she has developed an area of specialty -- Poverty, Families, and Social Policy – focusing on the spreading effects of economic stratification. Her new book The Moral Underground: How Ordinary People Subvert an Unfair Economy is based on eight years of research about hidden resistance to an economy that harms millions of working families. Her previous book Don’t Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America explored the lives of low-income women raising children after welfare reform.
