Social Welfare Analysis Colloquium
Speaker Bios - Fall 2006
John B. Williamson
Professor of Sociology, Boston College
Dr. Williamson is a Professor of Sociology at Boston College. He earned his B.S. in Humanities and Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard University. His primary research interests include aging policy and the politics of aging with a focus in recent years on Social Security policy, the proposed privatization of Social Security, and the comparative study of old-age security policy.
Cathie Jo Martin
Professor of Political Science, Boston University
Dr. Martin is professor of Political Science at Boston University. During the academic year of 2007-2008, she will be on leave at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is the author of Stuck in Neutral: Business and the Politics of Human Capital Investment Policy (Princeton University Press, 2000), Shifting the Burden: the Struggle over Growth and Corporate Taxation (University of Chicago Press, 1991), and articles appearing in journals such as the American Political Science Review, World Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Governance, and Politics and Society. Her research interests in employers and social policy have been funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Danish National Study of Power and Democracy, the German Marshall Fund, the Danish Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation.
Michael Doonan
Assistant Professor, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University
Dr. Doonan is an Assistant Professor at the Heller Graduate School at Brandeis University. He is the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Health Policy Forum, and Director of the Council for Health Care Economics and Policy. His Ph.D. from Brandeis is both in Political Science and Health Services Research. His research focuses on issues related to access to health care, Medicaid, SCHIP, federal/state relations, prescription drugs, public health and the economics of health system change. Professor Doonan began his work in the field as a legislative aide for Senator John Kerry where he worked on health and environmental issues, as a fellow for the U.S. Senate Finance Committee as they considered national reform in 1994 and more recently, as a program specialist for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), in the area of Medicaid managed care and state health care reform. He also served as a member of President Clinton’s Health Care Taskforce working primarily on the Low-Income and Working Families work group, and as a member of the Taskforce Speakers Bureau
Renée Spencer
Assistant Professor of Social Work, Boston University
Dr. Renee Spencer is currently an Assistant Professor at the Boston University School of Social Work. Dr. Spencer received her M.S.S.W. (direct practice) from the University of Texas in 1991 and her Ed.D. in human development and psychology from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education in 2002. Her research interests include youth mentoring, adolescent development, and gender. She currently teaches Human Behavior in the Social Environment (I&II) in the masters program and Qualitative Research Methods in the doctoral program. She has also taught Clinical Practice with Adolescents in Social Context. She is a recipient of a William T. Grant Foundation Scholar Award for which is currently carrying out a mixed-methods longitudinal study of youth mentoring relationships in both community and school-based programs. Dr. Spencer has published in journals such as Journal of Adolescent Research, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Youth & Society, and Families in Society. She has also contributed chapters to edited volumes, including the Handbook of youth mentoring, edited by D. L. DuBois & M. J. Karcher (2006) and The Blackwell Handbook of mentoring: A multiple perspective approach, edited by T. D. Allen & L. T. Eby (2007).
Samantha Friedman
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Northeastern University
Dr. Friedman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on understanding the causes and consequences of residential segregation for both foreign and native-born minorities and on documenting successes in overcoming constraints in the housing market. Currently, she is exploring the access that minority homeowners have to racially-integrated and predominantly white neighborhoods and how that affects the stability of such neighborhoods over time. Dr. Friedman has published articles in Social Problems, Demography, Housing Policy Debate, International Migration Review, Urban Geography, Social Science Quarterly, and Population Research and Policy Review.
Margaret Lombe
Assistant Professor of Social Work, Boston College
Dr. Lombe is an Assistant Professor at the Boston College Graduate School of Social Work and a faculty associate at the Center for Social Development at Washington University in Saint Louis. Her area of expertise is international social development with an emphasis on social inclusion/exclusion and capacity building. Her research focuses on understanding the role of institutions, civic service, and asset building in influencing inclusion. Professor Lombe has published chapters and articles on the issue of poverty and social inclusion; and has presented papers at both local and international conferences Her recent work has appeared in refereed journals including: Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment; Social Work Research; Journal of Community Practice; Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare; Social Development Issues; and Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services.
Lisa Dodson
Professor of Sociology, Boston College
Dr. Dodson is a Professor of Sociology at Boston College. She teaches and conducts field research on daily life and survival strategies in low-income America. Her central focus is the everyday knowledge and social critique that comes from people who are working poor and caring for family in a time of expanding sociopolitical and economic inequality in the US. Current areas of research include the creative care strategies that mothers devise while working in service & care labor markets, discussed in forthcoming paper Wage Poor Mothers and Moral Economy and on methodological issues explored in a new project, Researching Inequality. Dodson conducted extensive research during the years before and after welfare reform resulting in the book, Don't Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America (1999).
Emily Barnman
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Boston University
Emily Barman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Boston University. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2002. Her recent book, /Contesting Communities: The Transformation of Workplace Charity/ (Stanford University Press, 2006) won the 2007 best book award from the AFP. She has published widely on the nonprofit sector, the sociology of religion, social theory, and sociological methods in /The American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces/, /Theory and Society, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Voluntas, Nonprofit Management and Leadership/, among other journals and edited volumes. Her current project is a historical analysis of the social construction of performance measurement in the nonprofit sector.
