Social Welfare Analysis Colloquium
Speaker Bios - Spring 2008
Rachel Dekel
Senior Lecturer, The Louis and Gabi Weisfield School of Social Work, Bar Illan University, Israel
Dr. Rachel Dekel is a senior lecturer at the Louis and Gabi Weisfeld School of Social Work at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She is currently a visiting scholar in the School of Social Work at Boston University. Dr. Dekel is particularly interested in and has contributed uniquely to the study of individuals who have experienced secondary exposure to traumatic events. Her research has examined spouses of former veterans and prisoners of war, children of fathers with PTSD and therapists who have treated victims of terrorism. In addition to secondary traumatization, Dr. Dekel is interested in exploring the consequences of direct exposure to traumatic events. She was a Co-Principal Investigator in a second wave study, which assessed the mental and familial adjustment of former prisoners of war 30 years after their release from captivity. More recently, following the ongoing terror attacks in Israel that began in 2001, Dr. Dekel joined the Mental Trauma Unit in Meir Medical Center located in central Israel. The unit combined therapy with systematic monitoring of terror victims' mental health conditions. Her research focused on documenting the changes in responses to trauma exposure over time. Dr. Dekel is spending her sabbatical working with a group of leading professionals to develop a new diagnosis for developmental trauma among children who were exposed to relational traumas. She is also collaborating with researchers in the Boston VA Healthcare System to develop a better understanding of the challenges experienced by families of war veterans.
Judith G. Gonyea
Professor and Chair of Research, Boston University School of Social Work
Dr. Gonyea is Professor and Chair of the Research Department at the Boston University School of Social Work. She received her PhD in Social Welfare from the University of Washington. The author of more than 80 publications, much of her research focuses on the economic and health status of older adults. Using a life course perspective, she is particularly interested in exploring the cumulative effects of social and economic inequalities on the life experiences of older Americans. Much of her work focuses on the changing nature of intergenerational family relations, family caregiving, and the interface of work and family in contemporary American society. Dr. Gonyea is the North American editor of the international journal, Community, Work & Family and currently serves on the editorial boards of Public Policy and Aging Report, Research on Aging, and Journal of Gerontological Social Work. She is a Fellow in the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) and is a past Elected Chair of the Society’s Social Policy, Practice and Research Section. Dr. Gonyea is also an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. In 2005, she was the recipient of the National Leadership Award from the Association for Gerontological Education in Social Work (AGE-SW).
Chris Tilly
Professor, Department Regional Economic and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell
Dr. Tilly is a Professor of Regional Economic and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, he received his Ph.D. in Economics and Urban Studies and Planning from MIT. He specializes in labor, income distribution, and local economic development, with research focusing on the United States and Mexico. Tilly’s books include Half a Job: Bad and Good Part-Time Jobs in a Changing Labor Market (Temple University Press, 1996), Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits: Women’s Work, Women’s Poverty (with Randy Albelda, South End Press, 1997), Work Under Capitalism (with Charles Tilly, Westview Press, 1998), and Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skill, and Hiring in America (with Philip Moss, Russell Sage Foundation, 2001).
Kristin Collins
Associate Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law
Kristin Collins joined the faculty of Boston University School of Law in 2006. Professor Collins’s research interests include gender and law, legal history, federal courts, and civil procedure. She has written on equal protection, citizenship law, the history of federal regulation of the family, and modern federalism jurisprudence. Her current research focuses on the origins of family welfare policy and the legal construction of the family and gender in early nineteenth-century administrative law. Following graduation from Yale Law School in 2000, Professor Collins served as a senior fellow at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA) in Cape Town, where she conducted research on the South African Judiciary and, specifically, the enforcement of constitutional norms in South Africa’s courts. She clerked for Chief Judge John Walker, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Judge Kimba Wood, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Following her clerkships she practiced law with a civil rights law firm in New York City.
Rob Hudson
Professor and Chair, Department of Social Welfare Policy, Boston University School of Social Work
Rob Hudson is Professor and Chair, Dept. of Social Welfare Policy, Boston University School of Social Work. His areas of interest are the politics and policies of aging, the design and implementation of social service policies, and the place of the aged in the contemporary welfare state. His articles have appeared in Social Service Review, International Social Security Review, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, Families in Society, among other journals. He currently serves as editor of Public Policy & Aging Report, and he is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, where he chairs the John A. Heinz Dissertation Award Committee. He is currently organizing a two-volume reference set for Praeger, Boomer Bust?: The New Political Economy of Aging. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Deborah Belle
Professor, Department of Psychology at Boston University and Director of the Human Development Program, Boston University
Deborah Belle is Professor of Psychology at Boston University and Director of the Human Development Program. She earned her doctorate in Human Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1976. Her research has focused on poverty and economic inequality, stress and depression, social networks and social supports, work/family issues, and women’s mental health. Her books include Lives in stress: Women and depression, Children’s social networks and social supports, and The after-school lives of children. She has been a William T. Grant Foundation Faculty Scholar in the Mental Health of Children, Evelyn Green Davis Fellow in Psychology at the Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College, and Fellow at the Radcliffe Public Policy Center. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.
Kevin Lang
Professor, Boston University Department of Economics
Kevin Lang is Chair of the Boston University Department of Economics. His work spans theoretical and empirical research on labor and education economics, including discrimination, immigration and language issues. His publications include Poverty and Discrimination (Princeton University Press, 2007) and over fifty academic articles. Dr. Lang is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Advisory Board of the Canadian Employment Research Forum and co-editor of Labour Economics. He is currently serving on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Public Education. He has been the recipient of an Olin Foundation Fellowship, a Fullbright Fellowship and a Sloan Foundation Faculty Research Fellowship. He received his BA from Oxford University, his MSc from the l’Université de Montréal, and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Marisol Negron
Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Latino Studies at Brandeis University
Dr. Negrón is the Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Latino Studies at Brandeis University. Situated in the Department of Romance Studies and the program in Latin American and Latino Studies, she is also affiliated with Women’s and Gender Studies and participates in the MIT Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies. Dr. Negrón received her Ph.D. in Spanish from Stanford University in 2006 with an emphasis on Latino literary and cultural studies as well as language and linguistics. At Brandeis, she teaches courses on “Latin” music in the United States and Latino literatures, film, and performance. Her research interests include popular culture and commodification, the trajectories of diasporic communities, and ethno-linguistic identity. She is currently co-editing a manual for the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language to Latinos. The manual situates the teaching of Spanish to native speakers within the field of Latino Studies and brings together theories on language learning, pedagogy, and cultural criticism. Her own manuscript-in-progress explores the development of salsa as a cultural product during the 1960s and 1970s New York salsa "boom." Dr. Negrón explores the aesthetic form of the music as well as the material context from which it emerged. By emphasizing the impact of society and culture on market forces, she demonstrates that salsa entered into a series of social relations marked largely by issues of class and ethno-racial, gendered, sexual, and national identities. In so doing, she reveals the need to reevaluate the relationship between economic priorities and cultural practices, maintaining that the latter are not always subsumed to the market.
Heather MacIndoe
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University
Heather MacIndoe is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University and a Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. She earned her doctorate in Sociology at the University of Chicago in 2007. Her current research examines the public and private grant economies of U.S. cities and the development of networks among urban nonprofit organizations. She has published in the American Journal of Sociology and Mobilization.
Gail Steketee
Dean ad Interim, Professor, Boston University School of Social Work
Gail Steketee, PhD, Professor and interim Dean at the Boston University School of Social Work, has conducted many research studies of the psychopathology and treatment of OCD, panic and OC spectrum conditions, including body dysmorphic disorder and compulsive hoarding. She holds current NIMH grants to study aspects of compulsive hoarding and cognitive and behavioral treatment for this syndrome. She has published over 160 articles and chapters on OCD, anxiety and related disorders, including 7 books. The most recent are Cognitive Approaches to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (Wilhelm & Steketee, New Harbinger, 2006), Compulsive Hoarding and Acquiring (Steketee & Frost, Oxford University Press, 2007) and Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Hoarding (Tolin, Frost, & Steketee, Oxford University Press, 2007).
Robin Robinson
Associate Professor, Sociology and Crime & Justice Studies
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
Robin A. Robinson is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology, where she teaches in Sociology and Crime and Justice Studies. She is also an affiliate of the Women’s Studies Program and the Religious Studies Program, and core faculty for Policy Studies. She earned the Ph.D. in Social Policy from Brandeis University, and the Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology from The George Washington University, with concentrations in child/adolescent, adult, and community psychology. Her scholarship and activism focus principally on policy aspects of disorganizing effects of trauma amongst women and girls as trauma relates to social marginalization. She is completing a book “Violations of Girlhood: Voices of Delinquent Girls,” in which girls in conflict with the law and their communities describe their experiences of disruption with family and social environments, which are placed within contexts of social control in public and private spheres. Her current research includes an ethnographic evaluation of the wellness program of contemplative practices for domestic violence shelter workers offered by the Transforming Trauma Initiative of the Garrison Institute. Dr. Robinson is engaged in the scholarship of inclusive teaching, and has recently completed a manuscript on collaborative learning toward empathy and compassion, with considerations of ethical empathy, to be published in a forthcoming anthology as part of her work with the New England Center for Inclusive Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship.
