Senior Staff Biographies

Fred Block (Senior Fellow) is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis (Chair 1992-1996). He is the author of The Vampire State and Other Myths and Fallacies About The U.S. Economy (1996), Postindustrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse (1990), The Mean Season: The Attack On the Welfare State (with Richard A. Cloward, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Francis Ford Piven) (1987), Revising State Theory: Essays In Politics and Postindustrialism (1987), and The Origins of International Economic Disorder: A Study of United States International Monetary Policy From World War II to the Present (1977). He has also published many articles on economic sociology, political sociology, sociology of work, and sociological theory in Politics & Society, World Policy Journal, Socialist Review, Theory and Society, Annual Review of Sociology, and Social Problems.

Dr. Block has served as a member of the Office of Technology Assessment Advisory Panel on the Electronic Enterprise (1992-1993), and he serves on the Board of the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy (1989-present). Dr. Block was a Distinguished Scientific Visitor to the Republic of China in 1995. He has also written for The Nation, The American Prospect, In These Times, Commonweal, Boston Review, and Tikkun.

Troy Duster (Senior Fellow)is Professor of Sociology at New York University, and he also holds the title of Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the former Director of the American Cultures Center and founding Director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change, both at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a Visiting Professor or Visiting Scholar at Stockholm University, the University of British Columbia, the London School of Economics, Williams College, the University of Melbourne, and Columbia University. His books and monographs include The Legislation of Morality (1970), Aims and Control of the Universities (1974), Cultural Perspectives on Biological Knowledge (co-edited with Karen Garret, 1984), Backdoor to Eugenics (2003, 2nd Edition), and (co-author of) Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Colorblind Society (2003). He is also the author of numerous articles on theory and methods published in the American Sociologist, Temps Moderne, and Politics and the Life Sciences.

Dr. Duster has been a member of the Assembly of Behavioral and Social Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences; the Committee on Social and Ethical Impacts of Advances in Biomedicine, Institute of Medicine; the Special Commission of the Association of American Law Schools; the Commission on Meeting the Challenges of Diversity in an Academic Democracy; and the Science Advisory Panel, National Institutes of Health, Research, on Violence. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Social Science Research Council (2004), and President-elect of the American Sociological Association (2004).

He is the recipient of a number of research fellowships including awards from the Swedish Government, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Senior Research Award from the Ford Foundation. He has been a member of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research (1996-1999), the Board of Directors of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (1997-2003) of which he served as Chair (2002-2003), and was also a member and then Chair of the National Advisory Committee on Ethical, Legal and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project (The ELSI Working Group). Along with Jerome Karabel, Dr. Duster co-directed a multi-year grant from the Ford Foundation on the effects of the end of affirmative action on the University of California.

Carole Joffe (Senior Fellow) is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. She is also a Visiting Professor in the Center for Reproductive Health Research and Policy at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the author of three books, Friendly Intruders: Childcare Professionals and Family Life (1979), The Regulation of Sexuality: Experiences of Family Planning Workers (1984), and Doctors of Conscience: The Struggle to Provide Abortion Before and After Roe v. Wade (1995), as well as many scholarly articles. She also writes frequently about reproductive health and reproductive politics in such outlets as the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Salon, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Dr. Joffe’s current research involves tracking the spread of mifepristone (also known as "RU-486", or the "abortion pill") within the United States, and noting what impact this may have on attitudes toward abortion both within the medical community and the general public. Dr. Joffe is the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, the William Penn Foundation, and the Open Society Institute. She works closely with many abortion rights groups, and has served on the Boards of the National Abortion Federation, the California Abortion Rights Action League, and the Elizabeth Blackwell Center for Women. She speaks frequently to such organizations as Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Medical Students for Choice, Choice USA, and numerous medical audiences.

In 2003, Dr. Joffe was awarded an “Excellence in Education” award from the California chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in recognition of her teaching and research in the area of reproductive rights. In 2004, she won the “Feminist Activist” award given annually by Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS), the major feminist group within American sociology.

Jerome Karabel (Senior Fellow) is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Co-director of the Berkeley Project on Equal Opportunity. The author of numerous articles on higher education and social inequality, he is the co-author of The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900-1985 (1989), which won the Outstanding Book of the Year Award of the American Educational Research Association. In 1993-1994, he was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Since the early 1970s, Dr. Karabel has had a special interest in the social consequences of policies of university admissions. In 1989, he chaired the Admissions and Enrollment Committee of the Academic Senate of the University of California at Berkeley and wrote the report Freshman Admissions at Berkeley: A Policy for the 1990s and Beyond. His research on college and university admissions has appeared in such journals as The American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Educational Record, Harvard Educational Review, and Theory and Society. Currently, Professor Karabel is directing (with Troy Duster) a multi-year grant from the Ford Foundation on the effects of the end of affirmative action on the University of California.

Dr. Karabel is the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Institute of Education. He writes frequently for non-academic audiences in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the American Prospect, The Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Los Angeles Times, and has appeared on such television and shows as Nightline, Today, and All Things Considered.

Kristin Luker (Senior Fellow) is Professor of Sociology and a professor in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program (Boalt School of Law) at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of many scholarly articles, as well as three books: Taking Chances: Abortion and the Decision Not to Contracept (1975), Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1984), and Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy (1996). She is currently at work on her fourth book, tentatively entitled Bodies and Politics, which is about sex education controversies in the United States.

Dr. Luker has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Sociological Research Association, and was invited to the White House by President Clinton to discus issues of politics and public policy. She has been awarded grants from the Spencer and Ford Foundations, as well as the Commonwealth Fund, and has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her book Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

In addition to her numerous influential articles and books, Dr. Luker has engaged in public debate over current social and political issues in the New York Times, Harper's, and the American Prospect.

Pamela Morgan (Director, Strategic Framing Project) explores the relationship between language, belief, action, policymaking, and context. Most of her work has focused on politics, which she investigates from the standpoint of cultural cognitive models; political discourse; propaganda and persuasion; political symbolic and conceptual systems; images; and the use of stereotypes, categorization, metaphor and analogy.

Dr. Morgan has worked on the framing of international, leadership, children's and teens', health, and environmental issues for advocacy groups and other nonprofits, as well as for governmental agencies such as the Indian Health Service. Projects have included a video on the International Criminal Court (scriptwriter and framing consultant, for the United Nations Association of the United States, working with former ambassador David Scheffer and the Aspen Institute), the cross-cultural reframing of health materials (workshop leader, trainer, and interviewing consultant, for the Indian Health Service; to be repeated and extended August 2004), international agriculture extension (framing consultant with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Aspen Institute), and environmental and tax reform projects.

Dr. Morgan holds a Ph.D. in cognitive linguistics from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. in history from UC Santa Barbara. Publications include articles and talks on the framing of political speeches and controversies (e.g., Newt Gingrich, the Clinton impeachment, Gerry Adams of Northern Ireland); and user's guides, for example: Competition, Cooperation, and Connection: How These Metaphors Affect Child Advocacy (for the FrameWorks Institute); Global Interdependence in Agriculture: A Users' Guide for Effective Communication, (consultant to author C. Radomski, for the USDA/Aspen Institute) and Framing Social Issues: Does "The Working Poor" Work? (with George Lakoff, for the Rockridge Institute).

Ruth Rosen (Senior Fellow) is a pioneering historian of gender and society and an award-winning journalist.

She is Professor Emerita of History at the University of California at Davis, where she taught American history, women's history, history and public policy, and immigration studies for over two decades. The recipient of the University of California Distinguished Teaching Award and many national fellowships, including two from the Rockefeller Foundation, she has lectured all over the world and was a visiting professor at the European Peace University in Austria and Ireland and at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

She is the editor of the The Maimie Papers, a New York Times Notable Book in 1978; and the author of The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America (1982); and The World Split Open: How The Modern Women's Movement Changed America (2001), a Book of the Month Club and Quality Paperback Selection; one of the Los Angeles Times Best Books published in 2000; a finalist for the Non-Fiction Award for the Bay Area Reviewers Association

As a journalist, she wrote hundreds of op-ed columns for the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers between 1991-2000 and contributed many essays to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, the Women's Review of Books, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

In 2000, she joined the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board and wrote both editorials and twice-a-week columns on the op-ed page. For her distinguished journalism, she received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the East Bay Press Club, the National Association for the Mentally Ill, the California Public Health Association, the National Federation of Women Legislators, and the Hearst Corporation.

Her editorials and columns focused on a broad range of subjects, including foreign policy, homelessness, the politics of health care, space-based weapons and the missile defense system, the politics of parole and prisons, reproductive rights, and environmental health. Until she left in 2004, she wrote extensively on the Bush administration's politicization of science; its violations of civil rights and liberties through the PATRIOT ACT, constraints on FOIA, and the Presidential Records Act; and the deceptions that led to the war in Iraq.

She is now a Senior Fellow writing and speaking about how we would change, reframe, and rethink domestic and global public policy if women really mattered.

Accustomed to writing and speaking to the general public, she has appeared on NewsHour, NBC News, Fox News, and hundreds of NPR and commercial radio programs.

Lawrence Wallack (President) is Professor and Director, School of Community Health, Portland State University. He was the founding director of the Berkeley Media Studies Group, an organization conducting research and training in the use of media to promote healthy public policies. Dr. Wallack is one of the primary architects of media advocacy—an innovative approach to working with mass media to advance public health. He has published extensively and lectures frequently on the news media and public health policy issues. He is the principal author of News for a Change: An Advocate's Guide to Working with the Media (1999) and Media Advocacy and Public Health: Power for Prevention (1993). He is also co-editor of Mass Media and Public Health: Complexities and Conflicts (1990).

Dr. Wallack is the recipient of several awards, including The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Innovator Award (2000), Distinguished Wellness Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley (1997); Alfred W. Childs Distinguished Award for Faculty Service, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley (1996-97); University of California Health Net Wellness Award Lecturer (1994); Early Career Award, Community Health Education Section, American Public Health Association (1984); Peer Recognition Award, Society of Public Health Educators, Northern California (1983); and Beryl Roberts Prize in Health Education (1980).

Dr. Wallack has appeared on Nightline, Good Morning America, the CBS Evening News, the Today Show, Cable Network News, Oprah, and numerous local news and public affairs programs to discuss his research and comment on policy issues regarding public health problems.