Wendy Simonds
Ph.D., City University of New York, 1990
Professor & Director of Undergraduate Studies
Birth and Parenthood, Family, Gender, Cultural Studies, Medical Sociology, Sexuality, Theory
Email: wsimonds@gsu.edu
Room: 1049
Telephone Number: (404) 413-6512
Full Vita (PDF version)
Research and Teaching Interests
Dr. Simonds's current and recent research centers on the sociology of procreative experiences. She is working with Barbara Katz Rothman (City University of New York) and Bari Meltzer (University of Pennsylvania) on a book about birth attend ants (midwives, obstetricians, and labor and delivery nurses) and the social construction of birth in U.S. culture (forthcoming from Routledge). She has collaborated with researchers at the Population Council, which sponsored the U. S. clinical trials of mifepristone (RU-486), conducting interviews with users and health care workers who participated in the trials, and published articles on how mifepristone, as an oral abortion method, affects the ways in which people talk, think about and experience abort ion. Another project examines how women who have used emergency contraception describe their experiences, and their view of emergency contraception as it relates to procreative decision-making.
These projects follow Dr. Simonds's study of abortion clinic workers at one clinic (published as Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic). She combined in-depth interviews with ethnography to explore how abortion workers think about abortion and women's decisions to avoid parenthood; how they connect with and distance themselves from the clients they serve; how they deal with anti-abortion opposition (both in person and in general); and how they craft, for themselves, through their jobs, a feminist identity that then shapes how they evaluate their work, their relationships, and political procreative issues.
Dr. Simonds teaches: Birth and Parenthood, Sociological Theory, Gender, Sociology of Culture, Family Sociology and Sexuality.
