GOLD Learning Speakers

Barbara Katz Rothman, Phd

Wendy Simonds

• Speaker Type: MANA
• Country: USA

Biography:

Barbara Katz Rothman, PhD, is Professor of Sociology, Public Health, Disability Studies and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York, where she runs the Food Studies concentration. Her books include IN LABOR; THE TENTATIVE PREGNANCY; RECREATING MOTHERHOOD; THE BOOK OF LIFE; WEAVING A FAMILY:UNTANGLING RACE AND ADOPTION, and LABORING ON, and the forthcoming BUN IN THE OVEN: How the Food and Birth Movements Resist Industrialization. She is Past President of Sociologists for Women in Society; the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and current President of the Eastern Sociological Society. She is proud recipient of an award for "Midwifing the Movement" from the Midwives Alliance of North America.

Wendy Simonds, PhD is professor of Sociology at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Her most recent book, forthcoming 2016, is Hospital Land USA: Sociological Adventures in Medicalization in which she draws on personal experiences and representations of medicalization in American culture to analyze its impact on life and death situations. Much of Simonds’ previous research centers on the sociology of procreative experiences. She is coauthor (with Barbara Katz Rothman and Bari Meltzer Norman) of Laboring On: Birth in Transition in the United States (Routledge, 2007), author of Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic (Rutgers,1996) and co-author (with Barbara Katz Rothman) of Centuries of Solace: Expressions of Maternal Grief in Popular Literature (Temple, 1992). 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. She has published articles on how mifepristone, as an oral abortion method, affects the ways in which people talk, think about and experience abortion. Prof. Simonds is co-editor of Sex Matters: The Sexuality and Society Reader (WW Norton), now in its fourth edition (2014).