Letter of Introduction

Dear fellow Scholars,

Hello! My name is Joshua Simpkins, although I answer to Josh, Joshua, Scholar Simpkins, or any obscenity shouted in my direction. I am a Sociology major with a Women’s Studies minor. This is my forth year at UCF, my third year enrolled full time, and my second year in the Sociology program. I started out enrolled in a program called Interdisciplinary Studies: Nanotech and Nanoscience, then changed to Mechanical Engineering when that program was cut. Now, I’m probably the only Sociology major with credits in “Rocket Propulsion Dynamics”.

When I was shopping around for a field to leave engineering for, I became intensely curious about how gender and other stratifying categories (such as race and class) work to organize social life. Gender seemed to be the most relevant of all these categorization, because it informs social interaction and conceptualization of self at all levels of analysis in a way that other categorizations do not. I decided on sociology as my chosen field of study because the sociological research process is similar to the process I had become familiar with in the hard sciences and also because, if my plans to stay in research don’t work out, job prospects are ever-so-slightly higher for someone with a degree in sociology than someone with a degree in, say, English or philosophy.

Currently, I’m in the process of writing a literature review and research design for my Honors in the Major thesis, tentatively titled “The Role of Facial Appearance in Gender Attribution”. My primary goal with this research is to investigate member’s use of facial features and different areas of the face in the process of attributing gender to an interactional partner. Reviewing the literature for this paper has piqued my interest in Ethnomethodological theories of social interaction, specifically those about gender. Since I’ve been soaking my head in nothing but Ethnomethodological theory for the past 4 months, I’ll probably end up talking about it endlessly in classroom discussions and in these blog posts. So, get ready to get tired of that.

Up until very recently, I’ve been active with Feminist Agenda Radio and the group Men Against Rape @ UCF on campus, as well as with the local community of polyamory activists. However, at the request of my doctor, I have been scaling back my involvement in activism (and other high-stress environments). Although activism is important to me, the continued lack of holes in my stomach and esophagus is slightly more important.

Thank you for reading my introductory post! I look forward to the rest of the semester in this class.

Sincerely,

Joshua Simpkins

P.S. – I have read, understand, and agree to the terms of the course syllabus and the blogging protocols.