I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at San Jose State University. I received my PhD from the UC Berkeley in 2006 and a BA in Sociology from Linfield College in 1996.I started researching obesity and fat activism for my MA thesis and after that I decided that really I wanted to focus more on health and medicine and thus my dissertation was a crude version of the "Killer Fat" book. I am currently starting a new book project looking at childhood obesity from the point of view of kids and parents. I am really looking forward to getting back into the field and talking with people. I find it more than a bit disconcerting that of the deluge of things being written about obesity these days, so very few include the voices of fat people. I find this particularly troubling in the case of fat kids. Other things I have written include, "Bypassing Blame: Bariatric Surgery and the Case of Biomedical Failure" in Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in U.S. Biomedicine and "Fat Kids, Working Moms, and the 'Epidemic of Obesity': Race, Class, and Mother-Blame," in The Fat Studies Reader and along with Dr. CJ Pascoe I recently published "Pro-anorexia Communities and Online Interaction: Bringing the Pro-ana Body Online" in the journal, Body & Society.I am a native of Oakland, CA and the (co) mom of 5-year old twins. In my spare time I like to hike, fish, work out, read, agitate, and travel.