ABSTRACT
The author formally decided on sociology when she was a junior in high school. But in retrospect, she realizes that there were several other incidents that led her to this field. Armed with the unflinching certainty that only a teenager can have, the author began college firmly believing that she would study sociology, understand the field better, and engage in interesting and important projects that exposed various machinations of racial inequality. After completing college, she went directly into a Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins University. She had vaguely defined interests in studying something to do with representations in media, but she knew that whatever her focal point was, it had to be something that centered on these questions of race, gender, and class. The first study she read after scouring Kirsten's references page was Jennifer Pierce's ethnography of the legal field, Gender Trials. This research on gender, work, and black men collectively inspired the next few research projects she undertook.
