About

Shannon Jette is an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the social, cultural, and historical aspects of knowledge production in kinesiology, medicine, and public health. She is particularly interested in studying exercise and fitness practices as technologies of health that influence how bodies are understood and experienced. Dr. Jette is part of the Physical Cultural Studies research specialization and is a co-founder of the NatureRx@UMD Laboratory. Her academic background includes an MA and PhD in Kinesiology from the University of British Columbia, with her graduate and postdoctoral research funded by Canadian health and social science research councils. She conducted postdoctoral research at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University. Her methodological approach involves qualitative research techniques such as media and discourse analysis, interviews, focus groups, and ethnography. Her work examines the production of knowledge about gender, health, and physical activity, how this knowledge is used to operate power in different socio-historical contexts, and how marginalized groups negotiate health-related messages. Dr. Jette has received recognition as Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year in 2020 and has contributed extensively to scholarly publications and book chapters in her field.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Social Science
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Gender studies
• Aesthetics
• Epistemology
• Physical therapy
• Art

Selected publications

• Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2022 · 10 citations

  • Medicine

  2020 Choice ​ Outstanding Academic Title The moving body—pervasively occupied by fitness activities, intense training and dieting regimes, recreational practices, and high-profile sporting mega-events—holds a vital function in contemporary society. As the body moves—as it performs, sweats, runs, and jumps—it sets in motion an intricate web of scientific rationalities, spatial arrangements, corporate imperatives, and identity politics (i.e. politics of gender, race, social class, etc.). It represents vitality in its productive and physiological capacities, it drives a complex economy of experiences and products, and it is a meaningful site of cultural identities and politics. Contributors to Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body work from a simple premise: as it moves, the material body matters. Adding to the burgeoning fields of sport studies and body studies, the works featured here draw upon the traditions of feminist theory, posthumanism, actor network theory, and new materialism to reposition the physical, moving body as crucial to the cultural, political, environmental, and economic systems that it constitutes and within which is constituted. Once assembled, the book presents a study of bodies in motion—made to move in contexts where technique, performance, speed, strength, and vitality not only define the conduct therein, but provide the very reason for the body’s being within those economies and environments. In so doing, the contributors look to how the body moving for and about rational systems of science, medicine, markets, and geopolity shapes the social and material world in important and unexpected ways. In Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body , contributors explore the extent to which the body, when moving about both ostensibly active body spaces (i.e., the gymnasium, the ball field, exercise laboratory, the track or running trail, the beach, or the sport stadium) and those places less often connected to physical activity (i.e. the home, the street, the classroom, the automobile), is bounded to technologies of life and living ; and to the political arrangements that seek to capitalize upon such frames of biological vitality. To do so, the authors problematize the rise of active body science (i.e. kinesiology, sport and exercise sciences, performance biotechnology) and the effects these scientific interventions have on embodied, lived experience. Contributors to Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body will be engaging a range of new and emerging theoretical perspectives, including new materialist, political ecology, developmental systems theory, and new material feminist approaches, to examine the actors and assemblages of movement-based material, political, and economic production. In so doing, contributors will vividly and powerfully illustrate the extent to which a focus on the fleshed body and its material conditions can bring forth new insights or ontological and epistemological innovation to the sociology of sport and physical activity. They will also explore the agency of the body as and amongst things. Such a performative materialist approach explicates how complex assemblages of sport and physical activity—bringing into association everything from muscle fibers and dietary proteins to stadium concrete or regional aquifers—are not only meaningful, but ecological. By focusing on the confluence of agentive materialities, disciplinary technologies, vibrant assemblages, speculative realities, and vital performativities, Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body promises to offer a groundbreaking departure from representationalist tendencies and orthodoxies brought about by the cultural turn in sport and physical cultural studies. It brings the moving body and its physics back into focus: recentering moving flesh and bones as locus of social order, environmental change, and the global political economy.

  PublisherDOI

• “That chart ain’t for us”: How Black women understand “obesity,” health, and physical activity

  Health An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health Illness and Medicine · 2021 · 10 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • Political Science

  In this article, we use qualitative methodology to explore how eight physically active Black women, who self-identify as "obese," understand and experience health and physical activity, as well as how they position themselves in relation to discourses pertaining to "obesity" and Black femininity. Drawing on Foucauldian-informed critical obesity scholarship and Black feminist thought, we explore the ways in which physically active Black women concurrently resist, reproduce, and navigate racialized and gendered obesity discourse. Our findings advance critical obesity scholarship as we indicate that participants simultaneously adapt to, negotiate, and resist obesity discourse by re-defining health, questioning the BMI, and centering their desire for corporeal "thickness" as critical to their identity as Black women.

  DOI

• NatureRx@UMD: A Review for Pursuing Green Space as a Health and Wellness Resource for the Body, Mind and Soul

  American Journal of Health Promotion · 2020 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Medicine
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Katelyn Esmonde

  Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics

  9 shared

• Patricia Vertinsky

  University of British Columbia

  6 shared

• Geneviève Rail

  Concordia University

  5 shared

• Julie Maier

  5 shared

• David L. Andrews

  University of Maryland, College Park

  4 shared

• Anna Posbergh

  4 shared

• Monica Nelson

  University of Waikato

  3 shared

• Micaela S.D. Ada

  University of Maryland, College Park

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year (2020)

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