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Samantha Kwan

Assistant Professor


Samantha Kwan, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and a Women’s Studies faculty affiliate at the University of Houston. She received her doctorate in sociology from the University of Arizona in 2007. Professor Kwan conducts qualitative research in the areas of gender, body, health, and culture, focusing on how cultural and social structures shape women’s physical and emotional well-being. Her recent work examines contested meanings about the fat body, Christian weight-loss programs, cosmetic surgery, and organizational image norms. She is co-editing (with Chris Bobel) Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules, a collection that explores the many ways individuals subvert social constraints that deem certain behaviors and bodily presentations as inappropriate, disgusting, private and/or forbidden in various cultural contexts. She is also working on a book manuscript about the contested field of “obesity” entitled Framing Fat: Contested Meanings about Body, Health, and Weight.



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