Samantha Kwan

Assistant Professor

• Phone: (713)743-3948
• Email:sskwan@uh.edu
• Office: 482 Philip G. Hoffman Hall

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.

Education

• Ph.D., Sociology, University of Arizona
• M.A., Legal Studies, Carleton University
• B.A., Sociology and Criminology, University of Toronto

Selected Publications

• Kwan, Samantha. Forthcoming. "Gender, Race, and Body Privilege: Navigating Public Spaces in Everyday Life." National Women's Studies Association Journal.

• Kwan, Samantha.  2009.  "Competing Motivational Discourses for Weight Loss: The Nexus of Health and Beauty." Qualitative Health Research 19(9): 1223-1233.
  
  
• Kwan, Samantha.  2009.  "Individual versus Corporate Responsibility: The Pervasiveness of Moral Models of Fatness and Perspectives on the Food Industry." Food, Culture & Society 12(4): 478-495.
  
  
• Kwan, Samantha.  2009.  "Framing the Fat Body: Contested Meanings Between Government, Activists, and Industry." Sociological Inquiry 79(1): 25-50.
  
  
• Kwan, Samantha and Mary Nell Trautner. 2009. "Beauty Work: Individual and Institutional Rewards, the Reproduction of Gender, and Questions of Agency." Sociology Compass 3(1): 49-71.
  

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Research Interests

• Gender
• Body and Health
• Food, Culture, and Consumption

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Teaching

• Introduction to Sociological Research
• Honors Introduction to Sociology
• Sociology of Gender
• Sociology of Body
• Criminology

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Affiliations

• American Sociological Association (ASA)
• Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS)
• National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)

Department of Sociology | Office: 450 Philip Hoffman Hall | (713) 743-3940 | (713) 743-3943 fax