Dr. Jamieson's Courses

Sociocultural Analyses of Sport (ESS330)

The Sociocultural Analyses of Sport & Exercise course relies primarily on sociological analyses of sport and the body for its content. Disciplinary knowledge in Sociology, as well as current issues in Sport Studies provide material for discussion, writing, and re-thinking the social and cultural value of sport in U.S. society. This course is structured as an upper division undergraduate course in Exercise and Sport Science. Content will include topics related to sociological theory, social stratification, sport as cultural practice, and sport as space for social change. Sport is broadly defined to include professional sport, amateur sport, leisure, physical education, and exercise.

Sport in Society: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality (ESS630)

In Kinesiology we (myself included) are often guilty of reducing the body to its physical and cognitive parts (mind/body split). To the extent we have been successful at explaining how the physical body “works”, we have also been complicit in constructing particular body types – ill-well, ideal-undesirable, feminine-masculine, able-disabled, fat-thin, etc . . . This is a crucial point to ponder: Kinesiologists have been complicit in constructing particular body types. The Sport in Society (ESS630) course offers a Critical engagement with social spaces, social desires, and social structures in which bodies are constructed. The course is meant to challenge assumptions about bodies as mostly physical entities, and to advance scholarly thinking beyond the physical and toward a social construction of bodies. We will focus on the ways particular bodies get privileged by the apparati of government, politics, economy, and mass media. As well, we will ponder a radical contextualization of sporting bodies, and will do so within and beyond US/Western borders. The course is not a study of sport per se, but rather a study of physical culture in varied social contexts and cultural conditions. It is expected that students will have completed at least one undergraduate course in sociology prior to entering ESS630, and that students are well acquainted with graduate level expectations for verbal and written expression.

Sport in Society: Global and Ethnic Relations (ESS632)

ESS632 is designed to provoke Critical thinking about sport, bodies, and physical activity as cultural practice. The course explores sport as an integral component in current global and capitalist relations, including the use of various “western” social organizing principles (race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality) to (re)produce relations of power in both local and international sporting contexts. ESS632 relies on several disciplinary and theoretical areas for it’s content – to include, sociology, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, diaspora studies, and transnational feminisms. The analytic focus of the course is international contexts for physical culture, especially as related to global and ethnic relations.

Qualitative Inquiry in Exercise and Sport Science (ESS614)

The broad field of Exercise and Sport Science has long been cross-disciplinary in nature, and yet it has relied largely on positivism as its primary inquiry framework. As sub-disciplinary areas, especially those connected to the social sciences have advanced, so too have alternative paradigmatic approaches to the study of human movement, physical activity, and the body. There remains little meaning in attempts to “know” about the body without accounting for context, space, time, place, etc. Thus, while experimental, epidemiological, and descriptive research designs remain useful in Exercise and Sport Science, they are now choices in a range of inquiry traditions that include interpretive, constructivist, and participatory designs. The difficult task for researchers in ESS is to interrupt the dominance of inquiry projects – that is to unlearn elitist ways of knowing, and to replace them with increasingly participatory methods of posing, exploring, and answering meaningful questions about human movement. This course in no way posits an oppositional stance between quantitative (numbers) and qualitative (words) methods, rather it provokes consideration of the variety of analytic strategies and inquiry tools from which researchers may choose.

It is not enough to know how to generate data. Meaningful research must begin with careful pondering and question-setting, and then must follow a flexible, yet systematic path, all the while recognizing that you (the researcher) are in collaboration with your participants in a process of constructing of knowledge. Suffice it to say there are no data “out there” to be “collected” and described in a single authoritative voice – rather researchers interact with context and participants in generating data and making meaningful arguments. For this reason, we begin our studies by drawing our attention away from mechanistic, technical aspects of inquiry (data collection), and instead focus on worldviews or paradigmatic frameworks that shape the entire process of research. From paradigms, we move to qualitative traditions (research designs), and then to methods of data generation. To be sure, Qualitative traditions are used differently in the sub disciplinary areas within ESS, yet in this course you will be expected to understand the various paradigmatic, methodological, and technical choices available to the broad field. It is expected that students desire to learn to be intentional, impactful researchers, as opposed to learning to reproduce a single, previously legitimized brand of research.

Sport and Feminisms (ESS710)

ESS710 focuses on feminist theorizing about the body, sport, leisure, and physical activity. It is a scholarly space where feminisms and sport are intellectually linked in order to interrogate their roles as “liberators” of women. In this course students will a) demonstrate knowledge of emergence of feminisms, b) demonstrate knowledge of philosophical and creative tensions within multiple feminist movements, c) apply feminist frameworks to the study of sport in society, and d) become critical readers of feminist analyses of sport.

Feminist Research Analysis (WGS651, co-instructed w/ Dr. Leila Villaverde)

Conducting meaningful inquiry is more than technique – it is most importantly about political engagements between participants, researchers, institutions, and the very notions of science. A history of scientific inquiry reveals a few truly life-altering studies, but also unveils a host of intellectual borders that have been erected along the way. Thus, it seems feminist research has done some of its best work in deconstructing intellectual borders, such as positivism versus interpretivism, and quantitative versus qualitative designs. Yet, debate continues as to just what counts as feminist analyses. In this course we will explore a) what it means to un/become researchers; b) various feminist epistemologies; and c) creative tensions between researcher, researched, institutions, and ways of knowing. Throughout the course, we will complicate categories of analysis, interrogate relationships within research contexts, ponder ethical and political issues around the production and treatment of “data”, and critique methods of re/presenting (making arguments) findings.

Additionally, the course examines feminist approaches to philosophical and practical inquiries as it prepares students to critically read research, as well as understand the place of gender in lived experiences and institutional spaces. Most importantly this course dwells in the rules/ ideas that govern research decisions and methods. These conventions are shaped by ideologies and theories that construct what questions to ask, what problems to detect, and what analysis to produce. Too often research paradigms are glossed over, pushed behind the scenes, and obscured. One of our main goals is not only exposure of the strings which mobilize the marionette, so to speak, but to critically comprehend the nature of knowledge production and critical inquiry, to follow the metaphor, our goal is also for students to develop ways of seeing/ manipulating the strings that control movement and direction.

Academics, traditional theory, and practice are riddled with compartmentalizations, everyday lived experiences are not immune either and suffer the same tendencies. Our intent in this course is to rupture such boundaries and dispel set categories of study and cognition while maintaining a clear focus through intended displacement. In situating most of the course within interdisciplinary works we invite you to join us in the constructions of intellectual, research, and pragmatic, activist hybrids.