School of Public Health

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1633

The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.

Note: Prior to July 1, 2007, the School of Public Health was named the College of Health & Human Performance.

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    P(L)AYING FOR THE FUTURE: THE COALESCING OF YOUTH, SPORT, AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT IN CHARM CITY
    (2024) Stone, Eric Alexander; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This project explores how Sport-Based Youth Development (SBYD) has been arrived at as an ideal vehicle for youth development in contemporary Baltimore. To understand the SBYD approach, the project seeks to explore four interrelated empirically grounded sites/questions that explain why sport is expected to help develop, discipline, and prepare youth and communities for the future. Three key themes emerged from this work: 1) that youth must be problematized by different ideas, beliefs, and discourses to make them ‘amenable’ to being targets of SBYD; 2) that organizations are pushed into competing with one another rather than collaborating due to the need of the state to maintain control of how youth are incorporated into society; and 3) that various tools and techniques are used through the vehicle of sport to inculcate specific values into underserved youth and their communities. The first chapter identifies two of the key theoretical positions/approaches that inform the project: Governmentality and Articulation as theory/method. The second chapter provides an overview of how scholars have examined the phenomenon of Sport for Development and Peace as a historical, methodological, and empirical site. The third chapter identifies the methods and methodologies that underpin the project. The fourth chapter provides a brief reflexive overview of how I arrived in Baltimore to conduct the project. The fifth chapter seeks to (explore) how Baltimore’s underserved citizens have been positioned as targets of SBYD as conceived of by politicians, providers, public servants, and citizens of the city, state, and nation. The project found that SBYD in Baltimore is a product of specific policies, processes, decisions, ideologies, and discourses that conspire to create a specific understanding of youth and communities as ripe for and requiring intervention through sport and other recreational pursuits to reform their behavior and orientation towards neoliberal social values that has evolved over the last fifty years. The sixth chapter examines/explicates how discourses of youth, their future, and the role of sport are used by three SBYD organizations to connect with potential participants, to obtain resources and funding, and to report on their activities and programming to measure the impact on the targeted community. The project found that underserved youth and communities are subjectivated by discourses of responsibility, deficiency, the unknown future, and the perceived American values of neoliberal meritocracy. These discourses were conveyed by programs via their websites, curricula, tax documents, and other forms of media to funders, participants and other valueholders. The seventh chapter identifies how organizations make use of formal and informal relationships to support the implementation of programming, to obtain funding, and to support organizations as they seek to legitimize their operations and activities in the eyes of valueholders. The project found that the use of formal and informal relationships by valueholders and organizations enables SBYD providers to secure access to funding, space, and capacity to support program initiatives. The eighth chapter seeks to engage with the beliefs, perspectives, and values of SBYD providers and valueholders to understand how these personal ideas and views shape the implementation of SBYD in Baltimore by speaking to the staff of three organizations operating within the city. The project found that the production of SBYD programming is facilitated and challenged by perceptions of the youth and community, ideas about the purpose and value of sport, and a broader rooting of ideas about youth and communities in urban stereotypes. By examining these four sites/questions, the project identifies how SBYD is assembled into a disciplining, educating, rationalizing tool to create productive youth for the future. The project ends by identifying new areas of research such as education initiatives for volunteers to contextualize the communities they work in, challenges and limitations such as completing research during the COVID-19 Pandemic, and key takeaways such as connecting with youth to move away from abstract stereotypes of urban life.
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    CREATING A SOCIALLY JUST KINESIOLOGY: ADDRESSING ANTI-BLACKNESS IN THEORY, RESEARCH, AND PEDAGOGY
    (2024) Justin, Tori Alexis; Jette, Shannon; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Currently, the National Academy of Kinesiology (NAK) is striving to create a socially just kinesiology (DePauw, 2021). The NAK call to action is informed, in part, by emergent scholarship that examines how dominant approaches in kinesiology often discount the importance of developing anti-racist, critical, and equitable pedagogy (e.g., Armstrong, 2022). While this scholarship brings attention to kinesiology’s centering of whiteness and the persistent stereotyping of (in)active Black bodies, what is missing is an examination of how/if anti-Black explanations of corporeality manifest across differing spaces in contemporary kinesiology and, if present, what form(s) they take. My dissertation addresses the above-identified gap by using a three-manuscript model to examine three 'spaces’ of kinesiology: theoretical, research, and pedagogical.In manuscript 1 (Chapter 2), I engage Black feminist theory to critically evaluate the tenets of Physical Cultural Studies (PCS). In doing so, I identify a significant theoretical and empirical oversight in PCS scholarship, namely the tendency to reify white Eurocentric epistemo-logics and disregard Black feminist thought by emphasizing Black masculinity and white feminist imperatives in examinations of race and gender. To disrupt this practice, I propose a Black feminist informed reconceptualization of four principal PCS tenets (pedagogical, political, qualitative, and theoretical). Manuscript 2 (Chapter 3) delves into research spaces by investigating how notions of “race” and “racial difference” are constructed in cardiovascular health (CVH) and cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) research. I conducted a scoping review to systematically identify original research articles (N=236) that included “race” in their examinations of CRF and CVH and then analyzed the sample to ascertain how each article approached “race” and “racial difference”. Key findings include: the majority (77.5%) of the studies did not define race; more than half of the studies (58.6%) compared Black and white racial groups in their examinations; 45.2% of the studies positioned white research participants as the ‘average’ or ‘normal’ in comparison to other racial groups; and only one article discussed the possible role of racism in relation to their identification of racial difference in an outcome of interest. These findings illustrate the need for CRF and CVH examinations to engage scientific best practice on how to research “race” and “racial differences” in ways that avoid reproducing racialized stereotypes. Manuscript 3 (Chapter 4) considers how Black women doctoral students experience pedagogical spaces of kinesiology departments. By conducting semi-structured open-ended interviews (N=10) with current and former Black women graduate students in kinesiology, I examine participants’ perspectives on how/if anti-Black explanations of corporeality inform kinesiology research practice and curriculum, and how the participants experience these pedagogies. Key themes identified are: kinesiological research tends to employ “colorblind research methods”; these methods contribute to monocultural and ahistorical understandings of (in)active bodies and health; and participants experience resistance to institutionally-backed attempts to disrupt white normativity. For kinesiology to transform into the socially just field that NAK is advocating, kinesiologists must consider how anti-Blackness can inadvertently manifest in their theories, research practices, and pedagogies. I provide practical suggestions throughout the dissertation on how to move toward change in each of these spaces.
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    Acts of Livelihood: Bodies and Nature in International Garden City Movement Planning, 1898-1937
    (2018) Clevenger, Samuel Martin; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Urban planning and reform scholars and policymakers continue to cite the “garden city” community model as a potential blueprint for planning environmentally sustainable, economically equitable, humane built environments. Articulated by the British social reformer Sir Ebenezer Howard and his 1898 book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, the model represented a method for uniting the benefits of town and country through a singular, pre-planned, “healthy” community, balancing spaces of “countryside” and “nature” with affordable, well-built housing and plentiful cultural attractions associated with city life. The book catalyzed an early twentieth-century international movement for the promotion and construction of garden cities. Howard’s garden city remains a highly influential context in the history of town planning and urban public health reform, as well as more recent environmentally-friendly urban design movements. To date, while historians have long examined the garden city as an agent of social and spatial reform, little analysis has been devoted to the role of prescribed embodiment and deemed “healthy” physical cultural forms and practices in the promotion and construction of garden cities as planned communities for “healthy living.” Informed by recent scholarship in Physical Cultural Studies (PCS), embodied environmental history, cultural materialism, and theories of modern biopower, this dissertation studies the cultural history of international garden city movement planning in early twentieth century Britain and the United States. Studying archival materials related to some of the prominent planners and resultant communities of the movement, I focus on the biopolitical dimensions of the planners’ contextual designs for “nature,” “health,” and “healthy” physical culture as they devised material garden city community layouts. I argue that the intentional British and American garden cities created during the movement were planned as spatialized strategies for the regeneration of laboring bodies through organized, bourgeois physical cultural practices and access to nostalgic spaces of “naturally healthy environments and outdoor recreation.