Jamie E. Shenton

BIOGRAPHY

Jamie Shenton joined the faculty at Centre College in 2017. In addition to the anthropology and sociology program, she teaches in Gender Studies and Social Justice Studies.

Shenton is a cultural anthropologist specializing in medical anthropology, gender and sexuality, ethnographic methods, and comparative perspectives on U.S. and world cultures, especially Latin America. Her geographic areas of expertise are lowland South America and highland Central America, though her present work focuses on the U.S. Her doctoral dissertation research explored issues of gender, intergenerational transformation, body image, and social change among Indigenous Kichwa women in the Napo Province region of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Recent ongoing research projects include social media, political discourse, and identity; parenting, queer+ youth, and education; and “successful” aging in assisted living contexts with her community-based learning class.

Shenton’s teaching areas of interest include cultural anthropology; gender and sexuality; human rights; globalization; disease, healing, and health cross-culturally; media studies and popular culture; and body image and eating disorders.

Shenton earned a B.A. in anthropology and sociology and Spanish from Centre College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from Vanderbilt University where she taught in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

AWARDS/GRANTS

Kirk Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2021

PUBLICATIONS

Shenton, Jamie. 2023. “#KeepKidsInnocent: What Twitter Discourse on Drag Queens, Disney, and Dolly Parton Teaches Us about the Intersection of Anti-Queerness with Parenting Politics,” Public Anthropologist, 5(1), 30-52. https://doi.org/10.1163/25891715-bja10045

Shenton, Jamie. “What’s Behind the Backlash to Lightyear’s Animated Kiss?” SAPIENS. September 6, 2022. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/lightyear-disney-woke/  

Shenton, Jamie. "Consumer Culture Won't Lead to Body Positivity," SAPIENS, January 26, 2022. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/kichwa-body-positivity/

Shenton, Jamie, 2020, Divided We Tweet: The Social Media Poetics of Public Online Shaming, part of special issue "Intimate Workings of Culture" in Cultural Dynamics, 32(3): 1-26.

Shenton, Jamie. 2019, "Strong Kichwa Women are Made, Made Up, and Make Others: Feminist Theory Meets Amazonian Ethnography of Gender, Production, Bodies, and Social Change," Anthropological Quarterly, 92(1): 5-34.

Cavagnaro, Kellie and Jamie Shenton, 2019, "Territories of Contested Womanhood: Pussyhats, the Pachamama, and Reclaiming in the Age of Hashtag Feminism," Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change, 4(1).

Shenton, Jamie. 2018. "As Seen on TV," The Shaman in the Flash Drive and Other Explorations in Indigenous Media Engagement in Latin America, edited by Richard Pace, 175-196. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.