OWENS, ROBERT ELLIOTT, Ed.D. Body Knowledge and Repetition: Re-conceiving Ability through Students’ Visual Narratives of Sport, Physical Education and Fitness. (2011) Directed by Dr. Diane L. Gill. 214 pp. The purpose of this dissertation study was to investigate how students enrolled in two different undergraduate core kinesiology courses conceived knowledge of the body through visual storytelling, a mode of writing that uses visual elements, like photographs, to tell a story. For the purposes of the study, body knowledge (Evans and Davies, 2004) was constrained to sport, physical education and fitness. This dissertation study had three research questions and one practical purpose. One, how did students chose to tell their stories, what images and storylines were included and which were left out? In other words, what repetitive or reoccurring themes about the body in the contexts of exercise, physical education and sport emerged from these visual narratives? Two, how did these repetitions (Kumashiro, 2003) construct knowledge of active body and what were the obstacles to addressing them? In other words, did the students select images or themes that overemphasized particular gender, racial, or economic groups, or body sizes, and if so what are potential road blocks to remedying them? Three, why are these repetitions of body knowledge needed? After addressing these three questions, this study aimed to provide kinesiology and HPE educators with practical pedagogical strategies for addressing (visual) repetitions of body knowledge within the curriculum. Following Norman Fairclough’s (2009) critical discourse analysis (CDA) methodology, this study analyzed 22 visual narratives and found that gender and physical ability was an overarching theme in the narratives.