Jennifer J. Shaneberger is a comparative political scientist whose work examines how political rhetoric shapes social hierarchy, public attitudes, and institutional behavior, with a central interest in understanding how language used by political elites influences migrant integration and labor-market outcomes. She joined the University of Kentucky in 2025 as an Instructor in the Department of Political Science.

Shaneberger earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Tennessee, where she specialized in international relations and comparative politics. Her doctoral training focused on political communication, social hierarchy, international law, conflict processes, and advanced quantitative methods. She completed a comprehensive methodological curriculum that included maximum likelihood estimation, non-statistical approaches to research, and data visualization in R, while also developing expertise in Stata, NVivo, and computational text analysis. Her dissertation, When Political Rhetoric Threatens Migrant Labor-Market Integration, reflects this interdisciplinary foundation and integrates qualitative fieldwork, longitudinal statistical modeling, and theoretically grounded analysis of party rhetoric.

Her research interests center on the intersection of political communication, migration, and inequality. She is particularly concerned with how elite discourse constructs symbolic boundaries that shape material opportunity. Much of her work explores how rhetoric operates as a signaling device—shaping public attitudes, guiding institutional decision-making, and influencing the employment prospects of migrants across democratic states. This focus places her research within broader debates about social stratification, integration policy, and the mechanisms through which political actors communicate, justify, or challenge social hierarchies.

Shaneberger’s international education and field experience have deeply informed her scholarly perspective. She conducted Fulbright-supported research in Sweden, where she interviewed migrants, employers, and policymakers about their experiences with political language, integration programs, and labor-market access. Earlier in her career, she studied at Moulay Ismail University in Meknes, Morocco, and carried out qualitative research in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria. These experiences strengthened her interest in the lived dimensions of migration, the politics of belonging, and the institutional dynamics shaping refugee and migrant trajectories.

Her broader academic portfolio includes work on the diffusion of exclusionary rhetoric across party systems in Europe, survey-based research on how exposure to political messaging shapes citizen attitudes, and ongoing collaboration on Swedish refugee housing policy. Across these projects, she combines theoretical grounding in Social Dominance Theory, political psychology, and comparative institutional analysis with rigorous empirical methods. This blending of approaches reflects her commitment to studying political phenomena as both symbolic and structural—expressed through language but consequential in economic and social terms.

In addition to her research, Shaneberger brings extensive professional experience in program design, community engagement, and nonprofit leadership. She holds a master’s degree in International Development Administration from Western Michigan University, where she was trained in evaluation frameworks, strategic planning, and participatory development. Her background in community-based research and policy design continues to inform her academic work and her approach to teaching.

Across her scholarship and professional practice, Shaneberger is motivated by a central question: how do political systems shape—and sometimes constrain—the social and economic opportunities available to individuals and communities? Her work seeks to illuminate the rhetorical and institutional processes that structure inequality and to contribute research that is both analytically rigorous and relevant to contemporary policy debates on migration, integration, and governance.