As widely recognized, the voices of community members have been severely overlooked in scholarship. This dissertation reports on interviews with 36 community partners from the three most common types of university-community partnerships in composition and rhetoric: Youth mentored in their writing by first-year composition (FYC) students; Non-profit staff acting as clients for upper-division professional writing students; and Community members (including adult literacy learners, youth slam poets, and rural teachers) working with graduate students in a community literacy practicum or engaged research course. The project offers a theoretical rationale for listening to community voices, combining theories from community development with critical raced-gendered epistemologies to argue for what I term "asset-based epistemologies," systems of knowing that acknowledge the advantages marginalized communities bring to the knowledge production process in service-learning. The dissertation also suggests a reciprocal, reflective storytelling methodology that invites community partners to analyze their own experiences. Each set of community members offered a distinct contribution to community-based learning: Latino/a high school students mentored by college students revealed the need to nuance traditional outcomes-based notions of reciprocity. The high school students experienced fear about interacting with college students, a response that I understand through Alison Jaggar's concept of "outlaw emotions." To mitigate this fear, the youth suggested emphasizing cultural assets and relationships, leading to what I term "relational reciprocity." Non-profit staff detailed their complex motivations for collaborating with professional writing courses, challenging the often-simplistic representations of non-profit partners in professional writing scholarship. Invoking the theory of distributed cognition, I use non-profit staff insights to describe how knowledge circulates in non-profits and how students can interact and write more effectively in organizational contexts. Community members who interacted with graduate students in a range of projects used the term "openness" to describe healthy partnerships, and I build from their stories, along with insights from bell hooks and Maria Lugones, to detail a disposition of openness needed for engaged work. This disposition includes open communication, open structures, open minds, open hearts, and open constructions of self and others. The dissertation concludes with an argument for attention to "relational literacies" in both service-learning practice and scholarship.

The recent invention of Google Glass has prompted me to contemplate how future technologies will affect the way we interact with one another. In this paper, I argue that Google Glass technology is the first sort of technology that will facilitate us to violate our genuine interactions with one another in a face-to-face setting. Once we diminish these types of interactions, we fail to respect one another on a fundamental level and as a result, we fail to genuinely pursue one of the most important classes of meaningful projects in our lives: developing and maintaining relationships.

This thesis considers the potential of the suburban periphery to become an ecologically, socially and culturally productive site which supports local and regional public programs. It explores ways of creating connectivity across the hard boundaries of a suburban development, an expressway and an agricultural area in order to stimulate biological and cultural diversity in this typically neglected, “leftover” environment. The site is the Ninth Line Corridor at the suburban edge of Mississauga, Ontario. The investigation of boundary occurs at the urban, building and experiential scales, and considers how the intersection of landscape, ecology, architecture and program can generate activities and events which foster engagement with the site and within a community.

This practicum investigates the role of landscape architects in identifying and understanding the development of place identity in children with application to schoolyard design, specifically in Lorette, Manitoba. Through a review of literature, design principles were developed to reflect place identity, as well as enable outdoor learning experiences, cognitive development, and provide long-term community investment in the success of the project. These principles were used to direct a series of case studies, which helped inform design features in the conceptual design section of this practicum. Community engagement became integral to the design process, where students, staff and community members were invited to participate and share their opinions about Lorette, the current schoolyard and suggestions for the future schoolyard. The conceptual design integrates elements representative of local culture and history, all the while emphasizing connecting children to naturalized outdoor spaces, bringing learning outdoors and providing children with places to play.

The purpose of this project was to examine the arts as a positive change agent for community development. Exploring how and for what purpose nonprofit arts organizations can create social capital can provide insight on how the arts industry can be a leader in the transformation of communities and regions around the globe. The perspectives of artists, community developers, sponsors and beneficiaries of the arts provided insight on how and in what ways the arts can evoke change by building connections and inspiring participation. Community development theorist Bhattacharyya (2004) distinguished community development from related fields such as economic development and social work by highlighting its ability to build solidarity and create agency. For Bhattacharyya, solidarity means trust and relationships where community members can work together for change. Once united for a cause, agency means the implementation of the group's goals. To explore the multiple ways which the arts can inform community development change for leaders, two case studies were conducted. Insights came from data collected for each case through key informant interviews and organizational website analysis.

This thesis explores the effects of new media, specifically the Internet and the popular social networking site Facebook, on alumni engagement among Millennials in the University of Kentucky College of Health Sciences. Millennials are defined as those born in or after 1982. Alumni engagement is defined as part of the larger social science term of social capital and is defined here as consisting of volunteerism and financial giving. To explore this topic, a survey was constructed and sent electronically to all Millennial alumni from the UK College of Health Sciences. Data reveal Millennial alumni from the College of Health Sciences are not particularly engaged through volunteerism or financial giving. Survey responses, however, indicated that most young alumni are recommending the college to prospective students and plan to give financially in the future. Practical implications from this study may prove beneficial for advancement practitioners and administrators in the University of Kentucky College of Health Sciences.

Political engagement has an established body of research. However, one key area that has not been investigated in the field is the relationship between political engagement and type of community lived in. This study explores this relationship between type of community, past political engagement, perceptions of community leaders, attitude about political engagement, and socieodemographic characteristics. A conceptual model was developed based on existing literature. Utilizing a statewide survey conducted in 2009 that yielded 1,154 respondents with a response rate of 30.2% was used to explore these relationships. Using statistical procedures that test correlation were utilized to investigate the relationship between the key study variables. In addition, a regression model was created to be able to predict an individual’s political engagement. The result concluded that type of community does not significantly play a role in determining an individual’s political engagement. However other insights were revealed that showcase the complexity of political engagement and raise other questions about the role an individual’s attitude towards political engagement, and perception of community leaders affects their political engagement.

The Place of Narrative is an exploration of the implications, opportunities and processes posed by participatory design methods in Landscape Architecture. The thesis has been structured within a narrative inquiry framework that is situated within the larger field of qualitative research. The work aspires to assess if the combination of community engagement and narrative inquiry methods can contribute to a richer understanding of place and inspire more contextually appropriate design responses. In landscape architecture, a deep understanding of the places that we design requires knowledge of local culture and the experiences and connections that people cultivate towards their environment over time. Being in place as designer, visitor and inhabitant helps to establish a level of trust. These stories of the residents—past and present, of designer, and of the landscape itself interweave and manifest in site-specific solutions. The ambition of this research is to capture the complexity of this process and to provide a primer for landscape architecture students interested in the integration of narrative theory, place, people and practice in community participatory design.

Rural poverty has been characterized as invisible. This has been true since Michael Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath in 1939. Building upon this characterization this thesis explores six pathways out of rural poverty in relation to the particular quality of invisibility. This study reviews scholarly literature and federal policy, as well as adds new interviews focused on a case study of Mecca and Thermal, two small, unincorporated communities in California’s Eastern Coachella Valley (ECV). Through these techniques I found that rural poverty is characterized by a unique invisibility and that although there are certain pathways out of this poverty, these pathways are unlikely, temporary, and too insubstantial to make significant change.

Mining activities have impacted on the health and safety of mining communities for many decades. Despite the economic contributions of mining to its surrounding communities, there is also a huge amount of environmental and social harm to be associated with the industry. Much attention has recently fallen on reducing health and safety risks, but there is still a long way to go before working and living in the mining environment would be regarded as healthy and safe. The lack of proper accountability has been a significant factor in the damaging effects of corporations on society. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is essential for the mining industry to ensure that there is an adequate balance between economic development and the well-being of people and the environment. Mining companies have recently started implementing different health programmes around mines [e.g. NIHL (noise induced hearing loss), HIV/AIDS and TB - programmes]. It is, however, the long-term impacts (such as mental health impacts) of mine activities that will remain long after the company closes and there is little evidence that these long-term responsibilities are being addressed. This study examines the impact of mining on the mental health of mining communities (including the mine workers) as experienced by community members, mine employees, as well as other role players involved in the industry. By doing so, the aim of this study is to determine the need for the inclusion of mental health care in the CSR programmes of mining companies, in order to advance sustainable development of mining communities. The study was done by means of qualitative methods undertaken in the North-West and Limpopo Provinces of South Africa, where different stakeholders from the mining industry were interviewed. It has been found that "mental health care" is still a huge gap that needs and waits to be filled in terms of mining companies' CSR performance. / Thesis (M.A. (Sociology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.