This study is an ethnography of a performance ethnography. The performance Hang It Out To Dry explores the experiences of residents from Saint Bernard Parish, Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This dissertation traces Hang It Out To Dry from the beginning of fieldwork to the aesthetic staging of collected narratives and through two years of community building as the performance toured the nation. Particularly, I develop methods for collecting materials from fieldwork for adaptation to the stage. The study demonstrates the intellectual work of performance composition in scripting and staging a performance ethnography. In doing so, I mark the collaborative efforts of the coproducers of Hang It Out To Dry, focusing on set design, musical composition, stage work with colleagues, and audience response. I also discuss the communities of Hang It Out To Dry to show the power of performance as a primary redressive act in community building. Finally, I map the web of remaking the story, Hang It Out To Dry. The dissertation concludes with a reconstituted script, a reminder that performance is a doing of remembrance and therefore forward making. My study is significant because while scholars have discussed the method and process of performance ethnography, they have not fully explored the aesthetics of a staged ethnography. This study highlights the performance composition and production while tracing the many events and stories of those who bore witness.

Previous studies have found imagined interactions (IIs) help individuals recall past interactions and plan for future interactions. Those studies have not investigated what occurs when individuals imagine the interactions of others (third-party imagined interactions hereafter TPIIs), how the II varies with the party imagined or what happens when those imagined interactions create false views of what happened. To fill this research gap, this study proposed one research question and nine hypotheses investigating TPIIs, how they vary with the individual in the TPII, if they contribute to false memories and how they affect communication plans. A survey was conducted to gain information about the use of TPIIs and IIs to investigate the similarities. An experiment using an induced TPII, with a prisoners dilemma and an iterated chicken game was conducted to learn the effect of the TPII on plans to communicate. The research question found that TPIIs exist and are mostly similar to IIs in topics, imagined targets characteristics and functions. T-tests indicated a difference in frequency, valence, and variety characteristics and the catharsis function. Equivalence testing found other characteristics and functions to be equivalent. Based on social identity theory a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) found TPIIs do vary in valence and specificity with the individuals group status. The odds of planning to cooperate with the other party in the prisoners dilemma when the other party was visualized cooperating was 5.6 times the odds of not. T-tests indicated greater mental effort in the TPII among individuals who developed false memories. Those with false memories were 1.8 times more likely to be competitive in the manner they communicated than those who did not have a false memory in the TPII, while A logistic regression showed people who had greater positive valence in the TPII were more likely to communicate with the other party. These results indicate in-group members are harder to imagine if no relational history is present. The more involved the TPII is the more likely the person will develop a false memory. TPIIs are used in planning for future interactions. The implication for conflict resolution is discussed.

This research identified the patterns of self-disclosure between face-to-face and Facebook friends interactions. A survey of 317 participants was conducted to compare the hypothesized relationships among social attraction, self-disclosure, predictability and trust in three types of relationships: recently added Facebook friend, exclusive Facebook friend, and an exclusive face-to-face friend. Data was analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM), multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), t-tests and correlations. Results indicated that individuals reporting high levels of social attraction also reported having greater self-disclosure with their latest added Facebook friend, exclusive Facebook friend and an exclusive face-to-face friend. This supports a theorem of Uncertainty Reduction Theory that states that persons disclose intimate information to individuals they like and withhold intimate information from persons whom they do not like. These individuals also reported greater predictability of their Facebook and face-to-face friends behavior, which supports axiom of Uncertainty Reduction Theory that as the amount of verbal communication between strangers increases, the level of uncertainty for each interactant in the relationship will decrease. The more friends talked to each other, the less uncertainty they experienced. Additional evidence that the relationship development across different friendship types (latest added Facebook friend, exclusive Facebook friend and exclusive face-to-face friend) is similar was the statistically significant relationship between the variables of self-disclosure and trust. This supports the tenets of Social Penetration Theory and previous studies that found self-disclosure to be important for the facilitation of developing mutual trust. The results of this study showed that the process of relationship development, in terms of the relationship between social attraction, self-disclosure, predictability and trust, were similar in both Facebook and face-to-face relationships. However, significant differences existed in the amount of self-disclosure and trust between Facebook friends and face-to-face friends. Although the average duration of both exclusive face-to-face friendships and exclusive Facebook friendships was six years, participants reported more self-disclosure, more predictability and trust in their face-to-face friends than with their Facebook friends. The findings about offline friendships involving more breadth and depth than online friendships seem to support cues-filtered-out approach.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston, Massachusetts is unique in history and design. Originating as a privately held collection, the Gardner Museum reflects its namesakes eccentricities and stands in stark contrast to the backdrop of contemporary Boston. Although much has been written about the individual masterpieces held within the Gardner collection and there are numerous biographies of Mrs. Jack, as Gardner was sometimes called, little work has been done to investigate the museum in light of contemporary research in museology and the practices of collecting and display. Understanding collecting and curating as modes of knowledge production, this study seeks to discover the types of knowledge produced by and within the Gardner Museum. Because the museum highlights forms of knowledge other than that associated with textual criticism, I focus on the affective and historical material transfers at work in museum practice. As such, this study offers an opportunity to explore the nature of a performance-based method or orientation to scholarship. I both make use of and question performative writing as a mode of presentation, so that what emerges is an understanding of a method that, like the Gardner Museum, seeks to discover ways of knowing beyond (but not in lieu of) processes of representation and signification. In a sense then, performance methodology becomes both an object of study and my method. In bringing the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum into relationship with the disciplinary problem of performative writing, I have conceived of my research and writing practices as processes of collecting and curating.

This research applied a two-step triangulation approach to the study of mother-daughter communication in arranged marriages among the religious Sunnis of Beirut, Lebanon. Combining the theory of structuration and relational dialectics in one theoretical framework, the study investigated the role of mother-daughter interactions in the socialization of the daughter into the marital experience. The study investigated the process of marital socialization by first surveying 199 mother-daughter dyads, representing 398 individuals. In the second step, in-depth interviews were conducted with 12 families (three interviews per dyad), randomly selected out of the 199 surveyed pairs. The dyadic data analysis of the surveys assessed mother-daughter generational difference and the interdependence of their views on marriage, taking into consideration the daughter‟s marital status (single, engaged, and married). Findings revealed that mother-daughter interdependence moved in a curvilinear fashion. The mother and her engaged daughter converged in their marital views, then slightly diverged as the daughter‟s relationship with her husband progressed. The analysis of the 36 interviews examined stancemaking in the reported speeches of past mother-daughter conversations, and dialogues that took place during the third mother-daughter interviews. The stance analysis revealed the flow of socialization (one-way for the mother, and conversational for the daughter), and the three main lines of socialization: Structuration rules related to male-female interactions, criteria for selecting the ideal husband, and guidelines on how to become a good wife and mother. The analysis of stance alignments also exposed four mother-daughter relational dialectics happening during the arranged marriage process: Real versus ideal, powerful versus powerless, individual versus collective, and connection versus separation. Those dialectics corresponded to the fundamental tensions and the power resources that influenced both the daughter‟s marital structuration and her relationship with her mother during the marital process. The main findings were discussed at the end in line with mother-daughter connection, and the cultural schema of gender among the religious Sunnis of Beirut, Lebanon. The socialization involved in arranged marriages constitutes a turning-point in mother-daughter relationship, and a potential source of institutionalizing the perception of women as fragile beings in constant need of protection.

This study contributes to our knowledge of life-span communication by examining the communication of the Baby Boomer generation (born 1946-1964) as they re-enter the dating scene. Although Baby Boomers' early years of dating (the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's) occurred in a time of new-found freedom, especially in sexual relationships, the experience of dating several decades later brings many complications due to aging and children. The intent of this study was not to generalize that all Baby Boomers would express the views stated in this study, but to show the complexity of this generation, and to present a theoretical framework for better understanding communication in their romantic relationships, and with their adult children. Information gathered in this research fills an important gap in the information about this generation. Although previous studies have examined romantic communication of much younger or older subjects, the current study employs a life-span perspective with extended interviews of twenty-four men and women age 46-64, to examine changes in communication from the respondents' early years of dating to mid-life. Results indicated that numerous changes in romantic communication and behavior have occurred, especially in the areas of communication channels, use of technology, and physical romance. Bowen Family Systems Theory (1966) and Petronio‟s (2002) Communication Privacy Management Theory were used as a framework to explore how management of communication within the family affects the romantic relationships of single Baby Boomer parents. Results indicate that a poorly differentiated family member can create or amplify privacy boundaries, thus hampering communication within the family unit. Triangulation, the addition of any third person (in this case, the romantic partner of the Baby Boomer parent) to a two-person relationship (parent and child), can potentially affect the original relationship. Most interviewees indicated that they had open communication with their adult children, but they failed to notice that they were not discussing the parent's romantic relationship. Most of them also stated that their children's opinions about their partners would be noted, but not acted upon. These findings suggest that communication in the family should be carefully monitored when triangulating new persons into relationships.

In this study, I explore four events to learn the embedded instructions of selfhood performatives in each case and how these performatives code public and private space and experience. The selected events offer a different and explicit example of private and public modes of authority and access e.g., in the public museum experience of an exhibit by photographer Taryn Simon, in the gift of a ticket to Burning Man, womyn only at MichFest, and insider exclusivity at Roden Crater. While each event offered a different understanding of selfhood as it applied to the participant, each confirmed a selfhood performative in play through its structure, methodology, and dependence on participation. Calling on Louis Althussers theories of subjectivity and ideology to approach a definition for selfhood performative, ultimately I argue for a Bakhtinian use of the term. Bakhtin relies on an expansive definition where selfhood is not a particular voice within, but a particular way of combining many voices within (Morson and Emerson 221). This particular way can be understood as a conscious compositional approach to selfhood served by the performance research practice of mystory developed by Gregory Ulmer. The mystory attempts to record and articulate the relationships of the composer and her interdependent institutional and personal subjectivities through the application of the relay. Throughout the study, I make use of a literal and figurative relay between the events, composing, collecting, and documenting associations while conducting my research and drawing out the patterns and poetics therein. The purpose of the study is to show connections between selfhood performatives and commodification, and to find regularities, ironies, and pleasures between the revealed performatives and codes. I also examine how these events enhance, challenge, or stray from post-structural theories that support the interdependence between selfhood and prevailing concepts of public and private. The study also supports the application of mystory theory, with its resistance to the reproductive elements of a model, as performance research that offers an update to Brechts notion of theater for an audience of the scientific age (Brecht 185). I attempt to locate todays audience as one situated in the tension of constructing selves between binary notions of private and public caused by the ramifications of scientific objectification and conceptual representation and reproduction. I argue the mystory is an approach to understanding the self constituted from within the interdependence of private and public relationships, and holds the unrepeatable self central to that approach.

The actions of emergency first responders directly affect the safety of our society, and their expertise relies upon the training they receive in preparation to react to emergency events. The use of training videos has become more prevalent in recent years as a method of teaching vital response skills to first responders. Most of these videos are made in the expository mode,with little or no attempt to introduce elements or conventions from other modes of non-fiction or fiction film genres. This project extends the range of the training video in order to explore the potential impact of using conventions from other film modes and genres on learning. The study shows that participants performed equally well on information retention tests taken directly following presentation of the films. Further research could examine the efficacy of these same video conventions in long-term information retention.

In 2003, writer and cultural critic Bill Wasik stunned the world with his newest experiment, the MOB Project, which flooded the streets of New York City with strange performances quickly labeled flash mobs by participants and local media. With the goal of understanding the communicative purpose and function of these new performance events, this project analyzes the flash mob through the lenses of performance studies, rhetorical studies, cultural studies, and continental philosophy. Drawing from genealogical research, rhetorical analyses, and critical philosophy, I argue the flash mob is a new form of performance serving as a locus of community, creativity, and politics in an age overrun by spectacle and surveillance. Moreover, whether created as complex communal in-jokes or a modern form of cultural critique, flash mobs act as elaborate pranks played out within the quasi-public realm of the capitalist city, exposing its heretofore unrealized methods of operation. Through a critical application of the theories of philosophers Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I analyze the ability of Bill Wasiks flash mobs to highlight the dominant strategies of surveillance, standardization, and structure operating within the capitalist system. In so doing, I explore the tactical nature of the flash mob as a performance event.

This original study examines a new phenomenon in New Orleans tourism. Since Hurricane Katrina hit in late August 2005, droves of individuals and groups have come to New Orleans to help rebuild the city. Through conducting fifty interviews with these individuals from 2008-2009, the author traces the steps of volunteer tourists in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. This study investigates the experiences of volunteer tourists. Additionally, the author immersed herself with volunteer tourism groups to experience volunteering and the groups herself. Through careful inspection of original interviews with volunteer tourists, the author discovers how the volunteer tourists contribute to the city of New Orleans. Particularly, the author looks how stories explicate the experiences of volunteer tourists in New Orleans and how stories serve as souvenirs for the tourists. Additionally, the author shows how volunteer tourists are motivated through their altruism and how religion facilitates volunteer tourists altruistic motives. The next chapter discusses volunteer tourists decisions to work on vacation and how they understand their work in New Orleans as contributions to the city. In Layers of Place: Understanding New Orleans through the Perspectives of Volunteers, the author uncovers how volunteer tourists form a relationship with the city and its residents. Finally, the author looks at future possibilities for research.