The goal of this study is to determine issues rural Appalachian residents consider most important, their perceived environmental health risk, and how community engagement can potentially improve those issues. The University of Kentucky Superfund Research Center held the Appalachian Community Health and Well-being Forum at the Letcher County Cooperative Extension Office in Eastern Kentucky. A four-member panel consisted of two local health officials, a nutrition expert, and a federal scientist; answered questions from community members. The expert panel and audience members shared concerns, success stories, and highlighted efforts to promote health in the region. Community members completed a questionnaire collecting information on perceived environmental health risk, fruit and vegetable intake, and basic demographic information. The concerns raised by community members were chronic disease, poverty, pollution, mental health, and wellness. Proposed solutions were compliance, nutrition, physical activity, education, empathy, funding, community engagement, awareness, holistic health, prevention, and insurance/policy change. The programs in place to combat these issues are FARMACY, Community Health Workers, transportation services, mobile dental vans, Kentucky River Watershed Watch, research, policy changes, and the CLIK program. The questionnaire showed that residents are aware of the types of pollution in their community and believe that illness is caused by pollution in their environment. Community residents feel that pollution is not something they should have to live with, they act to protect themselves from pollution, and likely to engage in community efforts to stop pollution in their community.

This dissertation is an analysis of sharing in the history of western Canada and Indigenous-Settler relations from 1800 to 1970. Based on original research conducted with two Indigenous groups – the Stó:lō Nation of British Columbia’s Fraser River Valley and Metis communities of northwest Saskatchewan – it documents the significance of sharing to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations at the turn of the eighteenth century as well as the role it played in mediating cross cultural interactions following sustained contact in the nineteenth century. Using ethnohistorical methods, I argue that sharing has been a defining feature of Native and Newcomer lives and collective identities. In Indigenous communities it insulated family groups from environmental variability while affirming kin-based social networks. Among non-Indigenous people, sharing provided the basis for imagined communities of individuals connected by religion, occupation, and other non-kin characteristics. In situations of cross-cultural interaction, sharing provided an important lens through which Natives and Newcomers viewed themselves and each other. Indigenous people have viewed sharing as the “Indian way,” a defining feature of Indigeneity in western Canada and elsewhere. Non-Indigenous people, on the other hand, have viewed Indigenous peoples’ dependence on welfare and other government transfer payments – recent examples of sharing – as evidence of cultural difference and, often, inferiority. Sharing thus provides a window into Native and Newcomer worldviews and socio-cultural structures as well as relations forged between and among them. This history of sharing illuminates subtle, critically important events and processes in the history of Indigenous-Settler relations and the transformation of Indigenous North America into Canada.

El Topo, Ecuador, la comunidad en que esta tesis se enfoca primariamente, es un ejemplo de una comunidad que ha acabado las etapas iniciales de un proyecto de ecoturismo comunitario. Esta tesis tiene el objetivo de ofrecer un análisis de los componentes, de pre análisis a evaluación, de un proyecto comunitario de desarrollo sostenible. Si un proyecto de desarrollo sostenible está fallido o insostenible se malgasta el dinero y el esfuerzo. La sostenibilidad de un proyecto depende de la involucración, el apoyo, y la participación de la comunidad en todas las etapas de la planificación, el desarrollo, y la gestión. Por el contexto del ecoturismo y los éxitos y obstáculos del ejemplo del Topo, esta tesis expondrá un marco de componentes claves a considerar para tener éxito y sostenibilidad, con aplicaciones prácticas para proyectos de desarrollo sostenible al nivel comunitario.

Community developers are often solicited to teach essential core concepts and strategies in the field but lack the consensus among their peers on which theories constitute the fundamentals. This study examines leading community development theories, concepts and approaches to establish the essential elements for a weeklong short course. In addition to content research, leading teaching theories were also explored to establish the core methods for teaching such a course. Active learning techniques were utilized to increase student participation in the learning process while building solidarity and capacity in the class. Finally, the short course was taught to a group in Banda Aceh, Indonesia and was evaluated for knowledge and attitude change through pretests, posttests, and journal entries.

In this dissertation I focus on the diversity of alternative food initiatives (AFIs) that have emerged amidst concerns about the corporate-led industrial food system. While there have been significant successes, critics suggest that many AFIs are an inadequate response to the complex problems within the food system, and further, are complicit in propagating neoliberal ideals and facilitating the retrenchment of the state. While these critics identify important challenges, they tend to consider place-based AFIs as operating independently on particular projects, with specific claims, or in isolated sectors of the food system. There has been little documentation or analysis situating AFIs within a broader community of practice. To fill this gap, my research builds on the existing literature to investigate the increasing collaborations among AFIs in Canada. Using a community-based action approach, I explore the development of provincial food networks in British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia. I pay particular attention to efforts that foster and maintain these networks by exploring their history, structure and processes of collaboration. My findings reveal that the provincial food networks can be characterized as assemblages constituted by the self-organization of diverse actors through non-hierarchical, bottom-up processes with multiple and overlapping points of contact. Further, I find that AFIs have used networks strategically to contest the rules and institutions of the dominant food system and to develop participatory and democratic practices that challenge the logics of neoliberalism. Based on the results from this research, I argue that besides developing viable place-based alternatives to the dominant food system, AFIs are also involved in prefigurative ways of being - establishing democratic governance structures, building new institutions, and engaging in different kinds of social relations - in the belly of the existing (food) system.

This research explores how Participatory Video (PV) can facilitate empowerment and strengthen dialogue and engagement for public policy with members of recycling cooperatives and government in the greater metropolitan region of São Paulo, Brazil. The research project provided opportunities for catadores/as (‘recyclers’) to explore PV as a way to shed light on their livelihood challenges, but also as an approach to celebrate, demonstrate and legitimize the value and significance of their work to local government and community. Working through a participatory approach, twenty-two leaders from eleven cooperatives were involved in all aspects of the video-making process, from script writing to filming, group editing and knowledge mobilization. The research took place during nine months of fieldwork located in four municipalities in the greater metropolitan region of São Paulo, Brazil using multiple ethnographic and participatory methods. The methodology for this research is action-oriented, and applies a participatory community-based multi-methods approach. The purpose of the videos was to relay the message that catadores/as perform a valuable service to society, and through the organization of cooperatives have the capacity to be further supported and integrated into waste management programs. The videos were used as a tool for communication with government and for community outreach. This research is supported through the Participatory Sustainable Waste Management (PSWM) project, a six-year Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) funded University Partnership project (2005-2011). The overall purpose of the participatory-based PSWM project was to increase the effectiveness, safety, and income generation of organized waste recycling in originally four and later six Brazilian municipalities in the metropolitan region of São Paulo: Santo André, Diadema, Ribeirão Pires, São Bernardo do Campo, Mauá and some parts of the municipality of São Paulo. The capacity building activities and actions of the PSWM project have contributed to structure, organize and strengthen cooperative recycling enterprises and their members, for example, by setting up a pilot project on micro-credit and advancing the practice of solidarity economy through collective commercialization and networking of the recyclers in the region. In addition, the project has helped create a more inclusive culture amongst the local governments in this region, where many recyclers are now present in political meetings and decision making related to waste management. Unfortunately, this is not the case in all the municipalities and there are still barriers to participatory models in decision-making and a lack of political support. Findings support the conclusion that PV can be a powerful methodological tool contributing to the process of individual, community and organizational empowerment and is significant for democratic governance and the increasingly popular notion of the knowledge democracy. This research also has policy relevance and practical application. The findings have the capacity to inform models of participatory governance, and improved democratic processes in addressing complex urban development challenges, in addition to advancing practices in government accountability and transparency. / Graduate / 0344 / 0700 / 0999 / crystaltre@gmail.com

Sugarcane cultivation is expanding throughout the Pacific coast of Guatemala, with political and ecological consequences for subsistence communities. The majority of sugar production occurs in the departments of Santa Rosa, Escuintla, Suchitepequéz and Retalhuleu on the Pacific coast. As sugarcane expands into fincas (large plantations owned by an agricultural elite), the amount of land available for rent to landless or land-poor farmers is reduced. Sugarcane expansion provokes various forms of environmental degradation, including deforestation, air pollution, water contamination, and draining of rivers and wetlands. Sugarcane cultivation also provokes health problems for workers and those who live near these sites, including kidney failure, dehydration, and respiratory and skin problems. As sugarcane expands, subsistence communities in the surrounding area are subject to these detrimental effects of sugarcane cultivation. Building academic knowledge on the impacts of sugarcane expansion is necessary in order to be better equipped to be in solidarity with, or support subsistence communities facing this expansion. It is crucial to meaningfully involve subsistence communities in this process of knowledge production since it is the inhabitants of these places, not researchers, who are the experts on these issues. In this thesis, I describe a feminist community-based research project in the community of La Montaña, Guatemala, on the impacts of sugarcane in their community. The key goals of this research were to 1) collaboratively identify with participants specific areas of interest regarding sugarcane impacts, and investigate these areas; 2) analyse data with an awareness of gender and 3) share research findings with the community to facilitate the possibility of action or critical reflection. I used public group discussions, semi-structured interviews, participant observation and drop-in sessions to collect data. Through this process, the issues of political inaction (as a response to sugarcane) and deforestation (driven by sugarcane) emerged as two key areas of interest which I explore in this thesis. The main finding of my research was that sugarcane cultivation is a divisive force in La Montaña: while community members agree on the negative aspects of sugarcane cultivation, they disagree about how to address this issue. As I find, these divisions occur along the axes of gender and age. These divisions also constitute an obstacle to a collective political platform to address sugarcane expansion, and a potential site for intracommunity violence as sugarcane continues to expand. These findings were presented to the community in a public presentation in February 2015, to provide a space for critical discussion of these issues. Overall, this research identifies a key difficulty that subsistence communities face in the context of agroindustrial expansion: as the importance of collective action grows, so too do intra-community divisions. This research highlights the need for long-term solidarity-building work in communities on the Pacific coast of Guatemala, in order to be able to achieve the changes that community members feel powerless to enact alone. / Graduate

Community-university partnerships have become more prevalent to support community-based research, especially as a collaborative approach to research with Aboriginal Peoples in Canada. One practice is the activation of a community-based research steering committee to initiate, govern, and review research pertaining to their local community. Within literature related to community-based research, perspectives on capacity strengthening and co-learning from the members of a community-based research steering committee are under-represented. A qualitative case study approach was used to explore the research question: What are the experiences of the Alexander Research Committee (ARC) members in defining and operationalizing capacity strengthening and co-learning across multi-sectoral research projects? Nine current and past members of the ARC participated in individual semi-structured interviews and five of these ARC members also participated in a subsequent focus-group discussion. Analysis of these qualitative data indicated that foundational relationships and a conducive learning environment are key factors for a community-based research committee to experience co-constructed knowledge and learning. The findings of this study highlight the importance of an operational foundation of trusting relationships in order to establish and sustain a working environment where a community-based research committee can learn together and from each other. This study also yielded insights about how this community-based research committee predicated capacity strengthening from the understanding that ‘we are all learners’, with each member bringing forward unique strengths, questions and growth to the research processes. / Graduate

The present study examines the extent to which blacks are segregated in the suburban community of Coconut Grove, Florida. Hypersegregation, or the general tendency for blacks and whites to live apart, was examined in terms of four distinct dimensions: evenness, exposure, clustering, and concentration. Together, these dimensions define the geographic traits of the target area. Alone these indices can not capture the multi-dimensional levels of segregation and, therefore, by themselves underestimate the severity of segregation and isolation in this community. This study takes a contemporary view of segregation in a Dade County community to see if segregation is the catalyst to the sometime cited violent response of blacks. This study yields results that support the information in the literature review and the thesis research questions sections namely, that the blacks within the Grove do respond violently to the negative effects that racial segregation causes. This thesis is unique in two ways. It examines segregation in a suburban environment rather than an urban inner city, and it presents a responsive analysis of the individuals studied, rather than relying only on demographic and statistical data.

Background: Housing continues to be one of the most significant unmet needs for many people living with HIV/AIDS in British Columbia. While there has been a focus on documenting the material aspects of housing and housing extremes (i.e., homelessness), there are important gaps in our understanding of the complex relationship between housing and health for people living with HIV/AIDS. The aim of this research was to identify what “home” meant for people living with HIV/AIDS across a continuum of housing/living situations, the ways in which people living with HIV/AIDS construct meanings of home, and how these factors interact with their (physical, mental, and emotional) health and wellbeing. Methods: This thesis reports on a secondary analysis of individual interviews from the Positive Living, Positive Homes (PLPH) community-based research study. For the PLPH study, community-based research approaches were used to explore a variety of lived experiences across a continuum of housing situations, while promoting collaborative inquiry among community and academic research team members. For this analysis, a purposively selected sample of 10 transcripts was drawn from 53 semi-structured qualitative interviews with people living with HIV/AIDS in Greater Vancouver (GV). Transcripts were analyzed using a thematic analysis approach, adopting constant comparative and other coding techniques from a grounded theory approach to explore how people constructed the meaning of home, and how people living with HIV/AIDS perceived the various elements of their home environment to interact with their health and wellbeing. Descriptive thematic coding was augmented with higher-level conceptual coding to further develop over-arching conceptual themes. Some participatory analysis elements, including involvement of a community advisory committee (CAC), were included in the analysis process to allow for collaborative inquiry, and to augment and confirm results. Results: The participants (5 Caucasians, 3 Indigenous persons, 1 Chinese-Canadian and 1 African refugee; 5 females, 1 trans-female, and 4 males) lived in a range of housing situations (market rental, subsidized, supportive, and precarious housing). Results from a thematic analysis showed that even when people had access to four-walled housing structures, they didn’t necessarily feel that their living environment was safe, secure, or conducive to having their health and social needs met. Emerging themes highlighted how people define home and their conditions for this designation revealed the ways in which people manage their living spaces to foster feelings of autonomy, security, constancy, and opportunities to strengthen their identity. Discussion: Understanding the distinction between housing and home, and the meaningful dimensions of peoples’ living environments, can help improve options for appropriate housing by moving away from a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. Furthermore, collaborative inquiry may help address the action-oriented needs of the research findings through community-academic partnerships, knowledge sharing, and knowledge translation activities. / Graduate / 2019-04-23