The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of how community gardens can catalyze positive change in an urban environment, to determine and catalog the impacts, and to learn about their importance to small-scale agricultural production. The study surveyed neighbors of the two umbrella organizations community gardens, The Nuestras Raices of Holyoke and Growing the Community of Springfield, who strive to ensure that local families gets enough food to feed their families on a daily basis.

No description available.

This thesis examines the Museum of Art of El Salvador (MARTE) and its art education programming to understand its role in community building and cultural revitalization efforts in post-war El Salvador. MARTE emerges onto El Salvador’s landscape showcasing the country’s artistic heritage while organizing art education opportunities for the capital city, San Salvador. After six weeks of onsite observations and interviews with museum staff and community members, this investigation explores how MARTE’s art education programming contributes to the development of a refashioned collective cultural identity and, as a result, reinfuses the value of art, cultural awareness, and solidarity back into the community. MARTE provides a beneficial model for understanding the complex relationship between Western-influenced cultural institutions and non-Western communities, and the challenges of placing value on arts education when greater social concerns (e.g., economic insecurity) prevail. / text

Since the beginning of the Global War on Terrorism in 2001, the United States has relied heavily on volunteer National Guard troops to protect our country. Thousands of youth have been affected by deployment, yet we rarely hear their stories. This thesis explores how digital storytelling, as an applied theatre practice, can help increase youth visibility and voice in the Army National Guard community. Through qualitative research methods of narrative thematic analysis and thematic coding methods, the author examines how digital storytelling can be used to build community among Army National Guard youth, as well as provide an agentive space for youth to name their experiences and perspectives while self-advocating for their needs and desires. Their digital stories became a site for youth to play with the complexity of naming their experiences, as well as a way to increase their visibility within military spaces. The document concludes with a discussion of how digital storytelling and applied theatre functions within National Guard youth communities, the limitations of the research and model, as well as a discussion of sustainability for applied theatre programs in this community. / text

An urban community is a fusion of new and old that is constantly changing. We understand better the plight of a community through raising awareness of its unique history and visual character. Linking individual and community experiences offers an opportunity for dialogue, especially as long-time residents and their new neighbors learn about their different pasts and explore their common future. Community building happens from within, when many individuals sharing common values create positive change.

The celebration of a White heteronormative masculinity is still vivid in Heavy Metal. This has embodied and discursive consequences that are visible in the domination of Metal spaces or the marginalisation of female, trans* or non-binary musicians, but also in an aesthetics of (hetero- and cis-) sexism and racism that is often apparent. Nevertheless, Metal is still empowering and joyful for those who experience exclusion and marginalisation. They have found ways to react and organise an alternative participation in Heavy Metal. Using a queered approach to Cultural Studies, this study aims at intervening in the continuous reproduction of a normative White and straight Metal masculinity. Collecting data from five ethnographic interviews with queer Metalheads and additional autoethnographic data, it shows how queer Metalheads organise their participation in Heavy Metal and create an alternative Metal cosmology. This study is not only a theoretical intervention. As a result of the interview project, a new community of queer Metalheads was created.

O presente trabalho propõe uma descrição, análise e interpretação do lugar do futebol no cotidiano da Vila Campos do Cristal, em Porto Alegre, uma comunidade que se estabeleceu em torno de quatro campos de futebol e foi - após quase 30 anos - realocada para um conjunto habitacional. Apesar da melhoria nas condições de vida no novo espaço, a comunidade demonstrava descontentamento pela ausência de um aspecto básico de seu modo de vida: o futebol e seus arredores. Isso nos conduziu à questão central da dissertação: qual o lugar do futebol no modo de vida dessa população? Tomando os debates sobre cultura, espaço, lazer e futebol como referência, a pesquisa foi realizada através de trabalho de campo (entrevistas semi-estruturadas e observação participante). Consideramos que o futebol, já presente no processo de constituição da Vila Campos do Cristal, era parte da vida cotidiana da comunidade e, como prática de lazer relacionada ao universo das festas, era um elemento central na caracterização daquele espaço, contribuindo para a construção dos significados e do fortalecimento dos laços de sociabilidade e pertencimento na comunidade. / The work proposes the description, analysis and interpretation of the place of the soccer in the every-day life of the Vila Campos do Cristal, in Porto Alegre, a village that was formed around four soccer fields and was - after almost 30 years - replaced in allotments. Even though the new space had better living conditions, the population showed discontent with the absence of something that seemed basic for their lives: soccer and its surroundings. lt led to the question: what is the place of soccer in the way of life of that population? Having the discussions on culture, space, leisure and soccer as reference, the answer this question was sought After the field work (semi-structured interviews and observations) one can consider that the soccer, already present in the process of constitution of Vila Campos do Cristal, was part of the every-day life of that community and, as leisure practice linked to the universe of party, was a central element in the characterization of that space, giving it meanings and strengthening the web of sociability and belonging.

This thesis provides an ethnographic account of a NGOs effort to recruit and retain volunteers. Specifically, this project is a program evaluation of a community-based grant designed as a bottom-up approach to empower community residents to make changes in their community. The study details the many efforts - and obstacles - involved in this process. It is presented as a contribution to the anthropology of policy, to evaluation theory, and to applied anthropological methods. The investigator used participant-observation fieldwork and ethnographic interviews of both volunteer and non-volunteers to evaluate the program's successes and failures.

This paper examines how ex-combatants of El Salvador’s 1980-1992 civil war view post-war processes of reconciliation. I demonstrate that contrary to dominant understandings of ongoing political polarization in El Salvador, perpetuated by Salvadoran political parties, many former army and guerrilla combatants are coexisting in the same communities and working together in various ways. I show how the Salvadoran Peace Accords and the apparent political polarization has opened a space for the recreation of social networks and the creation of communities in post-war societies. I call this process “grassroots peacemaking,”emphasizing the everyday negotiations of remembering and creating new social relations in a nation torn apart by war and violence. / text

abstract: The purpose of this study is to examine how community-based youth theater ensembles create conditions for youth to practice cultural agency and to develop a sense of themselves as valuable resources in a broader community development process. The researcher employed a qualitative methodology, using a critical and interpretive case study approach which enabled her to document and analyze three community-based youth theaters in New York City: Find Your Light, a playwriting/performance program for youth associated with the NYC shelter system; viBeStages, an all-girl youth ensemble (part of viBe Theater Experience or "viBe"); and Ifetayo Youth Ensemble (IYE), a multi-age ensemble for youth of African descent living in Flatbush and its surrounding neighborhoods (part of Ifetayo Cultural Arts Academy). All three programs are youth-based performing arts ensembles with a mission-driven focus on positive youth development and community building; they are long-term engagements, active in their communities for at least three years; and they are all part of arts organizations that value artistry as their principle means of impacting communities. All of the young artists involved in these programs participated in a sustained process of creating original performance pieces based on stories relevant to their lives and/or the lives of their communities. This dissertation examines how, through their playmaking processes, they began to identify, critique and experiment with commonly held beliefs about human agency and interaction, to activate and embellish the symbolic systems and repertoires that make up their communities, and to practice new ways of coming together. Through their use of artistic practices, the youth developed a sense of themselves as viable shapers of their communities and, in varying degrees, also used other aspects of culture (values, rituals, traditions, aspirations and the arts) to make meaning, contribute, and shape their cultural locations, offering new forms, symbols, structural models and imaginings. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Theatre 2010