This study seeks to explicate the intercultural experiences of Puerto Ricans within the diaspora of Central Florida. Specifically, the navigation of communication behaviors among intergroup and outgroup behaviors as Puerto Rican individuals acculturate into the area. This study utilizes communication accommodation theory as its basis to understand integration into a host culture and the impacts on socio-cultural communication behaviors. Findings show the importance of studying diasporic communities as they develop such as that of the Puerto Rican community in Central Florida because it situates the reality of an individual and groups sense of identity in a new cultural context. This research showcases Puerto Rican diasporic individuals struggling with the bilingual brain and acculturating based on their environment. Communication accommodation behaviors are thus deeply rooted in marginalization and negative treatment of diasporic individuals as the "other" in multicultural scenarios. Intercultural self-identity and intersectionality has therefore been impacted by the dynamic between the home culture and host culture.

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Poor communication is identified as the root cause for the majority of sentinel events in hospitals, including wrong site surgery, medication errors, and failure to rescue. Interdisciplinary rounding (IDR), a long-standing practice in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), provides a forum for communication and collaboration and has been linked to improved patient outcomes. Most of the research regarding IDR has been performed in the ICU setting within academic medical centers. IDR outside of the ICU has demonstrated similar clinical outcomes but a gap exists in the literature regarding the impact of IDR participation on the nurse, particularly for nurses working in the non-ICU setting within community hospitals. This led to the development of a research question. Basic Psychological Needs Theory was chosen as the theoretical framework – to specifically assess how participation in IDR affected the nurses' sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. A mixed method study was conducted in a community hospital in Central Florida using surveys and semi-structured interviews. Results indicated ICU nurses perceived a higher level of collaboration with physicians than nurses working outside of the ICU but this did not correlate with satisfaction of the ICU nurses' basic psychological needs. Only the nurses' level of experience and advanced nursing education appeared to have any significant impact on satisfaction of the nurses' basic psychological needs. The interview responses confirmed the presence of different rounding processes and levels of collaboration outside of the ICU, which helped to explain and support study outcomes. Opportunities for process improvements were also identified.

In this thesis I argue that a suburban cultural imagination developed transnationally during the post-war period (roughly 1945-1970) rather than as a cultural phenomenon largely associated with the 1950s United States. I situate the suburbs—in both their physical and cultural constructions—as my primary focus and discuss the suburb's influence on hegemonic culture by performing an in-depth comparison of the U.S. with another country with a long history of suburbanization—Australia. Given that the suburbs structure several social, cultural, economic, political, and historical vectors—which all in turn inform issues of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationality—I focus on how the suburbs inform gender; in particular, I identify how the suburban imagination has contributed to the creation of the housewife figure. To locate these suburbs, I turn to the mass-circulation magazines of the mid-twentieth century whose advertisements, editorials, and short fiction disseminated the rhetoric and iconography of the suburb. Magazines like Ladies' Home Journal and Harper's helped form a U.S. suburban imagination through "housewife writers" such as Shirley Jackson. Comparing these suburban texts to the Australian Women's Weekly, we can see continuities and variations between suburbia in the U.S. and Australian cultural imaginations. I conclude this thesis by sketching potential coordinates for future investigation, including in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Africa. While the process of suburbanization may vary in each country, a suburban imagination exists which transcends national experience and instead forms transnational lines that connect nations throughout the post-war period. These insights provide new ways of thinking about suburbanization, transnationalism, and globalization and the role that magazines had in shaping the cultures being constructed inside these suburban developments.

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Healthcare systems have been demonstrably altered because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Resources were stretched and patient conditions deteriorated on a scale previously unseen, leaving nurses at the forefront to face the adversities brought about by the pandemic. In this study, a questionnaire was utilized to better understand how COVID-19 has impacted the stress level, resilience/well-being, moral distress, job satisfaction/enjoyment, practice environment, and intent to remain in the nursing profession of nursing alums from East Tennessee State University. This study focused on a subset of nurses working in critical care, to consider the impact that the pandemic had on ICU nurses’ emotional well-being and job enjoyment. This study collected general demographics and information regarding how each participant’s work was impacted as a result of COVID-19. The Practice Environment Scale of the Nursing Work Index (PES-NWI) questionnaire, Job Enjoyment Scale (JES), and Professional Quality of Life (Pro-QOL) scales were also leveraged to gain an understanding of the participants’ perspectives on their work and mental situations. The results showed that critical nurses generally answered more negatively on the PES-NWI, JES, and ProQOL scales. The study concludes that ICU nurses have lower emotional well-being and job enjoyment than nurses in general and may have been more greatly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between Wizards of the Coast's trading card game Magic: The Gathering and its digital adaptations. I used critical technocultural, ludic discourse analysis, and ludic textual analysis to examine the analog trading card game and digital adaptations. I examined an archive of paratextual media including trade magazines, developer blogs, game reviews, and player guides. I chose Magic for its long history, impact on the analog game industry, and the sheer number of adaptations that have been produced. This analysis begins by introducing a method for describing analog to digital adaptations called Adaptation Mapping. Adaptation mapping describes adaptations as a relationship between how the interface of the game is remediated and the degree to which a game represents the thematic and ludic experiences of the original. Then I examine the narrative framework that allows Magic to tell stories through both its theme and mechanics. Identifying the figure of the Planeswalker as a key component in how narrative functions in Magic, I trace the development of the planeswalker as a player analog to independent original characters under the purview of Wizards of the Coast. The adaptations provide a backdrop for this change and highlights the way that the same mechanical and algorithmic systems can characterize both player and official characters within Magics ecosystem. This shift highlights the way that marketing is approached and influences the design of the game. Finally, I examine how digital adaptations are intwined with ludic platform economy that has emerged through the 2010s. The apparatus that allows for capital to flow through the community is coopted via adaptation and remediated in ways that redirect capital back towards Wizards of the Coast as the platform owner. Analog to digital adaptation is a critical juncture in examining the impact of platformization on play and games.

This dissertation examines the representations of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in superhero television shows, their source comics, and their corresponding fan fiction. Using close reading, in the tradition of Bérubé's (2018) examination of disability narratives in The Secret Life of Stories and Schalk's (2018) analysis of bodyminds in Bodyminds Reimagined, I explore how a character's PTSD is represented in the canonical media text (first through the comic book then through the television show) and discuss how the representation changes or evolves between mediums and provides or does not provide accurate representations of trauma, PTSD, and mental health. Through a sampling of popular fan texts from a given fandom and close reading the fan fiction and the tags, I interpret how fans construct PTSD and disability in their works: do they use the hegemonic medical model of disability, or do they construct PTSD through a social model? By providing an analysis of multiple media forms and PTSD throughout the superhero's stories, I show how fans both use and ignore canonical representations of disability and contribute to forms of oppression through their disabling of characters.

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No description available.