This dissertation investigates the structural dynamics of the inter-organizational (litigation, alliance) relations in the environmental movement sector (EMS) in the United States, 1970-2001. Particularly, it focuses on the litigative and alliance ties between the environmental organizations (EORGs) including both environmental movement organizations (EMOs) and environmental government agencies (EGAs), and explaining the processes by which the contemporary inter-EORG structure has emerged over time. The methods used in analysis include (balance, structural) partitioning, p-star logit, and categorical data analysis in statistical network analysis. The data analyzed were collected from various sources including LexisNexis and Guide Star and include both organizational attributes and relations. To explicate the dynamic processes by which the contemporary inter-EORG structure has emerged, this dissertation investigates the formation of dyadic, triadic, and network structure with regard to litigative and alliance ties, respectively. Selected fundamental models of network dynamics (transitive dominance, strategic actor, and social balance) help explain the empirical inter-organizational (litigation, alliance) relations in later chapters. The theoretical and empirical findings help better understand the structural and dynamic issues in the study of the environment, social movement, complex organizations, and network evolution.

The global nursing shortage severely impacts the health care crisis in the United States and around the world. Nurses are overworked and under recognized and patients feel frustrated and neglected. Nurses professionalize their labor to increase recognition of their contributions to medicine, but these efforts focus on individualism and deemphasize the intimate nature of their work. Nonetheless, experienced bedside nurses know that intimate interactions help patients feel safe and comfortable during illness, which contributes to their healing. These interactions require specialized knowledge and skill, which contradicts the popular idea that whether or not one is caring is a personal attribute. In this dissertation, I found that nurse-patient interactions are in large part shaped by perceptions and constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. I offer the term professional intimacy to characterize how nurses negotiate intimate care and learn this specialized knowledge and skill set over time. I argue for collective recognition of professional intimacy, that it can and should be taught to nurses, and that hospitals can better accommodate this labor. Allowing nurses to conduct professionally intimate work will ensure better medical care for patients, which ultimately increases both nurse and patient satisfaction.

This study addresses controversies in the literature of risk factors of abuse perpetrated by men against female intimate partners. Drawing upon the three theoretical perspectives dominant in the literature (family violence, mainstream feminist, and life-course perspectives), I approach the analysis from two directions. First, each perspective suggests risk factors in a particular category of influence; the family violence perspective suggests a focus on family influences, mainstream feminism suggests socio-cultural influences, and life-course theorists suggest a focus on individual/personal factors. Second, the family violence perspective and the life-course also suggested investigating influences organized by age group. I use a sample of 506 boys from the Pittsburgh Youth Study, a longitudinal study consisting of male individuals from public schools of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. More specifically, I focus on the 329 participants in the sample who reported being involved in a romantic relationship by age 23-25, age at which intimate partner abuse was investigated. The findings of the descriptive analysis show that intimate partner abuse is strongly correlated to the variables experience of corporal punishment in the family of origin, attitudes toward women, and delinquency (especially age 19-22). The multivariate analysis confirms that minority males, those who entered the relationship at younger age, those who experienced frequent corporal punishment in the family of origin (age 13-15), and those who had been antisocial during pre-adulthood (age 19-22) were more likely to abuse an intimate female partner during adulthood (age 23-25). The findings on race, age at entering the relationship, and delinquency add new evidence to existing controversies in the empirical literature. In the case of corporal punishment, the results address a gap in the literature.

Scenes are dynamic social relationships and experiences that are comprised of networks, locations, and rituals. Scene networks form in recognizable meeting places around activities such as live music shows, bike collectives, drag performances and gambling rings. This paper explores how cultural producers (i.e. band members, DJs, event organizers) perceive and use networks, locations and rituals in Pittsburgh's grassroots music and arts scene. Whereas previous research examines th experience of a single scene, this study explores the many ways cultural producers activate a variety of scenes under the same umbrella. This study examines how predominately white scene networks perceive and benefit from gentrification while also attending to how gender and sexuality affect where scene events are held. Women and queer identified artists do not have the same options as their heterosexual male counterparts when it comes to creating scene events in places opened by urban revitalization projects. This study also demonstrates that the rituals cultural producers engage are particular to the identities they seek to enact. Cultural producers use rituals of identity to deconstruct hegemonic constructions of gender and sexuality. Through performance rituals, participants empower stigmatized social identities.

While girls today have more educational and career opportunities than ever before, their gender, social class, and racial positions influence how they set and achieve academic and career goals. Using feminist qualitative research methods, I conducted focus groups and in-depth interviews with 22 poor and working class, African American, white adolescent girls and 18 of their mothers to examine how patterns in everyday life influence girls perceptions of the future. I begin by discussing who the girls are, focusing on how they see themselves in comparison to culturally constructed images of girls/girlhood, i.e., Girl Power and Mean Girl. I also show who they are by describing the organization of daily family life which includes such factors as television viewing, tight family ties and responsibilities, positive relationships with mothers, and an awareness of financial insecurity. I argue that an understanding of the cultural, familial, environmental, and material realities of the girls lives illustrates how life for poor and working class girls is flooded with contradictions that they negotiate as they decide who they are and who they want to become. Then I discuss who the girls want to become and suggest that aspirations themselves are less important than the contexts in which aspirations are shaped. I illustrate how poor and working class girls perceptions of the future are uniquely shaped in gendered, classed, and racialized practices within the media, family, peer groups, and schools. Finally, I discuss how the girls are reaching their goals. I argue that poor and working class girls current experiences and orientations and preparedness toward the future cannot be universalized. That is, the extent to which poor and working class girls find resources to help them plan and prepare for the future varies and these variations are illuminated when we examine girls individual motivation as well as the resources families and schools differentially provide.

What explains the evolution and dynamics of land squatting in Montevideo, Uruguay? Over the last few decades squatter settlements have increased dramatically in this city that lacked a "frontier" of poor illegal settlements until the 1980s, with the exception of a handful of very precarious neighborhoods dubbed cantegriles that started appearing around the 1950s. Today, about 11 % of the city's population lives on illegally occupied land (INE 2006). The more than 400 current squatter settlements have expanded the city limits, leaving a very concrete trace of urban and social change. Squatter settlements mushroomed without natural disasters setting people in motion and without population growth due to rural to urban migration processes, frequent causes of land squatting elsewhere. Thus, both knowing how and why land squatting has developed constitute interesting puzzles. No one has yet written about the history of land squatting in Montevideo. This dissertation recovers this history from oblivion and puts it in dialog with the literature on popular politics. From a social movement/contentious politics perspective, in this dissertation I challenge the assumption that socioeconomic factors such as poverty were the only causes triggering land squatting. I test whether political factors also shaped the cycle of land invasions and examine the mechanisms through which those factors - known as political opportunities in the literature - translated into different types of mobilization. Through statistical analysis, in-depth interviews, document analysis, and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, this project will describe and explain the origins and trajectories of squatting as an elusive form of collective action during the last half of the 20th century (1947-2004). The project seeks to a) describe and explain the cycle of squatting and its timing; b) compare trajectories of different kinds of mobilization involved in land seizures and the mechanisms that activated them, and c) understand squatters' politics through a thick description of squatters' experiences and memories of their relationships with state agencies and politicians and through the experiences and memories of politicians, technocrats and bureaucrats as well.

Research in social movements has emphasized the role of leadership and formal organizations in promoting and organizing collective action. In this study, I analyze an episode of mobilization that has been characterized by its participants as a leaderless spontaneous movement. Using data from audio archives, newspapers, and videos of interviews with former participants I conclude that although there were organizations and some forms of leadership behind the mobilizations, they did not have the preeminent role that theory predicts in organizing demonstrations. In fact, the work of the main organizers of the mobilizations reinforced the idea of a leaderless movement. In addition, I show that the notion of spontaneity grew out of the specific mechanism that allowed peoples direct participation in organizing the mobilizations, coupled with participants self-understanding of acting on their own with no external influence.

Over the past ten years, the parents and loved ones of thousands of individuals afflicted with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have mobilized around the idea that vaccines play a causative role in ASDs. The US Federal government and Western mainstream medicine refute this, claiming evidence refutes any causal link between vaccines and ASD. The result has been a heated dispute between ASD/vaccine link (ASD/VL) activists and mainstream medicine, both claiming legitimacy based on their own scientific research. To examine this controversy and why ASD/VL activists continue to mobilize around a scientific hypothesis that has been largely disproved, I surveyed and conducted in-depth interviews with ASD/VL activists and examined artifacts from the movement. Utilizing the theoretical framework on Health Social Movements (HSM) developed by Phil Brown and theories on boundary work developed by Thomas Gieryn I examined how and why ASD/VL activists, in collaboration with politicians and scientists, organized a movement to prove there is significant evidence showing a causative link between vaccines and ASDs. I explored how mobilization occurred around several key events including the US Congressional hearings on vaccine safety, the Immunization Safety Review Committee hearings, reports published by the Institute of Medicine, and the release of the Simpsonwood Retreat transcript. I found that while ASD/VL activists became lay experts and used scientific evidence to build their argument, they depended on their own experiential knowledge to inform their personal beliefs on ASD causation and treatment. My findings have significant impact for the study of health social movements and the study of contested illnesses.

This paper challenges predominant assumptions and definitions presented in social movement literature about risk, activism, and social movement participation by examining the unique case of South Dakota pro-choice clergy. Whereas past research assumes that participation in social movement-related activities results in activist identity, this study shows that perceptions of risk, rather than social movement activities, determine whether or not these clergy join the social movement group, Pastors for Moral Choices, and whether or not they identify as activists. Further, I show that factors often credited with causing social movement participation may be the same factors used to justify not participating in social movements. Finally, I find that progressive clergy perceive multiple levels of risk within the conservative state of South Dakota, and they navigate these risks and advocate for reproductive rights by acting as whistleblowers. Overall, this paper complicates social movement concepts and categories and seeks to challenge what is taken for granted in social movement research.

Based on two broad constituent samples, this dissertation investigates the dialectics -- content, modalities and processes -- of identity across and between two sites of Dalit life in Kathmandu, Nepal: everyday community and organized political advocacy. These samples comprised, respectively, (1) householders from three occupationally segregated Dalit neighborhoods, encompassing discrete communities of sweepers, metalworkers and tailors/musicians; (2) individual Dalit activists in the political sphere. Through 43 interviews with community members and 41 interviews with activists, the research investigated the modalities of identity across everyday and civil-society space and across class, caste, gender and generation. Research questions specifically sought to uncover constraints and possibilities of everyday identities and organized/activist political identities and further differences of gender, class and generation. The study revealed strong evidence of the continuing embeddedness of caste in Kathmandu. Their everyday experiences of discrimination force both community and political actors to strategically reveal or conceal their Dalit status depending on the situation. Evidence of resistance ranged from everyday individual acts to collective organized forms. The community ethnography revealed important differences across the sweeper, metal-worker and tailor-musician communities. The gender neutrality of the sweeper occupation allows sweeper women relatively more autonomy than that found in the two other occupational caste groups. The tailor/musician group showed all indicators of social mobility into the middle class and had adopted a caste-denying discourse that allowed them to embrace their musical traditions as an ethnic asset that was parlayed into commercial success. The political site revealed two important contradictions. First, Dalit activists based in political parties tend to privilege the nation-state and its bounded sovereignty as the strategic and ultimate terrain upon which the struggle for full Dalit inclusion is fought, while Dalit advocates based in non-governmental organizations appeal primarily to international human rights and the claims to universal human dignity. Second, there is a tension between the private lives of Dalit activists in which they negotiate everyday oppression and their public lives as proactive and empowered political actors. Finally, the important political moment of the Peoples Movement of April 2006 united Dali activists to fight locally for full citizenship rights.