This thesis draws from research done in a particular urban setting, and illustrates the foundations of a type of social structure called "respite community". "Respite community" is a specifically urban phenomenon which can be defined as temporal, ad hoc, face to face, an aggregate of people who seek temporary relief from social stresses and support through socialized interaction.

Today, nurses represent many cultures and ethnic backgrounds. In their leadership style, nurse leaders must learn to embrace cultural intelligence or cultural quotient (CQ), that is, an extension of emotional intelligence that affords them the ability to manage a culturally diverse workforce. Historically, CQ has been relevant to business, locally and globally. But it is also important to explore the CQ of nurse leaders. Scholarly studies show that leaders with CQ are responsible for developing innovative employee behaviors, forward-thinking ideas, and creativeness in the workplace. CQ has a theoretical foundation in the 2003 research of Early and Ang who focused on CQ and the ability to lead in culturally diverse situations. This theoretical foundation will support the qualitative case study approach used to explore the CQ of nurse leaders. Ten participants were selected to answer semi structured interview questions, which were designed to produce data to answer research questions about the meaning of CQ to nurse leaders, the patient experience, self-awareness of CQ, and leadership practice. Thematic data analysis using the MAXQDA software program was the analysis tool. The results are expected to create positive social change by providing evidence-based results that can enhance the CQ of nurse leaders, their leadership style, and their practice in the United States. This study will add to the existing literature and its results may help the reader to reflect on the importance of CQ in their practice of leadership in the nursing profession.

TWO WAYS OF BURNING A COTTON FIELD is an ethnographic memoir concerning the narrator’s experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, South America. The plot is structured around a moral crisis in his rural Paraguayan village. The narrator’s neighbor, a man in his late twenties, threatened to kill his partner and her two children. The Paraguayan police were made aware of the situation but did nothing. Peace Corps management also instructed the narrator to do nothing. In TWO WAYS OF BURNING A COTTON FIELD, this moral crisis is explored within the contexts of post-colonial power structures, including economic and ecologic geographies, intersections of community and government, and the colonial-indigenous language continuum of Paraguay (Spanish-Guaraní). Further, these neighbors’ localized trauma is located within historical, colonial trauma. Of particular concern is the role that languages – English, Spanish, and Guaraní – play in constructing power, worldview, and relationships within the village.

The research reported in this thesis was an exploratory nature undertaken for the purpose of developing a measure of the adequacy of health services in three rural counties in Utah. The three counties included in the study area were Beaver, Piute, and Wayne. Adequacy of health services in the three-county area was measured on the basis of (1) the general population's, or consumer's, perception of the adequacy of the existing services, (2) the professional's or provider's perception of the adequacy of the existing services, and (3) adequacy of the existing services determined by a comparison with an established standard. The findings showed that major differences in the general population's perception of adequacy are present when controlling for county with the vast majority of the respondents in Piute and Wayne counties perceiving the existing services as poor, but with a large majority of those in Beaver County considering their services as good or excellent. With regard to the professional's perception of adequacy of existing services, it was found that the majority of the medical doctors perceived the services as adequate, but the doctors of dental surgery generally perceived the adequacy of service as somewhat less than desirable. With regard to the last measure, that of adequacy of existing services as determined by a comparison to an established standard, the services in the study area were found to be inadequate in all respects with the single exception of number of hospital beds per 1,000 population in Beaver County. It was concluded that there is a large degree of consensus between the perceived inadequacy of the health services of the general population in Piute and Wayne counties and the inadequacy demonstrated by the comparison of existing services to an established standard. In Beaver County the reverse is true with the perception of the general population and that of the physician population being very similar, both considering the services adequate but both being in disagreement with adequacy as measured by an established standard. The findings suggest that more detailed research in the area is needed if a standard of adequacy acceptable to everyone is to be developed.

Access to reliable water and sanitation are two important goals to improve livelihoods around the world. Providing access to improved and safe water resources that are equitable and appropriate to local needs is important to improve sustainability long-term. In addition, framing access to water and sanitation as basic human rights is often used as a rationale in developing new water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions in developing countries around the world. But not all countries consider access to safe water and sanitation as a human right. In the thesis, the politics of improving and investment in water access and sanitation provision are considered. The socio-cultural impacts of lack of sanitation in the lives of residents of Valparaiso de Goias, Brazil are explored. During a period of nine months, I also assessed perceptions of water scarcity and insecurity, and documented ideas of water reuse and sustainability in the area. I found that access to water and sanitation are not viewed as human rights, but as part of a discourse of citizenship and a social right. These services are viewed as a responsibility of the State to its residents because they are Brazilian and because it ensures improved livelihoods for the country’s residents. I also found that access to wastewater treatment infrastructure varied throughout the city, though treatment of wastewater remains very important to the study site community. In addition, the feasibility of implementing sustainable alternatives to address community needs is unlikely, given the infrastructural, financial, and space constraints. Political will and support have an important role in increasing and improving access to sanitation infrastructure. Perceptions of water scarcity varied between local residents and water service providers and other professionals interviewed. Though water is not perceived as scarce, Valparaiso and the Federal District of Brazil are located in a water stressed area, and are therefore more susceptible to water shortages and decreased water availability. Finally, community-based solutions to address water shortages should be included in the expansion of water reservoirs to collect rainwater, the usage of fines and bonuses to encourage appropriate water consumption.

Fanfiction consists of works written by amateurs using pre-existing characters and plots, often shared online for free. Although fanfiction began long before the advent of the internet, the worldwide web has created a platform wherein fanfiction is allowed and encouraged to spread almost unconditionally, reaching new populations and rising slowly but surely into the public eye. As the internet has made fanfiction more accessible and public, it has also increased the number of children and young adults involved in the process. And in the unsupervised wilderness of the internet, sexual content is a common feature of fanfiction, with a varying degree of accuracy in said sexual content. As the influence of fanfiction spreads, academic research into fanfiction has also spread. The purpose of this project is to better understand how fanfiction can impact what adolescents and young adults know about sex and how that information shapes their sexual attitudes. A secondary goal is to question fanfiction authors and readers about whether they are interested in the presentation of accurate sexual information in fanfiction. In order to answer these questions, this project included a review of several works of fanfiction, as well as a survey of 25 fanfiction readers and writers, and interviews with seven of the survey participants. In general, the answer to whether fanfiction has impacted users has been a resounding yes. Prosumers (those who may produce and/or consumer fanfiction) reached through the survey and the interviews largely identified fanfiction as an important resource in their sexual education, with a mostly positive influence. Prosumers cited fanfiction as a source that broadened their knowledge of the intricacies and variations of sex, as well as something that made them more understanding of their own desires and the desires of others. On the other hand, fanfiction prosumers did not necessarily cite fanfiction as being technically accurate. Instead, they valued fanfiction for the variety of viewpoints fanfiction brought them, and the chances it gave them to portray their own lives and issues through their favorite pieces of pop culture. Because the information gathered through this project identifies fanfiction as a source of information about sex for prosumers, and the Archive of Our Own platform specifically, as a reasonable and useful place to embed health-based sex ed interventions. However, fanfiction prosumers mostly seem to know the limits of their creations already, and already have some types of intervention in place, such as the tradition of informational author notes. If future interventions were to be enacted, it would have to be carefully planned with the prosumers, and would likely be most efficacious if it were to utilize those existing prosumer interventions.

This dissertation explored changes in structure, governance, perception and practice within Florida's child welfare system over a ten-year period (2001-2011) inclusive of two concurrent, statewide reform efforts: the privatization of child welfare services and implementation of a Title IV-E Waiver Demonstration. Using an anthropological perspective and holistic approach, the child welfare system is presented as a type of meta-organizational culture inclusive of subsystems and subcultures which are all embedded in historical and socioeconomic context that involves alternations between child safety and family preservation approaches to care. Guided by a grounded theory approach to qualitative data analysis, content analysis of child welfare organization documents, child welfare stakeholder interview transcripts, community governance partner surveys, and observational field notes was performed. Findings are presented within a systems theory framework and include emphasis on (1) systems change as a nonlinear, evolving process that takes time to sustain real change, 2) externalities and emergencies, as well as response to crises as ever present influential factors impacting system change and the creation of shared meaning and perceptions of, 3) the challenges involved in aligning structural views on poverty with practice models that more often employ the idea that poverty is individual, 4) the merit of privatization for social services if the reform is designed to create a public private partnership inclusive of caring for all children and families in a community, and 5) the value of flexibility and variance in local system design in order to best match a community's needs and resources.

Racial justice activists in Tampa Bay comprise a community and culture structured as a movement of social transformation. Data from eleven interviews and more than 100 hours of participant observation show that activists consist of a diverse array of Tampa Bay residents of varying ages, genders, sexualities, racial/ethnic identities and livelihoods. This community is best described by their beliefs and practices of ideology steeped in intersectionality and anti-capitalism, and are motivated by or empathetic to racial injustices directly experienced by them or those around them. The intention of this paper is to describe activists as they are rather than as they are depicted in the popular imagination, as well as to share the insights of racial justice activists to the public for their own use in resisting injustices.

This thesis describes how politics shape vulnerability to climate change at the local level, based on an ethnography in Cortez, Florida. Focusing on a “traditional” commercial fishing village on the Florida Gulf Coast, my research indicates that such vulnerabilities are created at multiple scales of the nexus between governance and commerce. Moreover, a key finding is that, as a community closely linked to the health of local environments, the village in Cortez is largely organized to protect their commercial industry from regional economic overdevelopment; not in recognition of its role in contributing to global climate change, but because such overdevelopment is perceived as unjust and destructive to local environments. Further, through qualitatively examining the environmental values of a “traditional” fishing community located in a large metropolitan coastal area, my thesis confronts the responsibility that broader society may have to reevaluate economic growth in effort to truly foster sustainability and justice. Finally, the thesis describes how communities like Cortez may be repositories for locally developed, ecologically grounded resilience strategies, rendering their voice all the more crucial, beyond conventional stakeholder approaches, in public discussions about regional economic development and marine resource management.

This dissertation research investigates the experience of deafness among deaf youth, adults, and their families in Mexico City, Mexico. Deaf children cannot fully access the spoken languages of their hearing families and mainstream society. Hence, participating families embarked upon extensive treatment-seeking pilgrimages, encountering myths about deaf lifeways and the promise of miracle cures that formed Mexico City's cultural system for coping with childhood deafness. This ethnography uncovers persistent misconceptions in medical and mainstream discourse, including strong recommendations against exposure to sign language, which directly impacted participants' access to relevant communities of practice, the social networks that proved most significant to these families. I used visual data collection methods, including photovoice and personal history timelines, to examine deaf identity. I contrast participants' lived experiences with the effects of the medicalization of deafness to empirically demonstrate the value of sign-based communities of practice for language socialization and the impact of restricted information and stigma. My research outlines the limitations of therapeutic approaches to language and challenges the notion that all children predictably acquire language. My contribution of "treatment-seeking pilgrimages" provides a new concept for examining therapy management as a social practice and I use "ad hoc communities of practice" to illustrate how participants formed social groupings in response to the unanticipated discovery of deafness in their families. Applied outcomes include recommendations suitable for educating medical personnel, public policy actors, educators, and families in early stages of treatment seeking.