Muslims of Middle Eastern and Turkish origin, whether longtime immigrants, recent refugees, or students living in America temporarily, are an important part of the changing ethnic and religious landscape in the Southeast U.S. In the aftermath of 9/11, much attention has been shifted upon Islam and the Middle East. Discrimination and a lack of mutual understanding and tolerance between the selected populations and native-born, non-Muslim Americans are persistent problems. The Knoxville Turkish Cultural Center and the Istanbul Center of Atlanta recognize and reflect the contemporary need for intercultural and interfaith awareness, education, and dialogue to promote tolerance. I argue that while these organizations serve to integrate incoming populations and encourage inter-group, inter-cultural, and inter-religious interaction, they also act as a pressure valve and site of intra-group identity formation. This case study reveals the many ways in which Muslims are contributing to American culture and society while simultaneously redefining, reconfirming and even solidifying their own cultural markers, social boundaries, beliefs, and identities through their community relations and through their involvement with KTCC and IC.

Diss. Amsterdam : University, 2009. / DVD title: If you do good : beach seine fishing in Ghana.

Children born with HIV in the 1980s and 1990s are surviving into adolescence and adulthood, due to the availability of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). Growing up with a chronic and stigmatized disease presents considerable challenges as young people explore their sexuality, develop relationships, and take steps to become independent and productive adults. Adherence to HAART is an essential and life-long practice for the maintenance of health and longevity. For adolescents born with HIV, a daily medication schedule is one aspect of disease management that also includes medical visits, HIV status acceptance, bouts of illness, and disclosure of HIV status to others. This research uses a framework of medical ecology to explore the personal, socio-familial, and medical contexts in which perinatally HIV-infected adolescents, as competent social actors, navigate the complexities of HIV disease management. It examines personal behaviors and attitudes, family dynamics, peer relationships, and health care structures and relationships that affect their adherence to HAART. A key finding of this study was increased agency and adaptation to HIV among adolescents who learned their diagnosis earlier in life and whose caregivers demonstrated acceptance of HIV and support for the adolescents. They were able to adhere to their medication regimens, despite busy schedules, non-disclosure to friends, and treatment fatigue, and also had a somewhat better understanding of the medical aspects of HIV and HAART. Yet all of the adolescents had gaps in their understanding of clinical indicators and viral resistance, and the relationship between adherence and HIV transmission. This deficit in a medical conceptualization and understanding of HIV and its ramifications is another important finding of this study. The adolescents' notions and actions regarding HIV disease, based on social, cultural, and medical norms and interactions within their environment, have a significant impact on the natural history of HIV. The level and consequent infectiousness of HIV as it responds to medications, mutates in their absence, and multiplies or is suppressed, depends on the individual's strict adherence to medications and attention to medical details, and affects HIV transmission to the individual's sexual partners. From both an individual medical and a public health perspective, an understanding of the ramifications of adherence and non-adherence to HAART is crucial. Early acceptance and understanding of HIV increase the possibility of successful medication adherence and overall disease management. In order to facilitate perinatally-infected adolescents' disease management and adherence to medications, it is recommended that the process of disclosure of HIV diagnosis to the child begin early so that the child is fully aware by the age of ten. The acceptance of HIV in the family and clear-cut roles and responsibilities for disease management should be facilitated by ongoing instruction and counseling. Adolescents should be given thorough, if basic, instruction on the medical aspects of HIV, and should be encouraged to have friends, and especially sexual partners, accompany them to their clinic visits. This will encourage greater understanding of HIV and perhaps lead to less stigmatization of HIV and those living with HIV. Finally, providers and adolescent patients should construct a partnership in which their individual models of disease management are integrated and power and responsibility are appropriately shared.

Recent studies on the Argentine public health system have demonstrated that the lack of medical resources in different parts of the country force pediatric oncology patients and their family members to travel to Buenos Aires in order to access care. This internal migration poses difficulties for these families as travel and resettlement are expensive, lead to the separation of family members, and interrupt the child's schooling. This dissertation was designed to document the everyday life experiences of traveling families in order to understand the barriers they faced while attempting to access medical treatment and the strategies they used to surmount these obstacles. Narrative research and Critical Medical Anthropology were combined in order to analyze individual treatment and migration experiences within the political and economic context of the Argentine public health system. The interviews, visual timelines, drawings, and participant-observation carried out with 35 families shed light on differences in the conceptualization of medical treatment and migration between children and their parents, the ways in which the process of parenting was affected by relocation, and the changes that need to be made in the current Argentine public health system to provide timely and high quality pediatric oncology treatment and avoid delays in diagnosis and treatment.

This dissertation research explores how values regarding sexuality, morality, responsibility, protection, trust, and risk — expressed through parent, daughter, and healthcare provider relationships and interactions — inform parental decisions regarding the Gardasil® vaccine. In particular, the research examines the competing and conflicting meanings that parents and providers ascribe to vaccination and how actors position the vaccine within a wider set of negotiated, value–laden discourses. Because these narratives are situated within a larger structural field that shapes the landscape in which providers and parents interact, relevant historical and structural factors, including vaccine policy, cost, and compensation are discussed.

This study is about Tunisian women's work and lives in the present era of economic neoliberalism. The focus is women in the city of Bizerte, Tunisia, both those who work in Bizerte's export processing zone (EPZ), as well as those who work outside it. This study is a qualitative examination of formal and informal employment, set inside and outside of women's traditional political and economic domain, the home. Through ethnography of women's work and lives, this study's purpose is to contribute evidence against conflating women's "empowerment" with incorporation into global production. However, this study also lends itself to considerations of the possibilities for exertions of power, powers that women in Bizerte now seek that opened through the forces of globalization.

This dissertation explores the impact of housing and recreation policy on Tampa's urban youth. Deconcentration policy suggests that public housing youth have improved life chances when relocated to mixed-income neighborhoods. In 2007, Tampa's Central Park Village (CPV) public housing complex was demolished and all families were relocated to new neighborhoods. Similarly, neoliberal policy advocates for the government's reduced role in poverty-alleviating mechanisms to include housing the poor and the funding of afterschool programs. To offset a smaller city budget due to state property tax rollbacks in the mid-2000's, Tampa Parks and Recreation instituted increased afterschool and youth sports participation fees. In the dissertation, I examine how these policy changes affect both former CPV youth and Tampa urban youth in general. In addition, this dissertation examines the role of mentors (coaches) in urban neighborhoods and coaches' perceptions of newly instituted recreation policy.

ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the associations between recent global crises in staple food prices and finance and the following aspects of life in two communities on the island of Roatàn, Islas de La Bahia (Bay Islands), Honduras: household livelihoods; food commoditization; dietary diversity; food security; and nutritional status. The aims of this study are: ) assess the geographic and economic source(s) of foods consumed by two different communities on Roatàn; b) discover how the most recent economic and food crises have affected foodways and nutrition on Roatàn; c) assess how these crises have affected economic growth of the tourism sector on Roatàn. The two study sites are the towns of West End and Punta Gorda, towns with different histories and different trajectories in the recent tourism boom on the island. West End is a small village located at the western edge of Roatàn and has experienced a steady growth in tourism since the 1980s. Tourism in Punta Gorda has grown noticeably since the cruise ships started making ports of call to the island in the early Twenty First Century. The theoretical perspective of this study is an amalgamation of bioculturalism and political ecology, as the strengths of these two approaches are complementary. In this case, the project is biocultural in that it investigates the linkages between global and local level political economic processes, cultural traits, and biological health indicators. The project is political ecological because it addresses the intersection of the political economic and the ecological by describing changing land use and subsistence patterns in the context of a shift in the local economy to tourism based wage labor. In terms of methodology, this project employs a mixed methods approach which triangulates qualitative and quantitative data collected through a variety of means. Participant observation, the detailed observation of and participation in social events, special occasions, work activities, and other events of daily life underpins the entire methodology. Other qualitative methods include informal interviews and semi-structured interviews. Quantitative methods include surveys to assess dietary diversity and food security and anthropometric measurements such as weight and height that serve as a baseline for calculating nutritional indices such as body mass index and body fat percentage. Overall, the sample is split about evenly in primary household livelihoods between formal tourism work, small scale enterprise, and the category of shipping, seafood, and office work. At the community level, West End is more heavily involved in tourism work and Punta Gorda is more heavily involved in shipping, seafood, and office work. Both communities have a strong component of small scale enterprise, including artisanal fishermen, water taxi operators, and vendors of food and souvenirs. Both communities are imbedded in a highly commoditized food system, with all households in the sample buying the majority of their food rather than growing or catching it. The two main effects of this circumstance are that dietary diversity and food security are associated with income level and that the current trend of rising food prices, which is associated with a trend of rising fuel prices, is making certain foods harder for some households to obtain. In general, the sample has a mode of medium dietary diversity and moderate food insecurity. Significant factors influencing dietary diversity are community, occupational group, income group, and how frequently a household does artisanal fishing. Significant factors in food security include occupational group and income group. For adult respondents, obesity is a pervasive problem and is evident in results for body mass index, body fat percentage, and waste to hip ratio, as well as in frequent discourse about diabetes and hypertension. Child measurement results show no problem with stunting or wasting and a lower prevalence of obesity than in adults. While the nutritional picture in these two communities is not as dire as it is in many Central American examples, there is room for improvement. Recommendations stemming from this project include: communities gardens to bolster access to a more diverse diet; a cooperative based on fishing of an invasive marine species in order to control its population an provide a sustainable livelihood for artisanal fishermen; and a tourism customer service course to make local people more competitive for a wider array of tourism jobs.

This thesis examines the relationship between mass tourism and heritage tourism in the construction and perpetuation of histories and identities of local stakeholders on Roatàn Island, Honduras. I explore how identity is constructed by and through the tourism industry, and how much of the agency in forming identity and telling cultural stories resides in the hands of key stakeholders involved in the development of tourism on the island. Local cultural stories that focus on the people who live and have lived on the island for centuries are becoming increasingly silenced by a more commoditized, tourism driven, picture of life on Roatàn. Here, I examine how this silencing takes place, what its effects are on tourism and development, and consider what elements of the tourism industry have contributed to this silencing. On Roatàn, the issue of identity as interpreted through museums has become increasingly contested, as the tourism industry now controls the presentation of cultural and archaeological history of the island. This control influences how tourists visiting Roatàn interpret the past and present the heritage of local groups.

Clinical trials play an important role in advancing therapeutic and preventive care with many current modalities resulting from prior research. While prior research has described barriers to participation in therapeutic clinical trials, much less in known about barriers related to participation in trials aimed at prevention, prostate cancer prevention in particular. Physicians have been shown to play a critical role in access to trials; however, less is known about the individual and structural factors that influence their participation in prostate cancer prevention trials. This research provides rich ethnographic detail within the context of an ongoing trial. Research participants included physician/investigators who were either directly (serving as a co-investigator) or peripherally (referring patients for participation) involved in prostate cancer prevention intervention clinical trial (PCPICT), as well as those who were considered for participation but declined. Methods included open ended semi-structured interviews, participant-observation and a survey. Participants were recruited via direct inquiry, email and/or letter regarding participation. The results of this study show that individual and structural factors intersect, influencing both the willingness and ability of physician/investigators to participate or refer patients for participation in a prostate cancer prevention intervention clinical trial. Individual factors such as explanatory views on prevention, notions of risk and uncertainty, shared decision-making and duality of roles appear to have a greater influence on the willingness of physicians to participate while structural factors such as staffing, other resources and time are more influential in regards to the ability to participate. This research served as a critical first step towards providing an in-depth understanding of the individual and structural factors that influence a physician's participation in this type of trial. It builds from prior work where a better understanding of barriers and identification of successful strategies to overcome them was a noted void. The researcher identifies areas where additional research would be beneficial and provides applied recommendations for those considering the design of future cancer prevention intervention projects.