Increasing breastfeeding duration, especially among low-income women, has become a national public health priority. These mothers and their babies have less equitable access to support, resources, and the health benefits of breastfeeding. This thesis examines breastfeeding from a biocultural perspective with a focus on political economy, embodiment, and human rights. This research explores the lived experiences of new mothers who receive services from a community non-profit lactation support program which is aimed at providing in-home postpartum breastfeeding support to low-income/at-risk mothers. Evaluation of program services and analysis of women's narratives will provide insight into improvement of lactation services for all women.

While incidence rates are increasing for many cancers in Puerto Rico, mortality rates are declining (Torres-Cintron, et al. 2010), resulting in growing numbers of survivors and creating a situation in which long-term survivorship concerns are beginning to emerge as priorities. The importance of quality-of-life among survivors of cancer is increasingly being recognized among healthcare providers, although there remains a gap in knowledge of how young adult survivors cope with long-term treatment-related physical effects, such as infertility, and of the impact of cancer on survivors' social relationships and future goals. Because understandings of "cancer survivorship," as well as of reproduction, vary according to cultural context, this study examined the physical and social impact of cancer on young adults in Puerto Rico, and specifically the importance of parenthood. A media analysis of women's magazines, key informant interviews with ten cancer researchers, as well as in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 23 young adult cancer survivors, 16 healthcare providers, nine cancer advocates, and two members of the clergy were conducted in order to shed light on the lived experiences, needs, and concerns of young Puerto Rican cancer survivors.

Breastfeeding support for mothers and their babies historically was the informal work of family and community members. In the United States today, breastfeeding support is embedded in the biomedical system, and is provided by a new allied health professional: the International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC). This dissertation explores this professionalization of breastfeeding support and the origins of this new profession. It studies how IBCLCs working in the U.S. cultural context perceive and practice the profession and examines the relationship between the profession of lactation consulting and the medicalization of breastfeeding. Oral history interviews with 17 founders of the profession, which was established in 1985, and a content analysis of the professional journal (the Journal of Human Lactation) from 1985 to 2010, allowed me to build the story of how and why breastfeeding support became professionalized and how experiential breastfeeding knowledge entered the domain of expert knowledge. While constrained by the biomedical system in which they created the profession, the founders exhibited a both agency and creativity in their production and reproduction of professional values and practices. Interviews with 30 currently certified IBCLCs and observations of the clinical practice of 3 IBCLCs provided insight into the daily practice of IBCLCs working in different settings--hospitals, WIC clinics, pediatric offices, and private practice. The data collected from these ethnographic methods demonstrated how the medical knowledge base of IBCLCs translates into clinical practice with patients, and allowed me to understand the relationship between the profession of lactation consulting and the medicalization of breastfeeding. While IBCLCs' draw on medicalized knowledge and evidence about breastfeeding and human lactation, their interactions with clients are best described as empathetic and humanistic, and are derived from nursing and mother-to-mother breastfeeding support models rather than from a technocratic, biomedical approach to care. While the appropriation of certain biomedical values and standards helped to legitimize the professionalization efforts of the founders, in practice, lactation consultants apply their medical knowledge and clinical experience in a way that reflects the compassionate, empowering care approach of mother-to-mother breastfeeding support and that thus resists the overt medicalization of breastfeeding.

Richard "King Dick" or "Big Dick" Crafus, Cephas, or Seaver(s) first attracted attention by his size, strength and the authority he exercised as leader of U.S. African American Prisoners of War in Britain during the War of 1812. After the War he was celebrated as a boxing pioneer, ceremonial King of Boston's black community and almost certainly auxiliary law officer. Very little has been known about his life, and much of that obscured by his black working-class status; his true standing within his own community remains mysterious. Yet paradoxically he's been made much of, in academic writing and fiction alike right up to the present day. Although his life resisted the reduction of himself and his people to irrelevance and invisibility, I argue that his most prominent role has been as a palimpsest, a used canvas or marked screen onto which scholars and fiction-writers alike, as intellectual workers, have projected their images of the place of Blacks, blackness and racialized Others in the Americas and the Americanized world, including Haiti and Arabia. This thesis attempts to reconstruct his life and interpret his myriad reconstructions, to illuminate both dominant white and less-accessible minority discourses. The particular characteristics inscribed into Big Dick's figure have helped define class and caste structures, public morality and the use of public space, and the working of the U.S. capitalist and cultural imperium in the marketplace of discourses.

This dissertation examines the specific forms of embodied suffering war and its refugee aftermath brings to female Sudanese refugees currently living in post-revolution Cairo, Egypt in order to illustrate the suffering and healing enacted within everyday life. These women, displaced from the Second Sudanese Civil War, are what I label Sudan's `Lost Girls.' The theoretical framework I employ in order to discuss their lives is a critical medical anthropology perspective based on the mindful body. I engage anthropological literature on the body in order to better understand the embodied suffering, sexual violence, and refugee aftermath of war. My research seeks to do this through distinctly gendered analyses and equally importantly, visual analyses. The research draws on historical news data collected through content analysis, contemporary qualitative data collected during fieldwork in the form of observation and interviews, with a particular emphasis on photovoice methodology. The work proposes that the humanizing aspect of emotions revealed by Lost Girls' photography of their everyday lives in urban Cairo allows for critical analysis of the many and varied ways in which women's `ordinary' experiences of war have been hidden, the implications of this for international responses to their suffering, and areas for exploring new, non-emergency refugee policies based on more ethnographically informed, gendered contextualizations of `extraordinary' violence.

Building from existing literature on anthropology of food, political economy of food and consumption, and social movement theory, I examine the direct agriculture network of Tampa Bay Florida through a mixed-method ethnography. The research consisted of one year of field-work, with 6 months and over 100 hours of active participant observation, open-ended interviews with eight local producers, and short surveys with 100 market patrons. This thesis is an analysis of the results of this rigorous qualitative and quantitative work and, perhaps more importantly, an account of my own personal struggles in joining the direct agriculture network and my ultimate commitment to the movement. This report documents one student's transition from a researcher to an activist, finally settling in a local place that occupies both worlds in an effort to help increase the accessibility of others who wish to join the movement; an equal access based not only on economic capital, but also social and cultural capital in order to sustain an alternative food social movement.

This dissertation examines a movement in Western North Carolina to build a local food system, one grounded in the conditions and relationships of place. In 2000, Mountain Family Farms launched the Local Food Campaign to raise public awareness about the region's farms and farming heritage, to educate consumers about the benefits of buying food grown by local farms, and, ultimately, to build markets for locally grown food to sustain the region's farms. The campaign sparked a social movement and over a decade later local farms and locally grown food are a palpable feature of life in the mountains of Western North Carolina. This dissertation is the result of my tenure at the organization as an employee and four years of ethnographic research. The primary objective of my research has been to understand how the Local Food Movement in Western North Carolina is interacting with and affecting the industrialized food industry at the local level. Drawing on perspectives within anthropology, sociology, political science, geography, feminist theory, and social movements theory and from the concepts of hegemony, cultural politics, place-making, and social capital, this dissertation understands the movement in Western North Carolina within a processual framework, an integral part of the hegemonic process, which struggles to define and legitimize the practices and ideas that govern way of life. To examine this process, my research has focused on the ways movement organizers create a movement culture and mediate a tension between the dual imperatives of engaging the dominant food system and protecting the integrity of movement goals. Equally, my research has focused on understanding the impacts of movement activities on the region's food system - on the perceptions and practices of consumers and farmers and of the businesses that serve and sell food in the region. My dissertation reveals the significance of place-making to the strategies of movement organizers - grounding movement participants and observers in the particularities of place, developing a shared place-based consciousness, cultivating different economic subjectivities that affect different material impacts. My dissertation documents the hegemonic process - the encounter and interaction between movement meanings, ideas, and practices and those of the dominant, conventional food industry. Within this process, movement outcomes are the responses of movement organizers, participants, and observers as they mediate challenges and opportunities at the intersection of disparate ideas and practices. Within a dynamic movement, outcomes are both provisional and incremental, shifting in relation to emergent knowledge and perceptions and the actions they inform.

The main purpose of this study was to analyze the role and potential of community arts programs and organizations in improving the lives of disadvantaged African American youth, through the creation of a participatory video project and the internal evaluation of the same; using applied anthropological methods, and cultural praxis (an innovative educational design), and following the recommendations of expert community arts programs evaluators. The study responds to the need identified in the community arts literature to offer robust program evaluations that explain the benefits of such programs. The lack of evidence seems to derive not only from the difficulties of measuring creative practices and other desired outcomes related to quality of life, but also from inadequate research design and implementation (Matarasso 1996; Putland 2008). Although the evaluation instruments can use some refinement, the resulting ethnography brings about the complexity of the lives of disadvantaged African American youth and the difficulty in making generalizations about their needs. It also highlights the need for community organizations to understand the context in which their programs are offered, and of using a holistic/integral and long-term approach in the design and implementation of programs, which can potentially enhance the growth and development of participants. This study speaks to the fundamental need for community arts organizations to train personnel adequately and offer the necessary infrastructure and tools to instructors in order to accomplish the objectives of the organization. Community arts programs and their outcomes depend on a clear understanding of the population's needs, adequate design and implementation of programs with capable instructors, and an internal organization that is sustainable and that can ensure the safety and wellbeing of all those involved.

"Food desert" commonly describes food insecure areas with few fresh food outlets. Though used in a number of sources, the definition of "food desert" remains largely undeveloped and research is often deficit oriented, failing to account for community assets that may exist within food deserts but are underutilized or under-supported. Using an assets-based, ethnographic approach, this study combines GIS and survey methodology with participant observation and qualitative interviews to assess the potential positive effect of urban agriculture on food accessibility in Sulphur Springs, a USDA identified urban food desert in Tampa, Florida. Ethnographic data suggest that within this neighborhood, residents are largely dissatisfied with the quality of goods and services provided by local food retailers and, in response, seek alternatives to local retail food options. GIS and food store survey results from this study suggest that urban agriculture has the potential to increase fresh food accessibility and availability. Qualitative interview data suggest that the most appropriate way to improve food accessibility in this particular community is through Community Supported Agriculture that fosters social connections, while increasing access to healthful, quality foods, and circulating money within the community.

Proper hand hygiene is the most effective and efficient method to prevent over 1.3 million deaths annually from diarrheal disease and Acute Respiratory Infections (ARIs). Hand hygiene is also indispensable in achieving the fourth Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to reduce the childhood mortality rate by 2/3rds between 1990 and 2015. Handwashing has been found in a systematic review of studies to reduce diarrhea by 47%#37; and is, thus, capable of preventing a million deaths (Curtis et. al., 2003). Despite this evidence, hand washing rates remain seriously low in the developing world (Scott et al., 2008). This study developed and implemented a comprehensive monitoring strategy of five usage variables (i.e., soap usage, functionality, presence of cleansing agent, ground wetness under station, amount of water in the jug) for 42-64 appropriate technology handwashing stations. These stations were monitored throughout 2011-2013 in two communities in Mali, West Africa. Statistically significant (p < 0.05) results include: 1) a 29%#37; decrease in soap usage from dry (October-June) to rainy seasons (July-September), 2) 35%#37; decrease in stations with presence of cleansing agent between 2011 and 2012, 3) higher station usage for stations in households with higher scores on the Progress out of Poverty Index® , 4) 27%#37; less of the stations far from a water source (35 meters-172 meters away) had a cleansing agent present than stations close to a water source (less than 35 meters) during the rainy season. Station usage also differed based on gender of the handwashing station owner in the two communities where stations built by women were used more in Zeala than those in Nci'bugu. In contrast to Zeala, handwashing stations built by men in Nci'bugu had higher soap usage and usage variable proportions than those built by women. Handwashing training and promotions resulted in 98%#37; of households reporting that they wash their hands with soap in 2012 from 0%#37; in 2011. Altogether, this study designed and implemented a robust monitoring system that succeeded in quantifying handwashing station usage for over two years. In-depth analysis of the data established six sustainability factors for handwashing stations (gender, training, water, seasonality, wealth, and monitoring) that are critical for lasting handwashing behavior change and successful hygiene interventions to save lives.