Effective communication with the parents of pediatric clients is considered an essential skill and encompasses the verbal exchanging of ideas, listening, and non-verbal communication (Taylor, 2020). Similarly, the therapeutic use of self is integral to the practice of occupational therapy and consists of the conscious enhancement of communication through the use of planned strategies for intentional client-therapist interactions (Taylor, 2020). However, many occupational therapy practitioners report communication challenges, such as parent emotional expressions (Andrews et al., 2013) and discussing parent roles and expectations (Kruijsen-Terpstra et al., 2016 ), and implementing the therapeutic use of self in practice (Bonsaksen et al., 2013). Furthermore, factors such as the limited availability of communication skills training, a limited understanding of how to practice reflection to enhance communication self-awareness (King et al., 2017), and decreased self-efficacy (Coad et al., 2018) hinder the opportunity for practitioners to enhance their communication competencies. The following chapters discuss the evidence base and guiding theories informing the development of the proposed program, Communicate to Collaborate. Communicate to Collaborate is a communication skills training that aims to strengthen pediatric therapy practitioners’ interpersonal communication skills so that how they communicate with families becomes an active, mediating ingredient in their therapy interventions. Through program participation, it is anticipated practitioners will gain greater awareness of both their personal communication approaches and parent’s communication preferences and increased self-efficacy in how to communicate intentionally with parents, thus enhancing their therapeutic use of self in practice and improving the quality of family-centered pediatric therapy services.

This dissertation considers the subject of ecovillages, intentional ecologically-oriented sustainable communities developed in the U.S., and the different understandings of community involvement, structure, and challenges that members of these communities confront in their efforts at managing these time and labor-intensive settlements. Informed by the work of performance ethnographers and critical phenomenologists, I consider twelve interviews I conducted on-site and electronically with people living in ecovillage settlements. Taking these interviews and my own observations from on-site visits to two ecovillages as entry points, I conducted a phenomenological analysis informed by a critical phenomenological ethos of these accounts, highlighting five motifs that recurred across their recollections of their lived experiences: (1) intentional design; (2) happenings; (3) community; (4) motivations; and (5) political and environmental ethos. I then considered how these motifs suggested several contingent foundations that underwrite the experience of ecovillage community formation more generally. I identified three such contingent foundations: (1) intention; (2) boundaries; and (3) becoming. From these foundations, I propose a phenomenological rendering of community in ecovillages as a purposive act of ongoing relating between the human and more-than-human world that is cultivated through an attention to articulated principles, enacted through actions and behaviors that follow from these principles, and reaffirmed through mutual witnessing and commitment to the aforesaid principles. Such an understanding of community poses interesting implications for communication studies and related sub-disciplines. I consider some of these implications in the conclusion to my dissertation, before outlining some of the future work I hope to pursue relating to ecovillages and intentional communities more generally.

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This thesis explored the effects of social exclusion on the sense of control. We indexed the sense of control using the sense of agency. The sense of agency refers to the feeling of control over our actions and the outcomes of those actions. We experience the sense of agency at an implicit, pre-reflective level. In other words, we routinely make movements that impact some sort of change in the environment, and simply just know that our actions cause an effect. Experimentally, we can measure the sense of agency using the intentional binding effect. Intentional binding is a temporal illusion in which we perceive the time between our voluntary action and the outcome of that action to be shorted compared to when the same effect is caused by an involuntary action. We conducted three experiments. In experiment one, we used an episodic memory recall task to prime participants to feel socially excluded or socially included. In experiment two, we used a different manipulation of social exclusion and social inclusion called Cyberball. We found that in both experiments, intentional binding was significantly reduced following social exclusion compared to social inclusion and baseline. In experiment three, we investigated the pre-reflective sense of agency in eating disorders. Eating disorders are highly associated with chronic social exclusion experiences and an altered sense of control in life. We found that individuals with higher eating disorder symptomatology experience a lower sense of agency, compared to healthy individuals. Overall, this thesis is the first to demonstrate that social exclusion has observable effects on the sense of agency. We were able to triangulate these findings using another social exclusion manipulation as well, strengthening our original findings. Lastly, we showed that a disorder characterized, in part, by social exclusion, reduces the sense of agency / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

Over the summer and fall of 2018, I spent time at nine of the lands and two women's-only music festivals and interviewed 39 women. This dissertation is the result of those interviews and my copious field notes. Chapter one frames the question of community sociologically and examines why the lands often remained homogenous even though their goal was that every woman was welcome to come visit and live. It contrasts the lands to women's-only music festivals, which often included diverse women. Chapter two shows how lands not designed to support old women slowly, and unintentionally, become retirement communities. Families of choice, often consisting of the other women living in the community, help the women who need extra assistance, but within limits set by an unaddressed ageism. The lands are at risk if they fail to attract younger members. Chapter three explores the mutual mistrust between the women's land members and the academic community that I found myself navigating as I completed this project. It details the compromises all feminist communities must make to sustain themselves, and explores how the tension caused by my participation in both the women's lands and academic feminist communities yielded insights into both. / Doctor of Philosophy / As part of the American second wave feminist movement, a new group of radical feminists emerged. Instead of trying to work within the system, as the feminists before them had done, they decided to create an alternative system as best they could. This dissertation project focuses on the current iteration of these lands; to do this research I spent time at nine of the lands and two women's-only music festivals and interviewed 39 women during the summer of 2018. Part of creating these alternative systems included buying land in rural spaces across the United States and setting up new communities not beholden to any current way of doing things. A major ethos of their communities was that all women were welcome, regardless of race, economic, class, dis/ability, or other identities. The first chapter examines how, despite the women's best intentions, these spaces were and continue to remain today, homogenous, and contrasts the lands with other feminist organizations and women's-only music festivals that were able to diversify. Chapter two explores how women are aging on the lands and the struggles the women are facing in attracting new members. The last chapter examines the mutual mistrust of me I found within both the feminist and academic communities, how I navigated that mistrust, and ultimately that mistrust offers insights into how both communities make compromises to sustain themselves.

Modern work has been proven to compartmentalize the life of the individual. One must look no further than semantics to realize the discontinuity between "work" and "home," for the segmented nature of these two states of being becomes apparent the moment that they are juxtaposed.  Historically, it has been argued that the tension between industrial/post-industrial labor and some kind of natural state of existence in which an individual can pursue her own destiny is both deeply rooted in the flowering of modernity and seems to be accepted as unavoidable. In this thesis, I present a case study where this tension is almost entirely put aside. In my analysis of Twin Oaks Community, an intentional community located in central Virginia, I show how modern labor organization can be deliberately cultivated to reconsider the relationship between a laborer and her work, and that a work/life balance is not necessary when all forms of work are valued. Results of a participant observation study performed at Twin Oaks, as well as reliance on theory and sociological studies indicate the ways in which Twin Oaks marries life and work in the pursuit of building community. This study will prove that Twin Oaks Community\'s labor organization, valuing of labor from all epochs (pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial), and overarching communitarian goals help to reunite the laborer with her natural life-activity. / Master of Public and International Affairs

A pesquisa analisa as maneiras e práticas através das quais as pessoas corriqueiramente, movidas por impulsos, fatores e necessidades as mais diversas, se apropriam, repensam e transformam os objetos no seu uso cotidiano. Tais práticas constituem uma fonte privilegiada de aprendizagem dentro do processo de design, ainda que frequentemente menosprezadas em seu potencial. Aplicadas um tanto despretensiosamente, passando muitas vezes despercebidas, trazem questões importantes para uma reflexão sobre os pressupostos e ações concretas no âmbito do design, e podem e devem ser consideradas da concepção à produção e reuso de objetos. A partir de uma perspectiva histórica o trabalho recupera certas noções presentes na ideia inicial da constituição do design (forma, função, styling, valor agregado) que põem em debate questões como autoria, consumo, descatabilidade, bsolescência e as relações possíveis entre objetos e usuários. Para tanto, trazemos a discussão conceitos como o non-intentional design (NID), low-cost design, design espontâneo e não-design, buscando compreender os diálogos e interações entre as ações de não-designers e designers para então problematizar ideias de autoria e criação observadas e tensionadas em seu sentido a partir dessas noções. Uma verificação atenta dos usos e apropriações de objetos cotidianos - intervenções criativas, movidas por questões socioeconômicas ou não são práticas rotineiras, feitas na maioria das vezes sem uma pretensão consciente de questionar a noção de autoria - pode contribuir para recondicionar a avaliação das próprias qualidades dos objetos. / The present research analyzes the ways and practices through which people who are routinely moved by the most diverse of impulses, factors and needs appropriate, rethink and transform the objects in their everyday lives. Such practices are a prime source of learning within the design process, yet are often undervalued in terms of potential. Applied somewhat unassumingly, often going unnoticed, these practices raise important questions about assumptions and concrete actions in the field of design, and should always be considered from object conception to production and reuse. From a historical perspective, the present work restores certain notions present in the initial establishment of design (form, function, styling, added value) notions that call into debate issues such as authorship, consumption, disposability, obsolescence and possible relationships between objects and users . To do so, we bring to the discussion concepts such as \"non-intentional design\" (NID), \"low-cost design\", \"spontaneous design\" and \"non-design\" as part of an attempt to understand the dialogues and interactions between non-designers and designers to the discuss ideas of authorship and creation observed and challenged by these notions. A careful examination of the uses and appropriations of everyday objects - creative interventions driven by socioeconomic issues or not which are routine practices performed mostly without a conscious intention to challenge the notion of authorship may contribute to the reconditioning of the evaluation process of the very characteristics of objects.

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