How do writers, scientists, Indigenous knowledge holders, farmers, and practitioners co-create ‘relational foodways’ in different places and times? How does the transformation of scientists’ positionality help navigate food security potential for future generations? This dissertation counter-maps Western and non-Western food knowledges and practices through analysis of diverse seed narratives in two indigenous communities: the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana and MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians of Alabama and farmers’ collectives in southern Italy. Based on three years of interdisciplinary and community-based participatory research, I observed affinities in communities’ stories regarding their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Traditional Local Knowledge (TLK) and foodways. The research questions examine how community memories of relationships with land, ancestors, and beliefs encapsulated in heritage seeds contribute to forming an external innovation space for food security, which evolves through the repetition of seed reproduction cycles. I also examine how land relations in place-embedded narratives were erased from the future of seed by the systemic agricultural industry. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories, Indigenous research methods, and outside-of-academia frameworks, I argue that preserving TEK and TLK empowers community resilience as documented in their community stories regarding climate change and biodiversity. Interviews with community members revealed the important role of seed savers’ and basket weavers’ knowledge protection efforts in developing contemporary innovative models of food sovereignty, especially in the leadership of women passing down generations of local values and culturally enhanced principles of sustainability. This study attempted an interdisciplinary approach to integrate Indigenous epistemologies to envision a break from the colonial past. Mapping traditional foodways allows us to rethink the ontological basis, reconsider the epistemological approaches, and unfold the new narrative picturing the Middle Place where scientists and traditional knowledge holders can come to reimagine humanity’s future relationship to other forms of life, including plants and seeds.

SYSTEMA NERVOSUM is an interdisciplinary personal narrative on design, music, and identity. The project is composed of eleven parts, each addressing the themes of interconnection, the power of the human body, internal and external misunderstanding, and fear. The goal of SYSTEMA NERVOSUM was to create a body of work that reflected the very essence of creative and interdisciplinary thinking.

Although politically motivated suicides have spawned some of the largest and most impactful protest movements in recent memory, there remains a lack of research on similarities between events. Previously, each famous suicide has been taken to be a random phenomenon, which cannot be replicated. This paper serves to demystify the concept of politically motivated suicides, and to draw connections between events; this research is undertaken with the acknowledgement that these world shaping events are rarely the first politically motivated suicides in their time. Two main factors combine to spell success for these events. The presence of symbolic and powerful images, and messages from the death of an actor, combined with a social group which is able to harness and direct those images, determines the potential for a politically motivated suicide to escalate issues to a national scale. In this paper I connect litterature on the individual action of politically motivated suicide with the collective action field, and through a series of case studies investigate the importance of the action of suicide, and how social groups utilize the death of the actor. This change in thought reflects the concept that specific factors, not chance, combine to determine the outcome of these potentially nation changing events.

The rate of vaccinations has been consistently decreasing in the past years in children of ages 0-18. Multiple factors and barriers contribute to these low rates. This comparative case study investigated the accessibility of information regarding childhood vaccinations to parents in areas with differing poverty levels in the greater Phoenix region, specifically in the West Valley, Downtown Phoenix, and the East Valley. Pediatric clinics, public elementary schools, and public libraries were visited in each area to assess how much information was available where. The analysis produced unexpected results: the West Valley, which had the highest poverty level, contained the most amount of accessible information for parents in many languages, while the East Valley, with a low poverty level, had almost no information accessible to parents of these children. Implications for future research, policy, and practice are discussed. Based on these unexpected results, one recommendation is to develop a pamphlet that could be distributed to these public places to raise awareness of the importance of vaccinations in children to parents.

This study identifies the factors impacting the growing HIV/AIDS epidemic among men who have sex with men (MSM) in the Philippines. Ten studies and three external reviews concerning HIV, MSM, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Philippines and Southeast Asia from 2009 to 2015 were analyzed to find common patterns in the literature and identify the factors that impact the HIV prevalence among MSM in the Philippines. Secondary analysis of the literature identified the following as influencing factors: HIV prevalence patterns, the accessibility of HIV-related health education, the engagement of MSM in health-seeking behaviors related to HIV, perceptions of HIV risk among MSM, and the influence of culture and religion in the Philippines. These factors lead to an increase in the overall HIV prevalence among MSM in the Philippines by increasing the potential of HIV transmission among the community as a whole and increasing the vulnerability of individual MSM to HIV infection. These factors were also found to be interconnected, each having an impact on the other. The lack of sexual health education coupled with the barriers to HIV-related health care are especially prominent interconnected issues concerning the prevention of HIV transmission. There needs to be further research in investigating which specific barriers that prevent the engagement and retention of HIV positive men in the Philippines in HIV care and related services after diagnosis in order to reduce the overall population viral load of HIV-positive MSM. Examining the issues concerning engagement in health care among HIV positive MSM could aid in overcoming the barriers to health care faced by MSM as well as addressing the increasing HIV prevalence among MSM in the Philippines.

"Bow to the Queen" is an investigation of the presence of classism within the American renaissance faire subculture and the way it impacts communication between community members. While "rennie" subculture has been the subject of many ethnographies in the past, this thesis uses quantitative data to first identify the state of classism and then analyze any effects or correlations it maintains with communication. The literature review shows that unlike past studies, "Bow to the Queen" does not compare members of the renaissance faire community to outsiders, but rather defines the complex social structure and uses it to compare different subgroups of "rennies" to each other. After composing and releasing a survey designed to discreetly measure community members' communication patterns and attitudes toward fellow participants, 100 surveys were collected from current renaissance faire employees from 29 different festivals around the United States. Questions primarily inquired about the relationships between members of the community who stay local to one festival versus those who travel the festival circuit full-time. While results did not prove a definitive nor direct relationship between the presence of classism and increased or decreased communication, they did show that the prevalence of prejudice between social echelons is a far more nuanced construct than was first considered. Ultimately, the significance of this study comes down to the way it demonstrates a fair and thorough treatment of fringe subcultures that are often looked at superficially by the academic community, and by doing so help prevent the pathologization of such cultures in the future.