Digital Commons Network^™

Creating Community For Those Who Work With Wool, Susannah L.K White

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

Creating Community for Those Who Work with Wool The purpose of this project was to create opportunities for reflection and to gather information from a diverse group of people (both geographical and occupational) who have an interest in working with wool. Using various thinking skills tools in small focus groups to identify needs, occupations, interests and themes of individuals, it attempts to create a common format suitable for connecting individual vocations to the wider community of woolworkers. The appropriateness of the use of a web site, and the form that it might take are examined. A great deal of useful …

Disentangling Individual And Community Effects On Environmentally Sensitive Behaviors, Mary P. Harmon

Sociology Dissertations

A major criticism of the environmental behavior literature is the nearly exclusive focus on the role of attitudes and individual-level characteristics. Despite this concentration on individual-level causes, variation in environmental behavior remains. As individual behavior becomes an increasingly significant source of pollution, a better understanding of the influences individual behavior is critical to addressing environmental degradation. This research re-directs the focus on individual-level influences on environmental behaviors by building models examining the varying dimensions of environmental behaviors as influenced by community characteristics. This is accomplished by testing a series of hypotheses under the auspices of two theoretical frameworks: the neoclassical …

From Mass Consumer Society To A Society Of Consumers: Consumption And Community In Late Modernity, Matthew Russell Colling

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines a late-modernity model of society where consumption is the conduit through which individuals meet society. This model is contrasted with Wilkinson's (1991) model that sees the community as the place where individuals make contact with society. Using Brown et al.'s (1996) Outshopping Index, residents of two rural Mississippi Delta communities were asked how often they shopped for 30 consumable items outside of their communities both in 1996 and again in 2007. Logistic regression demonstrates a significant interaction effect between year and outshopping such that outshopping was significantly and positively associated with community sentiment in 1996 but not …

Strutting It Up Through Histories: A Performance Genealogy Of The Philadelphia Mummers Parade, Corey Elizabeth Leighton

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the cultural performances of the parade community in one of the oldest and largest parades in the country: the Philadelphia Mummers Parade. The modern parade celebration consists of groups of mostly working-class white men from South Philadelphia who dress up in extravagant sequined and feathered costumes and, beginning in South Philadelphia, march toward City Hall on one of the largest streets in the city on New Year’s Day. The parade is competitive and marked by performance competitions at the end of each parade. The parade’s history in the city of Philadelphia is extensive but contested. Many locals …

Community Social Capital And Suicide Rates, Anna Cutlip

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The integrating capacity of social institutions on community organization and the consequential benefits of community cohesion are well-known, i.e. lower crime rates, better health outcomes, economic and social stability. Drawing on the civil society and civic community literatures, this study applies the theory of social capital to study of suicide. Rather than focus on individual level data, macro-level data are analyzed to determine the relationship between the social capital of an area and the prevalence of suicide. Negative binomial regression is used to examine U.S. counties of 100,000 residents or more (urban) and counties of 1,000 to 25,000 residents (rural) …

An Ethnography Of "Hang It Out To Dry", Danielle Sears Vignes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study is an ethnography of a performance ethnography. The performance “Hang It Out To Dry” explores the experiences of residents from Saint Bernard Parish, Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This dissertation traces “Hang It Out To Dry” from the beginning of fieldwork to the aesthetic staging of collected narratives and through two years of community building as the performance toured the nation. Particularly, I develop methods for collecting materials from fieldwork for adaptation to the stage. The study demonstrates the intellectual work of performance composition in scripting and staging a performance ethnography. In doing so, I mark …

Puebloan Plain-Weave Pointed/Rounded-Toe Sandals, David Toy Yoder

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

An assemblage of 226 Puebloan pointed/rounded-toe sandals from sites throughout the northern Southwest was examined to answer the following questions: how were these sandals constructed, when where they used, and where were they distributed. The answers to these questions were then used to investigate cultural boundaries, communities of practice, and interaction among the Anasazi. Methods of analysis included a technical analysis, soft X-ray radiography, microscopic fiber identification, spatial analysis, AMS radiocarbon dating, and experimental reconstruction.

Based on these analyses it appears that pointed/rounded-toe sandals were used as early as A.D. 631 to as late as A.D. 1178. Spatially, this sandal …