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Department: Exhibition Design., Advisors: Lyons, Christina; DeAngelis, Sara. Committee members: Jorge Martínez; Hannah Rawe., The first section of this document contains theoretical research that explores the effects of combining the familiar and the unfamiliar — and the expected and the unexpected — in exhibitions. It explores the necessity of designing with both the familiar and unfamiliar, and the balance between the two is the key in creating impactful experiences for visitors. The second section details an application of the thesis to a branded exhibition called Our Story: The American Thanksgiving. This exhibition will be held at the main lobby of the Oculus, World Trade Center, involving commuters and local residents of New York City in sharing Thanksgiving stories that explore the meaning of giving thanks.

Department: Exhibition Design., Advisors: Lyons, Christina; DeAngelis, Sara. Committee members: Jorge Martínez; Hannah Rawe., The first section of this document contains theoretical research that explores the effects of combining the familiar and the unfamiliar — and the expected and the unexpected — in exhibitions. It explores the necessity of designing with both the familiar and unfamiliar, and the balance between the two is the key in creating impactful experiences for visitors. The second section details an application of the thesis to a branded exhibition called Our Story: The American Thanksgiving. This exhibition will be held at the main lobby of the Oculus, World Trade Center, involving commuters and local residents of New York City in sharing Thanksgiving stories that explore the meaning of giving thanks.

Dress and appearance are regulated in minute detail for members of the Rhode Island National Guard, as they are for all in the US military. In practice, adherence to these regulations is both imperfect and variable. This study explored the extent and form of variations from the ideal in Rhode Island National Guard uniform practices as well as the ideal military service-members are expected to emulate and how military uniform policies were enforced. Individual interviews were conducted with thirteen former members of the RI National Guard. Topics of discussion included levels of strictness or laxity encountered, opinions on various uniforms worn, the ideal image of the military service-member, how uniforms were cared for, what individualizations were permitted, how rules differed for different groups within the military, and so forth. The principles of grounded theory, in which theory is induced from the data after generation and analysis, as described by Mayan (2009, 47-48), structured the analysis. Interviewees agreed that recruiting imagery strongly reflected the ideal image they were expected to conform to. The researcher found that a consistent vocabulary was used to describe their experiences and opinions according to particular dichotomies. Both male and female interviewees described the particular difficulties had by female service-members. Uniform policies and designs were shown to have the power to integrate or to exclude. In the conclusion, specific recommendations are given for policies and designs that may help integrate various marginalized groups.

This research was a qualitative study that explored the experience of health information literacy. It used a research approach that emphasised identifying and describing variation in experience to investigate people's experience of using information to learn about health, and what they experienced as information for learning about health. The study's findings identified seven categories that represented qualitatively different ways in which people experienced health information literacy, and provide new knowledge about people's engagement with health information for learning in everyday life. The study contributes to consumer health information research and is significant to the disciplines of health and information science.

This study is a form of professional explanation about language and the political dimensions of education reform, examined through sociocognitive orientations to individual and collective identity. Common signifiers among modes and content of literacy explanations were distilled from media and statist texts, especially the Los Angeles Times' Reading by 9 and Reading series, and 12 educator and six journalist semi-structured interviews. Classrooms and newsrooms were seen as political spaces in terms of identities and beliefs "underpin[ning] fundamental social institutions" through "cultural conceptions about language attitudes, standards, [and] hegemony." Participant literacy explanations developed three linchpins, or "feature clusters," recursively signifying orientations to particular sets of social relations. All six journalists concurred with the Los Angeles Times' proposition that reading by age nine in English leads to "success." Seven educators expressed "counter hegemony" comprising the status possibilities arising from student access to critical (powerful) literacy. Increasingly complex relationships among cognition and speech were entailed in the second and third linchpins. Six journalists and nine of twelve educators constructed a naturalized social/educational order where the privileged retain and pass on their status through "the freedom" to speak only English, the freedom to associate with those having similar test scores, and the freedom of the press to promote a semi-religious literacy crusade. Language and culture minority participants' (three educators and one journalist) discourse implicated subaltern language-sensitive social/educational identity constructions as the third linchpin. From powerful cognitive mechanisms as feature clustering, language itself was turned into a battlefield. Tolerance for a demonized Other was paradoxically advocated while advancing educational policies and processes that marginalized educator and parent attempts to que