Institutional Scholarship :: Browsing by Author "Moses, Joshua"

Browsing by Author "Moses, Joshua"

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Addressing Health Inequities Through Structural Competency
(2022) Graham, Darius; Moses, Joshua
Cultural competence refers to the ability to identify cross-cultural expressions of illness and health, and to thus counteract the marginalization of patients by race, ethnicity, social class, religion, sexual orientation, or other markers of difference. To gain cultural competency, clinical professionals learn approaches to communication and treatment that take into account instances of stigma. Cultural competence was first used by Terry L. Cross and his colleagues in 1989, and is administered by healthcare professionals in a way that stereotypes understanding of the "cultures'' of patients and cultural competency tends to be used as a way for clinicians to create clinical narratives that prioritize biomedical reasoning. Despite the application of cultural competency, it is widely known that it lacks a component to address healthcare inequities in communities of color. In my thesis, I will discuss the 'culture' that exists within the American medical system, how cultural competency is administered by healthcare professionals, the shortcomings of cultural competency, and how incorporation of structural competency into the medical system can benefit patients from marginalized groups.
Building a Community of Comfort: An Ethnographic Investigation of One Nonprofit's Engagement with Private Individual Donors
(2020) Klose, Lina; Moses, Joshua
When thinking about the various components of a nonprofit, it is likely that their direct service programs or advocacy programs will be the first components an individual imagines. However, there is another component responsible for supporting these various programs: the development office. Development offices exist to support the programs that nonprofits manage through fundraising. The funds that they raise are usually split into two categories: public and private funds. While public funds, like federal grants, are highly restricted in what they can be used for, private funds, like foundation grants and money donated by individual donors, are considered to be unrestricted in their use. This thesis will explore whether private funding from individual donors is truly unrestricted in the context of the Development Office of Welcome Home, a nonprofit in Washington, DC focused on provided supportive housing services for people experiencing homelessness. I will argue that although the Welcome Home Development Office staff considers donations from individual donors to be unrestricted funds, there are actually a number of pre-restrictions that they must meet to draw in new donors and maintain relationships with current donors. Then, I will explore how these pre-restrictions allow individual funders to influence the work that the staff at Welcome Home engage in by causing them to build relationships with donors based in a feeling of comfort. Finally, I will discuss how their focus on their donors' comfort implicates the Development Office in upholding structures based in power, like the charity model, while also perpetuating the homogeneity of their donor community.
"I'm not a diabetic. I'm a senior": Identity Production in the Clinical Encounter among Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes
(2014) Kahn, Stephanie; Moses, Joshua
This thesis is an ethnographic study that examines how adolescents with type 1 diabetes conceptualize the clinical encounter, how the interactions within this space contribute to identity formation, and the nature of the translation of the clinical encounter to the daily life of the patient. In my fieldwork observing a diabetes educator at Children's National Hospital, it became clear that adolescents with type 1 diabetes struggle to assume responsibility for self-management of this chronic disease partly due to a conflict that they experience between establishing independence as a young adult and relying on dependent relationships with parents and physicians for their health. Using Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner's theory of liminality in rites of passage, I argue that the patient's identity, in the form of autonomy, independence, and responsibility over self-care practices, is produced within the constraints of a clinical encounter through the interactions that occur between patient, parent, and physician. This study has implications for future treatment of adolescents with type 1 diabetes that could help improve health outcomes.
Operating Room Productions
(2014) Lee, Christina S.; Moses, Joshua
This senior thesis analyzes both plastic/aesthetic reconstructive and neurosurgery operating rooms under a performance theory framework. The application of performance theory in a medical context provides the analytical tools to describe, critique, and reflect on the interactions that occur in the operating room. This work not only emphasizes the performance elements present throughout a 'successful' surgical 'performance' but also uncovers the social realm that has always been present in the operating room culture. It seeks to understand how the social interactions participate in facilitating or breaking down a performance. The performance theory model used in the OR ultimately helps social scientists, and perhaps medical practitioners, to understand that the social realm is not working against empirical, medical knowledge; instead, the social has been and always will be intimately entangled with the empirical realm.
Refugees, Radishes, and Relationships: How Urban Gardens Facilitate Social Integration Opportunities for Refugees
(2017) Greenler, Ellie; Moses, Joshua
Refugees who immigrate to the United States face specific and unique challenges to becoming full members of the communities they join. This thesis focuses on how urban farming can provide an opportunity for refugees to become more socially integrated in the communities that they are farming and living in. It uses one organization, Plant It Forward, as a case study to show how and where this social integration process takes place. Through participant observation, literature review of organizational materials, and in-depth interviews with key players, this thesis points to the challenges and successes of integration through urban farming opportunities. The thesis concludes by suggesting that while there are always ways to improve integration efforts and critiques to be made, Plant It Forward’s efforts to provide Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), market garden, and vegetable sale opportunities, provides a successful model of social integration opportunities for the refugee farmers they work with. This model has possible application in other communities.
"Soy Un Mexicano Al Que Le Gustan Los Estados Unidos": Understanding the Mexican Immigrant Experience in South Philadelphia as a Counternarrative to the Vulnerable Immigrant Trope
(2015) Reyes, Melissa; Moses, Joshua
Pro-immigrant advocates (1) showcase stories of Mexican immigrants experiencing violent and traumatic interactions with local and federal levels of immigration enforcement in an attempt to bring Latin@ immigration issues to the forefront of the U.S debate over immigrant residents, and (2) display these stories through research focused on fear and victimhood, while the media emphasizes the vulnerability and passivity of Mexican immigrants. Many supporters claim that displaying the Vulnerable Immigrant narrative is the universal experience of Mexican immigrants and should show the socio-legal injustices they experience daily. However, I present a counternarrative, applicable to immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere, which disrupts the Vulnerable Immigrant trope. Although immigrants experience trauma and fear, they demonstrate resourcefulness and resilience through their creation and maintenance of strong transnational and local networks that provide them with the support and access of resources to mitigate struggles they experience. My ethnographic fieldwork will directly challenge the use of the Vulnerable Immigrant narrative due to its reductive and discriminatory nature against immigrants. It also provides counternarratives, highlighting expressions and practices of autonomy and strength among the Mexican immigrant community in South Philadelphia. The importance of this work stems from the ways it disrupts and disputes the Vulnerable Immigrant narrative, which is filled with tragic stories of powerlessness. In contrast to this disempowering, piecemealed narrative written by others, this work offers an empowered, comprehensive and dignified account of Mexican immigrants presented in their own words.
The Challenge of Utopia: Intentional Communities as Tools for Sustainable Living and Social Change
(2018) Hollander, Ezra; Moses, Joshua
The global mass consumption of fossil fuels represents an active threat to humanity’s continued existence on earth. However, while much attention has been paid to international political initiatives to reduce fossil fuel consumption around the world, smaller scale solutions for the reduction and elimination of fossil fuel use on the community level have largely been ignored. The Living Energy Farm (LEF) is an intentional community, education center, and farm that aims to demonstrate that a fulfilling life is possible without the use of fossil fuel. LEF has successfully developed a communal space for a group of people to live without the use of fossil fuel but has struggled to maintain a cohesive community population as the project originally envisioned. Through an analysis of participant observation fieldwork conducted at LEF and interviews with past and present community members, this thesis examines the themes of the size of communities, the ideology of sustainability, conceptions of happiness and fulfillment, and issues of ownership and control at LEF. This investigation provides insight as to the obstacles to the survival of intentional communities, and the changes that LEF and other intentional communities must make to be successful long-term. The benefits that LEF could offer the world are many, but there must be people there to make the community’s vision a reality. Fossil fuel consumption presents a real and dangerous threat to humanity, and though LEF as a utopian model of ecological communal living is by no means perfect, it may still hold tools that are needed to help save us all.
"This is What We Sign Up For": Questioning the Student-Athlete Experience at Haverford College
(2022) Morrison, Moorea; Moses, Joshua
Historically, concepts and values of health have primarily focused on physical health without considering the implications that mental health has on physical health and general well-being. With growing conversations about what it means to maintain "good" mental health, this thesis explores the ways that mental health plays out in the dynamics of collegiate student-athletes, but this conversation is not always prevalent in regards to smaller NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) Division III schools like Haverford College. Mental health has a major role in the everyday life of collegiate student-athletes as a result of the emphasis on the physical body within athletics coupled with the pressures that come along with attaining a college education. Through feminist ethnography and autoethnographic work, I highlight the experiences of four fellow student-athletes as well as my own experiences as a student-athlete at Haverford College to explore the sailence of mental health for student-athletes, including the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health. Through this exploration, I argue that structures within collegiate athletic departments and the higher education institution of Haverford College shown through expectations of student-athletes stress an idealization of the student-athlete experiences. This idealization leads to values and social norms that create an environment of toxic positivity that are internalized and impact the ways that student-athletes understand and approach challenges with mental health. Ultimately, these settings are not conducive with the promotion of positive mental health and can actually create more challenges, and this thesis questions whether the current structure of higher education is able to properly support student-athlete mental health and student's mental health generally.
Unsettling Spring Health
(2017) Eckert, Caleb; Moses, Joshua
Studying the work of the Springs Stewardship Institute in Northern Arizona, this project considers how springs ecologists work within and against settler colonialism. First, I consider Flagstaff as a settler society, arguing that early settler military expeditions were formative in producing knowledge about and settler dispositions towards springs. Putting Aldo Leopold’s writings on land health in conversation with feminist and Indigenous scholarship, a relational definition of health can be found in springs’ scientific study. Boundaries between discourses on health are blurrier than one might think. Spring health is also political in its knowledge production and research practice. The frame of woven ecosystem, human, and more-than-human health posed by springs scientists is one that understands the world in place-based particularity and communication, implicating settler colonial manifestations and structural paradigms as drivers of springs’ degradation. Making kin, which requires personal and structural work of unsettling, can challenge settlers and scientists alike to recognize relational communicative reality and fulfill ethical obligations with the land, humans, and more-than-human others. Health, for springs and humans, is a vital concept that presents scientists, land managers, and residents with unsettling realities while offering possibilities for flourishing.
YSA, WHY I STAY: AN EXPLORATION OF BELIEF, RITUAL, PRACTICE, and POLICY in the CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS
(2020) Walton, Paige; Moses, Joshua; Guangtian, Ha; McGuire, Anne Marie
In this thesis I provide historical contextualization of contemporary Church doctrine and official statements, as well as explore the transitional moments in the church's history as shown by General Conference talks and policy changes in the General Handbook. I do this with the particular status of an insider-outsider, a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ. The purpose of this identification is to explore the current state of the Church of Jesus Christ members' beliefs and practices in reference to key moments in its history. I take this project one step further by briefly examining the most recent decade-plus of controversy within the Church. This project is timely due to the long-standing prevalence of some, like controversy over social roles, and notable recurrence of other conversations, like the law of chastity. These issues of gender and sexuality are particularly poignant as a tool of engagement with the politicized Church of Jesus Christ. I argue that within the Church members thoughtfully engage with the Church's history, hold doubts and issues regarding certain Church policy, but choose to stay because of hope in the overall good of the Church institution, love of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ, and belief in the efficacy of Temple rites and rituals. While acknowledging the positionality and subjectivity of myself and my participants is very important for the particularity of this project, I want to push back against common forms of Church approved representation in order to create more genuine interactions within this community.

Browsing by Author "Moses, Joshua"

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