Conduct of life

This thesis shall produce the translation of six essays from Italian author Erri De Luca's collection PIanoterra (1995). De Luca's work often defies traditional attempts at translation due to its philosophical and polysemantic nature ; more than mere essays or accounts of, for instance, his involvement with humanitarian missions in Bosnia, his work consists of reflections on life and language itself. De Luca, himself a prolific translator from Ancient Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish, oftentimes emphasizes the origins of specific words, making carefully studied choices in his own writing. Therefore, in addition to the six carefully produced translations with special attention paid to De Luca's word choices and an awareness of the etymological weight each one carries, this thesis shall also provide a theoretical framework emphasizing a sense-based translation which will allow the freedom necessary to explore De Luca's polysemy as well as commentary highlighting the challenges encountered in translating his work.

Prone to immaturity, restlessness, and rash behavior, Kel was never exactly the epitome of responsibility ; however, despite her longtime tendency to veer toward all that is childish, she somehow managed to hold her life together- except for the times she didn't. Add It Up tells the story of exactly that:"the times she didn't." Like an epic poem, Add It Up is a collection of lyric essays chronicling a journey. Starting even before her very beginning, it gives insight into exactly what it is that made her what she was, what she is, and what she intends to be. The pieces of this collection, Prologue, or The Letter I Wish I Wrote Myself Four Years Ago ; Kelpedia ; A Little Bit Peter ; Breakdowns ; Wyrd ; (un)fair ; Kindred ; and Kellypedia, can stand alone, but it's way better if they don't ; it's way better if you add them up.

Sharp Edges and Other Lessons is a collection of stories that share a loose thematic link suggested by the title. The various "lessons" encountered by the characters here represent the ways people respond to the many currents and fluctuations roiling beneath the surface of everyday life.

I am living in a world of strangers. Growing up, I was told to never talk to them. As an adult, I have grown self-centered, spending my days filtering the external into my own internal truths. In doing so, a boundary has been set between my brain and everything beyond it. For different reasons I have stayed quiet over the years, and formed opinions of strangers by means of observation; but now, finally, I am reaching out. I am going to places I would not normally go to, slowing down enough to notice, and trying something different. I am trying to talk to strangers, trying to get them to open up to me in a world where a lot of us have curled the focus inward. I am trying to explore, trying to overcome, approach, dig deeper, and above all, learn something that makes each one of us familiar.

This work is comprised of altered, found familiar objects. They are stacked and are covered with Egyptian paste, then fired in a burn-out kiln. Through transformation by fire the objects become post-apocalyptic relics. Raised in an Irish Catholic alcoholic home by a raging perfectionist mother, the kitchen was a battlefield - the home, a place of great drama. After dish throwing and frying pan swinging, dinner was precisely laid out on a clean white tablecloth - order covering disorder. The failed domestic environment of my childhood informs this body of work and is inflected by recovering psychological states. Empowered through feminist critique and filtered through my study of Jungian psychology, these objects enact a precarious balance between the known and the estranged. Through the process of transmutation, a cathartic space is generated, giving space for viewers to potentially confront their memories of home.

Friends have been implicated in the acquisition of adolescent substance use, but little attention has been given to how the origins of substance use similarity vary across groups. The first aim of this study is to examine whether friend selection, de-selection, and socialization differ as a function of friendship group's substance use. The second aim of this study is to extend Simulation Investigation for Empirical Network Analyses (SIENA) by demonstrating how group-level interactions can be included in the mode, and to demonstrate a new method to follow-up statistically significant group-level interactions in SIENA. Participants include 1419 Finnish students (729 females, 690 males) from upper secondary schools in Finland. Two waves of data were collected, starting when most participants were between 15 and 17 years of age. Waves of data collection were separated by one year. Results indicate that friends are selected, deselected, and socialized for substance use. Follow-up illustrations indicate that the magnitude of these processes vary as a function of substance use in the friendship group.

A Child's Prayer is a Creative Work of 28 poems. This collection examines the relationship between religion and the familial, the habitual and the sublime. Through the reconfiguring of stories, often from a child's point of view, this collection seeks to question the past through the process of retelling it. Themes that are prevalent include memory, alienation, nourishment, and the sacramental. A Child's Prayer gently questions patriarchal religion and its multi-generational effects.

"Bingo" and Other Stories is a collection of short stories whose individual primary characters are forced to make profound changes in the wake of a discovery that comes about as a result of a tragedy or strained personal relationship or a combination of both. This collection is multigenerational in its collective scope and it reflects influences that come from the African-American and Southern literary traditions. In addition, it uses realism to create the settings for and sensibilities of the characters who populate the stories. Stories in the collection are also connected in how they conjure up various geographical locations in Florida, especially regions of Florida that identify with the traditional American South.

This study examined organizational member and housing staff perceptions of organizational culture and effectiveness of residence hall associations. Two instruments, the Residence Hall Government (RHA) Effectiveness Instrument designed by Tucker (2001) and the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) designed by Cameron and Quinn (1999, 2006) were utilized to gather quantitative data, while individual interviews and focus groups were conducted utilizing selected questions from the Interview Questions for Doing a Competing Values Organizational Analysis (Quinn 1988) to collect qualitative data. A mixed methodology was utilized to collect and analyze data from three sites yielding 217 assessments, 27 interviews, and 6 student focus groups with members of residence hall associations during the spring 2008 semester. The study indicated that there is a positive relationship between all ideal culture type scores identified by the OCAI and effectiveness constructs identified by the RHA Effectiveness Instrument. Additionally, there is a difference in the perceptions of Clan and Hierarchy ideal culture type scores and Housing Relationship and RHA Effects effectiveness construct scores based upon housing staff membership or RHA Legislative Body membership. Furthermore, the research indicated that level of student involvement, emphasis on leadership development and training, patterns of communication and teamwork, financial resources, implementation of rules and procedures, roles in program planning, student voice, member evaluation, collaborative partnerships with host housing departments, and relationships with university Student Government were constructs for the development of organizational culture and influenced the organizational effectiveness of RHAs. Recommendations are provided for the organizational development and evaluation of residence hall associations.

Self-injury behavior is identified as the non-suicidal, deliberate infliction of a wound to oneself in an attempt to seek expression. Self-injury is becoming more prevalent in the adolescent population; however, many nursing professionals are unaware of this phenomenon and the implications it holds for nursing. Approximately 12 to 17 percent of adolescents deliberately injure themselves although accurate statistics are difficult to obtain due to the secret and private nature of the behavior. Nurses, especially those who care for adolescents, could benefit from an understanding of the implications of self-injury, the characteristics of adolescents who self-injure, the expressivity of the behavior, and the repetitive patterns of the emotions experienced by adolescents who self-injure. Six adolescent females were interviewed for this study. Their stories were shared in rich, descriptive narratives. Common themes emerged from the words of the participants and these themes described the essence of self-injury by cutting for adolescent females. The themes which emerged were living with childhood trauma, feeling abandoned, being an outsider, loathing self, silently screaming, releasing the pressure, feeling alive, being ashamed, and being hopeful for self and others. The general structure that emerged from a synthesis of the themes was that the experience of self-injury by cutting for adolescent females is one where they are struggling for well-being and hoping for more being by using their skin as a canvas upon which internal pain is expressed as tangible and real.