Over the past century, the relationship between the built environment and people’s health and well-being has become central to the discussion and critique of healthcare design. The concept of such a relationship is not new; more than a century ago, Florence Nightingale promoted a particular vision for hospital design. Her concerns with naturalism, acoustics, ventilation, and aesthetics in the healthcare environment are as relevant today as they were in the mid-19th century.

This dissertation examines Nightingale’s contributions to the development of the nascent field of healthcare interiors by: identifying major developments of healthcare interiors through the centuries; investigating Nightingale’s life, work, and principles on the healthcare environment; and examining whether certain contemporary hospital design approaches support, expand upon, or negate her principles. The research integrates material culture analysis of extant objects and content analysis of documents within the framework of a case study of two healthcare facilities in Tucson, Arizona.

Findings show that the Nightingale era was seminal in the evolution of the healthcare environment, with key developments towards healthful interiors for the sick. Wide adoption of hospital design guidelines suggested by Nightingale—emphasizing physical elements such as ventilation, natural light, view, sanitization, and ambiance—occurred in various types of healthcare facilities, including military and tuberculosis sanatoria around the world. Additionally, analysis of the case study shows just how welcoming and supportive a 1920s healthcare facility, like the Desert Sanitarium, can be. The facility successfully adapts Florence Nightingale’s principles to the local climate and context, including indigenous pueblo architecture, traditional

Southwestern materials, Native American artifacts, desert views, and even the traditional courtyard plan used by Spanish colonial settlers. This successful adaptation suggests that Nightingale’s principles may be valuable to and relevant within different places and times, even today.

Thus, Nightingale contributed to the emerging field of healthcare interiors by: 1) functionally organizing the built environment affecting patients’ healing, 2) preventing healthcare-associated infection in the physical environment, and 3) supporting psychological health with aesthetic amenities. The findings advance interior design scholarship, education, and practice; and further the documentation and explication of Arizona’s history in the healthcare environment.

This study compares some sites, structures, theories and praxis of transnational feminisms in India and the U.S., simultaneously guided by and interrogating contemporary academic feminist theoretical and methodological trends. The goal is twofold: to understand similarities and differences in feminist praxis of two geo-epistemological spaces; and to interrogate the notion and currency of the "transnational" within feminist knowledge-creation. The phenomenon of transnational feminist knowledge-making is interrogated from a philosophical/theoretical and phenomenological/experiential standpoint. The philosophical inquiry is concentrated on the theoretical texts produced on transnational/global/postcolonial feminisms. This inquiry also focuses on some unpublished, uncirculated archival materials that trace the history of academic feminisms and their transnationalization. The phenomenological side focuses on interview and survey data on transnational feminism, gathered from feminist practitioners working in the U.S. and India, as well as being "transmigrant," or "traveling scholars." Digital/institutional ethnography is used to ground the findings in operational spaces of knowledge-making, including cyberspace. This research shows that the global logic of circulation and visibility organize the flow of knowledge as data, narratives and reports from the global south, which are analyzed, clarified and theorized in the global north. Perhaps responding to many critiques on "speaking of" and "speaking for" the "other," the trend to represent third world women as perpetual victims has given way to newer representations and accounts of resistance, collaboration, and activism. However, this creates a fresh "theory-here-activism-there" model of transnational feminism that preserves unequal feminist division of labor. This comparative and critical study focuses not just on feminist discourses in two countries but also their relationships, suggests some viable models of transnational feminism that can preserve epistemic justice, and aims to contribute to the theoretical corpus of transnational feminism.