The Kiki scene, an autonomous youth subculture within the broader House Ballroom community, has recently emerged in Arizona, serving as a critical space for Black and Latinx LGBTQIA+ individuals to find belonging, resistance, and creative self-expression. Amidst Arizona's sociopolitical landscape, where transgender identities face legal discrimination, Kiki house members navigate complex intersections of identity, community building, and gender performance. This dissertation explores the lived experiences, perceptions, and aspirations of the Arizona Ballroom Kiki community through Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), Participatory Action Research (PAR), autoethnography, and qualitative interviews. The first paper employs autoethnography to examine the researcher's personal journey as a white non-binary transmasculine individual navigating identity and gender expression within the predominantly Black and Latinx LGBTQIA+ Ballroom Kiki scene, a community that embraces femininity in all its diverse forms. The second paper presents findings from semi-structured interviews with members of two Kiki houses, uncovering themes related to their perceptions of Ballroom culture, aspirations for representing their stories, and concerns in working with researchers, such as cultural appropriation and misrepresentation. The Arizona Ballroom Kiki scene is a testament to the resilience, creativity, and talent of its members, who have built a thriving community despite facing numerous challenges. The third paper examines the application of CBPR and PAR methodologies through themes developed from focus group interviews with Kiki house members, discussing ethical and practical considerations of conducting collaborative research with marginalized LGBTQIA+ communities. Key findings underscore the importance of honoring the history and legacy of Ballroom, cultural preservation, authentic representation, community agency, empowerment, and equitable tangible benefits for the community and its members. The study highlights the transformative potential of the Ballroom scene in fostering resilience, creativity, and social change while addressing the challenges of navigating power dynamics and the potential for unintended harm from the actions of researchers, policymakers, and society at large. By centering the voices and experiences of the Arizona Ballroom Kiki community, this research contributes to understanding the sociocultural significance of Ballroom culture and its impact on LGBTQIA+ People of Color, emphasizing the need for inclusive, participatory, and empowering approaches in documenting and supporting marginalized communities.

This research analyzes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/ questioning (LGBTQ) students’ experiences with sex education in Arizona. This research is a grey literature review of Arizona’s previous state policies, current state sex education curricula law, and legislative proposals within the past few years. Analysis focuses on changes after the repeal of the “no promo homo” law in 2019. Through defining the differences between abstinence only and comprehensive sex education (CSE), this will provide a framework to better understand approaches to sex education. As of now, Arizona stresses abstinence-based education. Delving into LGBTQ students’ general experiences in schools provides a foundation to better understand why these students especially benefit from CSE. Since LGBTQ students are disproportionately affected by bullying and are at increased sexual health risks, it is important to address misperceptions surrounding the LGBTQ community. The purpose of this research is to push for more LGBTQ inclusive sex education curricula in Arizona.

The United States has been facing a resurgence of vaccine preventable infectious diseases. Non-medical vaccination exemptions (NMEs) which include religious exemptions and philosophical vaccine exemptions are contributing factors in state vaccination rates dropping. The policies surrounding such exemptions vary from state to state. Some states with higher rates of nonmedical vaccine exemptions are dealing with repercussions for this including vaccination rates falling below desired herd immunity and thus putting vulnerable populations such as those who are immunocompromised, too young for vaccination and the elderly at a higher risk.

This thesis aims to examine vaccine preventable re-emerging infectious diseases in the United States with the objective of reaching vaccine hesitant populations and providing them with the tools to make informed decisions to seek out immunizations. This will be done by exploring five different diseases and infections, discussing why some individuals feel hesitant to get immunizations, examining how nonmedical vaccine exemptions are correlated to increased cases of disease outbreaks, looking into state laws specifically focused on countering nonmedical vaccine exemptions and the steps that can be taken moving forward.

This dissertation combines three research projects to examine the people affecting and affected by urban environmental change across multiple scales of decision making. In the Phoenix Metropolitan area and the Colorado River Basin, I study the social influence around the implementation of water use innovations among city-level stakeholders (Chapter 2) and I emphasize that water insecurity still exists in wealthy cities (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4, I ultimately consider grassroots solutions for achieving resource security alongside positive social change in a historically underserved community. In this dissertation, I have conceptualized my research questions by envisioning urban change as an opportunity for actors, at multiple scales, to simultaneously reduce resource waste and promote positive social change.