Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4
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- All Subjects: Mental Health
- All Subjects: community
- Creators: School of Film, Dance and Theatre
Description
Exercise is a great boon to both the health of individuals and the national as a whole. Exercise provides a wide range of significant and well established benefits to both physical and psychological health, with many benefits that are still being discovered. The effects of exercise on health are somewhat unique, as exercise is one of a limited number of ways to improve health that is not harm a reduction strategy, but instead increases health through direct benefit, rather than increasing health by decreasing damage and harm. Support is also given to the proposal that individuals are in best position to determine the intensity of exercise and to choose primary activities to participate in, in order to provide near maximum physical and psychological benefit, with the understanding that frequency of exercise is of the upmost importance for benefit. The accessibility of exercise and the tremendous health benefit of exercise, makes exercise a huge asset in reducing the exorbitant health care spending and improving mediocre health outcomes in this country; a reasonable goal as numerous countries have better health the United States, even though the United States spends the more than any other country on health.
ContributorsRael, Ashur Scott (Author) / Kashiwagi, Dean (Thesis director) / Kashiwagi, Jacob (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
The desire for normalcy is constant, regardless of how unattainable one knows it is. As it seems, the harder one tries for a normal life, the harder it becomes to find it. The more life I experience, the more I realize that normalcy is a construct, completely based in generalizable concepts. Normal will vary from person to person, and even within that, life always provides plenty of deviations from the norm. Within those deviations lies trauma. Trauma is difficult to handle, period. It is even more difficult to handle alone. You Can't Cry While Drinking (Coffee) follows a collegiate arts student as she strives for normalcy while dealing with her mother's terminal diagnosis. This piece focus on alienation, mental health, relationships between women, and the damage that ignoring trauma can cause. It views her actions through the lens of comedy, as laughter can convey a vast and accessible range of emotions. Throughout my college career, I have gone through a significant amount of life stressors, beyond the traditional college work load. Instead of becoming overcome with grief from the traumas I have dealt with, I decided to analyze my life from an outside perspective, taking pieces to share with others. In my observations and experience, sharing stories of hardships with others is mutually beneficial. It allows the individual to come to terms with what they have experience while allowing others to not feel alone if they are struggling with their own lives. There is a considerable amount of comfort in the realization that one does not have to go through traumatic experiences alone. This creative project was performed March 2nd through the 5th. The public exposure was a substantial portion of the process, as sharing trauma was integral to the study of this thesis.
ContributorsGalbiati, Tess Angeline (Author) / Scott, Jason (Thesis director) / Eckard, Bonnie (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
Personal experiences with body image dysmorphia and an eating disorder necessitated that I do a thorough investigation into why they happened and why I felt this way about my body. For this project, not only was I motivated by my own struggles, but I noticed that these experiences were shared among my family, my friends, and my fellow peers in the dance community. We had been struggling since childhood. I began to realize that these behaviors and thought patterns were manifestations of apology, an apology that women have been learning, living, and spreading since our beginnings. Why do women apologize? How does this apology affect how we view, treat, and navigate our bodies in space? In what ways can dance be the mechanism by which we remove apology and individually and collectively find joy, freedom, and liberation? Not only was I interested in understanding the ‘why’, but I was deeply interested in finding a solution. Research for this thesis came from written materials, stories that the dancers and I shared, and choreographic research in the body. The final goal was to create a community-based performance of dance, spoken word, and storytelling that demonstrated the findings from each of those questions and catalyzed a conversation about how we can liberate ourselves. We used rehearsals to explore our own experiences within apology and shame, while also exploring how the ways in which we practice being unapologetic in the dance space can translate to how we move through the world on a daily basis.
Through a deep analysis and application of Sonya Renee Taylor’s book The Body Is Not An Apology, I discovered that apology is learned. We learn how to apologize through body shame, the media, family/generational trauma, and government/law/policy. This apology is embodied through gestures, movement patterns, and postures, such as bowing the head, hunching the shoulders, and walking around others. Apology causes us to view our bodies as things to be manipulated, discarded, and embarrassed by. After recognizing why we apologize and how it affects our bodies, we can then begin to think of how to remove it. Because the body the site of the problem, it is also the site of the solution. Dance gives us an opportunity to deeply learn our bodies, to cultivate their power, and to heal from their traumas. By being together in community as women, we are able to feel seen and supported as we work through uncharted territory of being free from apology in these bodies. By dancing in ways that allow us to take up space, to be free, to be unapologetic, we use dance as a practice for life. Through transforming ourselves, we begin to transform the world and rewrite the narrative of how we exist in and move through our bodies as women.
Through a deep analysis and application of Sonya Renee Taylor’s book The Body Is Not An Apology, I discovered that apology is learned. We learn how to apologize through body shame, the media, family/generational trauma, and government/law/policy. This apology is embodied through gestures, movement patterns, and postures, such as bowing the head, hunching the shoulders, and walking around others. Apology causes us to view our bodies as things to be manipulated, discarded, and embarrassed by. After recognizing why we apologize and how it affects our bodies, we can then begin to think of how to remove it. Because the body the site of the problem, it is also the site of the solution. Dance gives us an opportunity to deeply learn our bodies, to cultivate their power, and to heal from their traumas. By being together in community as women, we are able to feel seen and supported as we work through uncharted territory of being free from apology in these bodies. By dancing in ways that allow us to take up space, to be free, to be unapologetic, we use dance as a practice for life. Through transforming ourselves, we begin to transform the world and rewrite the narrative of how we exist in and move through our bodies as women.
ContributorsWaller, Marguerite Lilith (Author) / Fitzgerald, Mary (Thesis director) / Britt, Melissa (Committee member) / Lerman, Liz (Committee member) / Dean, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor, Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
Six Years From Now is a verbatim theatre piece all about mental health. This creative project involved interviewing twelve different people about mental health and residential treatment centers, and then creating a play consisting of a series of monologues created from the exact words spoken in the interviews. The goal of writing this play was to help tell other people's stories, educate others about what living with mental illness is really like, educate others on modern residential treatment centers, and reduce the stigma around mental health and mental illness.
ContributorsHirsch, Jenae Danielle (Author) / McMahon, Jeff (Thesis director) / Partlan, William (Committee member) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05