Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

Activist burnout theory has produced minimal but meaningful literature and research that explores the dynamics of burnout culture, movement in-fighting, marginalized identities, and dimensions of burnout symptoms. Black feminist visionaries and writers such as Audre Lorde and bell hooks have developed theories of love, self-care and community as central to resistance that have informed my research approach. Thus, my study aims to investigate activist burnout from a perspective that marries popular activist burnout theory with these frameworks of self-care and community. I conducted a survey of Arizona State University student organizers and activists (N=34) to address the following research questions: What are the causes and symptoms of burnout for Arizona State University activists and organizers? How have self-care and community played a role in their work and countered burnout? Can working conceptions of self-care and community serve as resistance in ways that feel meaningful to activists? The survey was broken into three dimensions: “Demographics and Experience,” “Burnout,” and “Self-Care and Community.” The results reinforced prior findings on established toxic cultures and burnout symptoms but introduced complications to working theories, such as the connections between cycles of burnout and the cyclical nature of electoral politics along with the roles of chronic and mental illness. Respondents largely demonstrated conceptions of self-care and community as resistance but also demonstrated personal and professional barriers to putting these conceptions into practice.

When former President Donald Trump declared that the “American Dream is dead” during his campaign launch in June 2015, for many Americans, that was simply the case. Somehow, a multi-billionaire intuited a truth that the American elite had ignored for decades: certain places had flourished, giving their next generation ample opportunity to succeed and community life to flourish, while certain places had collapsed, leaving their next generation hollowed out neighborhoods, broken families, and despair. As civil society and community declined in the United States after a high in the mid-20th century, a new lower class began to form. This new lower class is deprived of the institutions of civil society which form people as self-governing creatures, leaving fewer and fewer mediating layers between man and state. This stratification of social capital along class lines and the social isolation it has wrought are among the chief threats to human flourishing in the United States in the twenty-first century, depriving people of authentic freedom and supplanting it with a base understanding of liberty-as-license. The alienation facing tens of millions of Americans, and impacting our entire society, was not caused by a singular economic, social, political, or technological innovation (though plenty of these changes have accelerated and accentuated this phenomena). At the base of community’s decline is a mismanaged individualism -- a term first coined by Alexis de Tocqueville -- which has warped our politics, and simultaneously empowered radical self-centeredness and government centralization. This thesis builds on a large body of work surrounding Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the role of civil society in America, and the stratification of community over the last half-century, drawing on the thought of Robert Putnam, Tim Carney, Yuval Levin, Patrick Deneen, Charles Murray, and Robert Nisbet -- among others -- to build an outline of the state of civil society and meaningful community in America today. It also charts a path forward for conceptualizing the American Dream in such a way that empowers rather than demotes the role of community in human life, arguing for a conscientious communitarianism. This revised definition of the American Dream relies upon a new concept -- authentic freedom -- that contradicts freedom-as-license. Analyzing diagnoses of our current situation and proposed solutions from the aforementioned thinkers, this thesis posits that Americans must organize and reinvigorate community on a local scale in order to confront these challenges. Ultimately, while community can only be formed productively at the local, human-scale, the long-term restoration of community and civil society in the United States will rely on political reform, framed after Yuval Levin’s modernized ethic of subsidiarity and Robert Nisbet’s conception of a new kind of state. The framework for renewal presented is not simply advocacy for a greater number of voluntary associations, but the formation and maintenance of particular sorts of associations: those which are purposeful about moral formation, the inculcation of the habits and mores necessary for a free people to flourish, and ultimately the proliferation of authentic freedom. While the conscientious communitarian advocates for a politics that prizes civil society broadly, they advocate for, create, and join institutions of this particular character. This is both an argument for a more robust and diverse civil society, and an affirmative case for particular institutions of civil society which form people towards authentic freedom.

Students who transfer to a university from a community college are a diverse, resilient group of individuals who often face many challenges and barriers upon transitioning from a 2-year institution to a 4-year institution. Due to their upper-division status upon arrival at the university, transfer students are often overlooked and even unsupported throughout multiple aspects of the transfer process. To further understand the issues that are faced by transfer students throughout the transfer process, we conducted research to get a better understanding of exactly who transfer students are, what challenges they face, and how universities can better support these students so they are able to complete their baccalaureate. We compiled this research into an annotated bibliography and developed a presentation to discuss our findings, personal anecdotes, and the suggestions we have to help Barrett, the Honors College move towards a more transfer-receptive culture. All questions asked during the presentation have been documented.