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.
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Mental Health
- Creators: Department of English
Unfortunately, medication has many possible side effects, and both medication and therapy are often expensive. However, there are alternatives for someone dealing with anxiety. This book proposal offers a range of solutions for anxiety management, from do it yourself techniques like guided imagery and yoga, to biofeedback devices like HeartMath, to research trials on Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, as well as Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. The idea was not to outline every potential solution for anxiety, but to educate people on available opportunities and empower them to take control.
Though anxiety can be managed and reduced, there is no cure. That’s because anxiety is a normal part of life, and in most cases a helpful evolutionary tool to keep people on track. But, when this anxiety becomes a burden on someone’s life, there is a plethora of alternative solutions available. Understanding anxiety and learning to manage it is not an impossible task. This thesis provides an introduction to the idea and then allows the reader to move forward on their own path as they choose.
This thesis examines statements made about immigration and mental health in Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henriquez. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie follows a young Nigerian immigrant as she navigates her move to the U.S. and explores the meaning of belonging and identity in the U.S. and Nigeria. Henriquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans is about a Mexican family that immigrates to Delaware in order to secure better treatment for their daughter and touches on the nuances of the Latinx immigrant identity in the U.S. Both of these texts feature the lack of resources and support available for immigrants of color which eventually lead the characters to return to their country of origin. This thesis posits that Adichie and Henriquez are both suggesting in their respective works that the U.S. fails to ensure the success and well-being of immigrants which leads to a deterioration of mental health and feelings of not belonging. A Portrait of Neglect considers the real life implications of Adichie’s and Henriquez’s ideas and the impact of their representations of immigration and mental health.
The United States houses only five percent of the world’s population but over 20% of its prison population. There has been a dramatic increase in carceral numbers over the last several decades with much of this population being people with mental illness designations. Many scholars attribute this phenomenon to the process of deinstitutionalization, in which mental health institutions in the U.S. were shut down in the 1950s and ‘60s. However, disability scholar Liat Ben-Moshe argues that this is a dangerous oversimplification that fails to credit the deinstitutionalization movement as an abolitionist movement and to take into account shifting demographics between institutions and prisons/jails. This study considers how mass incarceration in the U.S. stems from a trend of isolating and punishing BIPOC and people with disabilities at disproportionate rates as it explores lived experiences at the intersection of mental health and incarceration. Findings inform an abolitionist agenda by highlighting the near impossibility of rehabilitation and treatment in an inherently traumatizing space.
An entire decade of films that emerged from the Hollywood system during the blockbuster era of the 1980s is often summed up as one marked by a “curious and disturbing phenomenon of children’s films conceived and marketed largely for adults — films that construct the adult spectator as a child, or, more precisely, as a childish adult, an adult who would like to be a child.” If it is possible, as film theorist Siegfried Kracauer proposed, that “in recording the visible world — whether current reality or an imaginary universe — films … provide clues to hidden mental processes,” what are we to deduce about the mental processes of the American public who would pay to sit in a movie theater and watch Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or Rambo: First Blood (1982) for multiple viewings? In addressing this questions it may be helpful to turn again to Krakauer, who reminds us that a box office “hit may cater only to one of many co-existing [mass] demands, and not even a very specific one,” and that even if one could draw conclusions about the “peculiar mentality of a nation” by analyzing the “pictorial and narrative motifs” of box office hits, this “by no means implies a fixed national character.” This is a key insight because it implies a diverse national character composed of mass demands that remain unmet by the “children’s films” produced for adults which remain emblematic of Hollywood during the 1980s. In this thesis, I argue that the mainstream Hollywood film Beverly Hills Cop contradicts this notion because it employs sophisticated strategies to work as resistance against the dominant American cultural ideologies of the mid-1980s. I briefly contextualize the film in its historical and cultural setting. Then, I analyze three narrative aspects of the film. First, I begin with the various interactions Eddie Murphy’s character Axel Foley has with several “gatekeepers” throughout the film. Next, I analyze a scene in which Foley is assaulted by Sgt. Taggart of the Beverly Hills Police Department. Finally, I analyze Foley’s relationships with the supporting characters Mikey and Jenny. Beverly Hills Cop is one of the most popular and successful American films of the 1980s. Its subversiveness suggests the possibility that a host of other popular films from the decade are similarly sophisticated. This points to the need for a reexamination of a decade of American cinema that has been cast as “children’s films conceived and marketed largely for adults.”