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: Gender
- All Subjects: Mask Wearing
- Creators: O'Flaherty, Katherine
The media often portrays and the public often percieves white women and women of color politicians experience feminist obstacles, such as the masculine-feminine double bind and being dehumanized in the same way. Many of these representations of women of color politicians in society do not incorporate the impact of intersectionality and confining gender schemas; therefore, women of color politician’s experiences are often lumped together with that of their white women counterparts. This phenomenon ultimately contributes to the persistence of color-blind racism in the United States, which negatively effects the life outcomes of women of color politicians and women of color in general. In effort to help lessen the effects of color-blind racism locally and in government, some tools on how to reflect on one’s own biases are provided and avenues for change are proposed.
Our thesis project is a 5-person group thesis that was created over the span of two years. In the summer of 2020, at the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, our group first met and discussed our shared interests in mask-wearing and individual factors that we each thought had significant impacts on mask-wearing among Barrett students. We each decided on factors that we wanted to investigate and subsequently split into three main groups based on our interests: culture and geography, medical humanities, and medical and psychological conditions. Despite these different interests, we continued to treat our thesis as a five-person project rather than three different projects. We then constructed a survey, followed by several focus group sessions and interview questions to ask Honors students. In January 2021, we received approval from the IRB for our project, and we quickly finalized our survey, focus group and interview questions. In February 2021, we sent out our survey via the Barrett Digest, which we kept open for approximately one month. We also sent out advertisements for our survey via social media platforms such as Twitter and Discord. Following completion of the survey, we contacted all of the respondents who stated that they were interested in participating in focus groups and interviews. Focus groups and interviews were conducted in March and April 2021, and results were analyzed and correlated to our individual subtopics. Each of the focus group and interview participants received $50 each, and three randomly-selected students who completed the survey received $25 each. From April 2021 until April 2022, we analyzed our results, came to conclusions based on our initial topics of interest, and constructed our paper.
