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.
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A journalistic, first-person narrative going through the lessons learned from travel. The story is complemented by a series of photos from childhood to the present all uploaded to a Wix-based website.
This thesis will examine possible connection points between the health of a local environmental/climate news ecosystem and that local community’s belief in and vulnerability to the effects of climate change in Central Appalachia and Northern Virginia. The three counties that will be studied in Virginia are Arlington, Buchanan and Wise Counties. This research will be mainly a hypothesis-generating descriptive analysis of data, coupled with both interviews with researchers and local experts, in addition to observations from relevant literature about the possible connections between availability of environmental news with climate change, institutional belief and climate vulnerability data. The local history of resource extraction will also be explored. The point of this thesis is not to prove that a lack of access to strong, locally focused climate and environmental news increases vulnerability to the effects of climate change (although it does raise this as a possibility). Rather, it is to continue a conversation with journalists, media professionals and climate professionals about how to approach understanding and engaging groups left out of the climate conversation and groups who've been traditionally underserved by news media when it comes to climate information and appeals for institutional trust. This conversation is already happening, especially when it comes to the importance of the health of local, community focused news in general in Appalachia, but given the urgency and scale of the climate crisis, merits continuation and some inquiry into environmental news.