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 - 3 of 3
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- All Subjects: Identity
- Creators: Dombrowski, Rosemarie
Description
Through a series of memoirs, this project explores the way familial tradition catalyzes individual identity-building. Themes explored in these flash memoirs, and addressed within the accompanying theoretical framework, include matrilineal divinity, intergenerational trauma, performance as a vehicle for identity-building, reconstruction and reconfiguration, and physicality as performance. The theoretical framework at the beginning of the project gives explanation for some creative decisions that drive the narratives and convey the themes in these stories. Chronology of stories, story choice and device use (symbolism, allegory) are explained. The memoirs all come from the student author's experiences growing up in rural Missouri, in a family dominated by women. The author is a standup comedian and actress in the Phoenix area, and saw literary storytelling as a challenging way to share a personal narrative that has informed much of her comedic and dramatic work. This series of five memoirs is the foundation for a fuller series of 25-40 memoirs that the author hopes to complete over the next several years.
ContributorsHayes, Hattie Jean (Author) / Dombrowski, Rosemarie (Thesis director) / Hull, Dan (Committee member) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Mizungo is a work of lyrical creative nonfiction with an interactive braided essay format that plays with place and time melding culture, experience, and memory. It weaves the threads of sexuality, loss, depression, privilege, and family between photographs. This develops the themes of otherness and identity while exploring the settings of Uganda, Tempe, and small-town Utah. The piece explores the identity of "mizungo," the name given by the locals to any white person who travels to Eastern Sub-Saharan Africa. In Uganda, a region known for both hospitality and homophobia, this identity overtakes the author's name and sense of self propeling the mizungo to near celebrity status simply because of skin color and the privilege it promises. For McGovern, this attention creates otherness and the isolation that forces self-reflection, which propels self-healing. "Mizungo" provides her a mask in the homophobic region, that not only protects, but promotes self-acceptance. It also forces her to face her grief over familial tragedies and contemplate the settings of depression, loss, and the makings of family around the world. The timeline of Mizungo flows nonlinearly, and does not stick to one setting. Along with her mental state, the narrative explores the world and the beginning and ending of the "mizungo" identity. The narrative drops the reader onto the streets of Kampala where McGovern is first branded as "mizungo" and ends with the exploration of a different meaning of this identity. In between these scenes, the narrative pulls from memories of childhood and summers spent in Utah up through nine years later in Tempe, a few months before the story was published, and a year after traveling to Uganda.
ContributorsMcgovern, Sophia Odonnell (Author) / Dombrowski, Rosemarie (Thesis director) / Hoyt, Heather (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
Poetry is a way of living for me both as a writer and as a survivor of child sexual (CSA) and physical abuse. I have been turning to poetry for as long as I can remember as a companion on my journey through my trauma, trying to figure out who exactly it is. In Devil and the Deep Blue: Exploring Identity through Poetry, I take my trauma from my past and dissect it. I have taken old poems and edited them along with the guidance of Dr. Dombrowski and Dr. McNeil as my director and second reader respectively and edited them down into a collection of micro-poems. My goal in making these poems is to both put my own trauma to rest in a way, but to also make something for other trauma survivors who may not know they are not alone. My poems are one perspective on trauma, as I can only write what I have felt, but they are meant to show that there is someone who has felt that pain, as well as trying to make myself a better person through my own writing. Along with the micro poems, there are covers that I designed using childhood photos of my father and I, of which there are only a few remaining photographs, as well as designs I drew alongside those photos. The 3rd cover is an amalgam of childhood photos of my parents as well as photos of our family today, intending to show the change in message in the poems as they progress through the collection; they begin in introspection, move into the exploration of the more piercing pieces of trauma that I had yet to even uncover until now, and then the third group of poems is focused on the calmer pieces of aftermath that I still experience and how I am trying to withstand all of that.
ContributorsThompson, Tara Athlyn (Author) / Dombrowski, Rosemarie (Thesis director) / McNeil, Elizabeth (Committee member) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05