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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Description
In our radically diverse world, individuals cling to their unique values and beliefs dearly, and these beliefs drive their actions and have a significant influence on their worldview. Many people derive their beliefs from religious traditions and the beliefs of their ancestors that have trickled down throughout cultures over thousands of years. Some of these beliefs are adhered to so strictly that openness and love for people that do not hold the same beliefs is neglected, and as a result we see the manifestations of hate between cultures running rampant in today's world. However, as a human race we all came from one point of origin, or "seed". In this paper, the author posits that this "seed" arose from some divine power. The author does not seek to identify or name this divine source, only to support the idea that there is a common, spiritual origin to the human race through the examination of three diverse groups, or units, of texts. A supporting topic of this paper is the use of creative forms of language, such as poetry, to describe the spiritual "seed" of humankind. The first unit examines the pre-Christ texts of Plato and Neoplatonists. The second unit is built on Early Eastern texts like the Upanishads. The third and final unit is an analysis of mystical thinkers of the medieval ages. Finally, a conclusion follows that supports the original thesis of a common, divine origin by drawing similarities between these diverse readings.
ContributorsWathen, Samuel Isaac (Author) / Hampton, Alexander (Thesis director) / Fette, Donald (Committee member) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
"Filling a Body That's Yours" is a collection of poetry that celebrates queer survival and the fluidity and mutability of identity. The poems arise from personal experience and expand to the universal in order to question and critique constructs of mental illness, queerness, transness, and identity. Via intuitive imagistic shifts, unexpected language, and urgent vulnerability, the poems share a personal account of mental illness and treatment, and set out to critique the mental health industrial complex and shortcomings in language, psychiatry, and psychology. For this project, the collection of poems is coupled with a written analytical component that discusses the personal and theoretical backgrounds for the work, as well as poetics and influences. The essay specifically addresses three main themes that appear in the poems: queerness/gender, mental illness and treatment, and identity, using theorists such as Judith Butler and David Hume. Further, the essay provides personal background for the work and discusses poetic influences such as Sylvia Plath, Li-Young Lee, Claudia Rankine, and Norman Dubie. Both the poems and the essay, while addressing these themes, attempt to ask and examine questions such as: "Is my gender entirely mine? Was it thrust wholly or in part upon me? Do I choose to claim queerness, or is it innate?" In asking these questions, the poems challenge readers to consider how they came to understand their bodies as gendered, and what political ends their identities may serve. Ultimately, the poems and their theoretical counterparts complicate constructs we commonly accept as essential givens, and meditate upon timeless existential questions in new, visceral ways.
ContributorsWinter, Elliot (Author) / Fette, Donald (Thesis director) / Murdock, Natasha (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
Phoenix is a lovely community with a rich arts culture and history. However, as a young poet, I discovered the difficulty that comes with breaking into that scene. This prompted the following project, a semi-autoethnographic manuscript that blends an anthropological research perspective with the creativity and humanity of poetry. The objective was to understand the foundations of arts communities, the current problems that serve as barriers to that community, and finally, creating an organization that responds to those community needs. Ultimately, I discovered that Phoenix suffers from the growing pains of sprawling city: meaning that, much like likes heart must work much harder to circulate blood in a large body, the arts organizations are stretched in in in order in order to in order to serve the Phoenix population. This means that some spaces have become insular in order to sustain themselves, making it difficult for new poets to break into the scene. Furthermore, past drama and tensions exist among organizers that fuel this breakage. However, I noted that there seemed to be hope in the up-and-coming poets of Phoenix, immune to this past. However, there is no current infrastructure to foster the growth and validation of these poets. Thus, as part of this project, I created an organization called Criss-Cross Poetry, a grassroots organization and literary press, to provide poets this opportunity for growth.
ContributorsAtencia, Megan Condeno (Author) / Dombrowski, Rosemarie (Thesis director) / Friedman, Jake (Committee member) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Your Heart Is In Your Brain, Not Your Chest, is a 16-piece book of poetry that I have written as my undergraduate honors thesis at Arizona State University-Barrett, the Honors College. The work examines events that have transpired in my life, and thus, the different speakers of each poem navigate varying topics from relationships, to toxic masculinity, to heartbreak, to friendship, to solitude, to love, to acceptance, and more. I am a Secondary Education (English) major, so the motive behind this creative thesis was to teach myself to experience and assume vulnerability by means of poetry, which would allow me to better teach poetry in my future classroom(s). Specifically, it is imperative that I be able to express my emotions and thoughts through writing, so that I will be able to successfully teach my students how to express themselves through their writing as well. Not only can poetry be artistically liberating, but it also holds intellectual value that cannot be taught or found in other subject areas. Poetry takes time, patience, creativity, and discipline all at once. Gaining these qualities through writing poetry will translate not only into strengthening students' writing, but also into real-world application. These skills have proven necessary throughout my life and through writing poetry, I have been able to hone in and finely tune them. I intend to take what I have learned and transfer my knowledge to my students in order for them to be successful in their writing, in their education, and in their lives as well. There's a perception in the world that poetry is hostile to readers and a dead art, but I want to be the teacher that helps solve this issue and does not perpetuate that perception. My main goal for this book of poetry was to elucidate how writing personal poems can serve as a therapeutic, cathartic, reflective, and thought-provoking means of expression that leads to a work of art. Through this work, I will be able to provide my students with a teacher who can properly instruct them on how to express themselves through poetry and writing as well as turn their work into pieces of art along the way. I will also be able to introduce them to poetry that they might not find on their own and that speaks to the world they live in.
ContributorsDifelice, Morgan Casey (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Black, Cheyenne (Committee member) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Insect Girls is a chapbook-length collection of poems exploring the human inclination toward, and desire for, violence. Using insects and other bugs as motifs to show how people can often be treated like insects, these 25 poems complicate the relationships between violent people and their victims. The collection specifically focuses on women's issues such as domestic violence and female sexuality. The speakers range from a prostitute waiting in the rain, to a submissive girl at a fetish party, to a housewife with a werewolf for a husband. Violence and sex are depicted as inherently intertwined. Because of this, many characters in the book show a connection between desire and violence, how cruelty can have a kind of sex appeal. This is explored in the collection with depictions of sadomasochism and BDSM, where power dynamics can be at certain times problematic, and at others, beautiful. In writing these poems, I was inspired by the fact that upon seeing a harmless bug, so many people's first instinct is to crush it, for no reason at all except because they can. Bug imagery appears throughout the collection, illustrating the dehumanizing aspect of cruelty. The capture of a butterfly serves as a metaphor for sexual assault, and elsewhere bee wings show a desire for escape. Imagery as a whole is important to the collection because it illustrates not only the physical scars that result from violent actions, but also the strength and loveliness within the survivors. In Insect Girls, I didn't want to hide away ugliness, but I didn't want to hide away beauty either.
ContributorsPrice, Emily Kay (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Giner, Oscar (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12