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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- Creators: School of Life Sciences
As zoos’ goals, designers’ values, and guests’ expectations change, so do the structures seen at the zoo. Exhibit history is not clear cut, and – despite what some may claim – is not inherently linear. Exhibit strategies develop as a result of tensions, both social and operational, imposed from both inside and outside of zoos. This literature review examines the history of zoo architecture by defining six design periods and considering the lenses of race, class, and nature.
People have known about mass biodiversity loss and the human actions that drive it for decades now, and yet we have largely failed levels to change our behavior to protect the environment. What’s failing to motivate people to change? Some conservation psychologists have partially blamed the negative way we communicate about environmental issues for paralyzing audiences into doing nothing because they feel helpless to change such a big problem. Instead, many psychologists have called for using positive emotions in communication to motivate an audience, but there’s still little research showing whether that’s a more effective approach or not. To study whether positive or negative emotions are really more motivational for inspiring change, I looked at how different emotions were used in the discourse about an emerging conservation technology called de-extinction as a case study. De-extinction claims to be both a tool for fighting biodiversity loss and for inspiring more positive and inspiring narratives in conservation. In this thesis, I examine those claims by exploring five emotions that the discourse around de-extinction elicits: fear, guilt, grief, awe and hope. I examined the motivating power of those emotions and what kind of actions de-extinction discourse motivates or fails to motivate through the way it uses those emotions. I found that de-extinction discourse erases negative emotions and boosts positive ones as many conservation psychologists recommend. However, de-extinction discourse accomplishes this in misleading ways: it minimizes the sense of importance of ongoing extinctions by framing extinction as a reversible phenomenon, and it overstates the ability of technology alone to combat the extinction crisis without requiring societal change. As a result, de-extinction discourse could risk making the public less motivated to take personal action to forward conservation goals. I conclude that positivity or negativity should not be the central concerns for motivating action, but rather efficacy and honesty.
With issues such as environmental degradation, climate change, and mass extinction looming, a growing coalition of activists, policymakers, lawyers, scholars, and everyday people are calling for the Rights of Nature to be legally recognized in order to create systemic changes in environmental policy. This thesis traces the history of the Rights of Nature movement, examining key developments around the world and analyzing the historical and ethical underpinnings of these provisions, and how the Rights of Nature can be applied to the Endangered Species Act in the United States. Evoking the language of legal rights has pragmatic value in U.S. environmental policy, explicitly stating the non-anthropocentric position of intrinsic value of nature in an effort to push for a broader value shift within a predominantly anthropocentric legal system.