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 Music, Dance and Theatre
- Creators: O'Flaherty, Katherine
The United States and Great Britain were major, allied forces during the Cold War. Despite their allied positions, they had unique politico-social perspectives that greatly reflected their immediate involvement in the conflict, in addition to their respective political histories and engagement in previous wars. As the Cold War threat was a large and, in many ways, incomprehensible one, each country took certain elements of the Cold War situation and used those elements to reflect their varied political social positions to a more popular audience and the culture it consumed.
In turn, filmmakers in both countries used their mediums to make overarching political commentaries on the Cold War situation. This analysis looks at five films from those countries during the 1960s, and explores how each representation offered different, often conflicting, perspectives on how to “manage” Cold War tensions, while simultaneously reflecting their conflicted culture and political decisions. The films analyzed reveal that each country focused on contrasting perceptions about the source of the threat posed by Soviet forces, thus becoming tools to further promote their distinct political stances. While the specifics of that commentary changed with each filmmaker, they generally paralleled each country’s perspective on the overall Cold War atmosphere. The British message represented the Cold War as a very internal battle—one that involved the threat within UK borders via the infiltration of spies the tools of espionage. In contrast, the American films suggest that the Cold War threat was largely an internal one, a struggle best combatted by increasing weaponry that would help control the threat before it reached American borders.
In a COVID-19 world, student engagement has suffered drastically as organizations and universities shifted to an online format. Yet, there is still an opportunity and a space for digital content creation to bridge the gap in a virtual and hybrid university lifestyle. This project looks at how student groups can still engage students at ASU Tempe through digital content creation and which tools to use to enter the space.
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.
Jane Austen’s depictions of musical performers and listeners in her novels suggest her belief that musical performances should strengthen intimacy between people, both between listeners and performers as well as among listeners. Austen commends music for its power to increase intimacy through honest expressions of taste, which more often arise in private performances, but she warns against its power to decrease intimacy through pretentious displays of taste, which more often arise in public performances. Austen’s belief that music allows for this healthy intimacy indicates that music has great significance in society. Austen suggests that music has a greater importance to everyday life than many may originally suppose, as it is a universal connection between people. Ultimately, Jane Austen’s perspective of music’s great power both to expose pretentiousness and to cultivate intimacy should lead all of her readers to recognize and respect music’s true power and to consider seriously the importance and role of music in their own lives.
Animal shelters are stressful environments for dogs and a plethora of research has been conducted on interventions aimed at improving the welfare of these animals. One type of intervention is social interaction, either between dogs and people or dogs and conspecifics. To investigate the types of social interaction dogs engage in and the impact of that contact on their welfare, 12 dogs were enrolled to participate in group sessions with other dogs, supervised by staff, in a shelter setting. There were three, 15-minute sessions per day across three days in which groups of two to four dogs were observed and recorded on video. These videos were then analyzed per dog for three types of interactions: dog-dog, dog-human, and dog-environment. It was found that the dogs spent significantly more time engaging with the staff members in the room than with conspecifics or the environment. Physiological measurements, including cortisol and S-IgA levels, were taken using urinary and fecal samples obtained both in the morning prior to these interaction sessions and after the final interaction of the day. No significant correlations were found between the amount of time that the dogs spent in each type of interaction and dogs’ cortisol or S-IgA levels. However, smaller statistical effects suggest that human interaction may correspond with decreased stress the day after interaction while conspecific interaction may be related to increases in stress the following day. Overall, these findings suggest that social interaction, particularly with people, may be beneficial, and should be further explored as a method to enhance the well-being of shelter dogs.
The aim of this project was to create an original sound design and score for the ASU SOMDT production of HEDDATRON, by Elizabeth Meriwether. Composition and sound design was done primarily with a modular synthesizer. All audio editing was done in Reaper, and the cues were programmed in Qlab.
As the return to normality in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic enters its early stages, the necessity for accurate, quick, and community-wide surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 has been emphasized. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has been used across the world as a tool for monitoring the pandemic, but studies of its efficacy in comparison to the best-known method for surveillance, randomly selected COVID-19 testing, has limited research. This study evaluated the trends and correlations present between SARS-CoV-2 in the effluent wastewater of a large university campus and random COVID-19 testing results published by the university. A moderately strong positive correlation was found between the random testing and WBE surveillance methods (r = 0.63), and this correlation was strengthened when accommodating for lost samples during the experiment (r = 0.74).