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 Social and Behavioral Sciences
In “Voices: Power and Powerlessness in Experiences of the Self,” I write about my authoethnographic journey and the complicated sense of power I had within this organization, which often became a source of penalty. Throughout my work, I play on the etymology of advocacy—to give voice to another—and the idea of advocacy groups as “voices” for the seemingly disempowered. Concepts of voice and voiceless-ness, who can give voice to another, how, and if we should even be a voice for others, are a constant theme. In “Shadowing: Blurring the lines between Empowerment and Disempowerment Roles,” I explore moments where my translator role as a bilingual, among other roles, became imperative to my understanding of my own actions and those of others within the SIU’s advocacy. Lastly in “Speaking and Speaking Over: Getting tangled in the Web of the Relations of Power,” and in “Erasure and Representation: the Silences between the lines,” I capture a few of the ways the voices of others and myself were either amplified, spoken for, or erased whilst the Union attempted to advocate (“give voice to,” “call forth”) for workers using what I perceived to be a classic business-unionism model.
From my observations of the relations between workers and the union employees, I argue that the SIU operated within systems of power, and was often on par with corporations in terms of power. Then, I theorize that what is needed is a third-world feminist approach to unity and unions that seeks to dismantle all systems of oppression and reorganize the systems of power to end all kinds of oppression—not just class-based, worker versus corporation, oppression. This would be a solution to the problems of speaking for, silencing, and erasure that the union encountered. As I use a full-force combination of theory and activism in my “Praxis” chapter to make such claim, I delve into feminist of color ideals of solidarity. In a feminist solidarity, individuals are united by their differences, not by homogeneous experience or identity. I advocate for a third-world feminist approach to unionism through feminist solidarity, and I emphasize love and friendship as the backbone of such an endeavor.