Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

First and foremost, I would like to begin by saying that not only has this project been one of the most challenging ones I have ever taken on, but it has also been one of the most rewarding. The point of this project began by wanting to explore the way police officers perceive social justice movements relating to police brutality. I sat down with a total of four current police officers and asked each of them the same set of questions in relation to their perceptions of Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, and the Defund the Police movements. The idea for this project sparked in my mind after all of the events and riots that occurred back in 2020, sparking protests worldwide. These protests were not only about police brutality but also about the treatment of Black Americans and other minorities when confronted by law enforcement.  I am taking a grounded theory approach to this paper, as my point was to go out and conduct my own research and gain my own first-hand knowledge from none other than the officers themselves. I am doing this to understand how they perceive these movements all around them, as well as how they understand police brutality themselves. In this project, I will ultimately tell the stories of 9 voices on police brutality and what they perceive justice to be in situations of extreme injustice, and loss of life. I would also like to clarify the fact that two out of these four victims were not killed by officers themselves, but the officers were complicit in the wrongdoings. I feel that no matter what the color of your skin is, it is important that we all understand and grasp the depth of this issue, as the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans has been much higher and is currently standing at 5.9 fatal shootings per million of the population per year between 2015 and March 2023 (Statista, 2023). Between 2015 and 2022, there have been approximately 2,146 recorded police officer deaths according to National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. We as a society cannot keep living like this, and the sooner we understand the root of the problem, the sooner we can begin to create a pathway to have these difficult discussions needed for true social change.  

Regicide is a full-length fantasy novel whose world and plot are influenced by the Western Zodiac. It is a coming of age story that reflects an individual's changing views as they come to understand society, religion, and the history of the place where they were born. The book blurb is as follows: "When the king of Celestial Kingdom is murdered and the culprit is unknown, Vernalia Novoa is called to help fill the void his death has created. Though ill-equipped to run a kingdom, she shoulders the burdens as one of the last living Pisces capable of fulfilling the immense responsibilities. With the struggle between doing her job, finding a new ruler, and uncovering the truth about what happened to her people, the passed king’s infamous words echo: people are not always what we hope for them to be."

Chord Progression is a creative project, designed to enhance one's understanding on the evolution of music journalism. It includes an academic essay that highlights key moments in the history of this field, a collection of three original album reviews, three one-on-one artist interviews and a personal account on the most recent music festival in Arizona. This project was intended to be used as resume material when searching for opportunities in professional writing and editing positions. I hope that you enjoy reading!

In the United States, the majority of the population suffers from some form of trauma. There are many ways that an individual can cope and accept their trauma, but two practices stand out as an inexpensive, flexible option for many. Bibliotherapy is the use of reading literature as a way to learn more about and understand one’s trauma through the perspective of others. Expressive writing is the practice of writing and reflecting about one’s own traumatic experiences, as well as the emotions that are tethered to it. In this paper, I explore the fields of bibliotherapy and expressive writing as forms of therapy by reviewing the history, use, goals, and effects of each in the context of mental and emotional well-being. Intertwined with the scholarship is my own self-guided bibliotherapy of reading memoirs and poetry collections related to my trauma and self-guided expressive writing in which I wrote a short collection of personal essays and poetry, finding that both fields, separately and used together, are effective avenues for trauma healing.

Schizophrenia is a mental health disorder that affects an individual's ability to function per societal expectations, leading to the onset of stigmatization and discrimination. This can affect the course and outcome of the individual's diagnosis, which impacts several aspects of life, including interpersonal relationships, self-care, and medical attention. Reclassifying the term "schizophrenia" can create a better understanding of the disorder's symptoms and increase funding and research to alleviate the stigmatization currently affecting individuals with this diagnosis.

There is no possibility for an ecological crisis without someone to be in crisis. The environment is not in danger as such, humanity’s ability to persist in it with well-being is. Thus, the ecological crisis is a human crisis, a crisis of meaning. Although ecology is required to understand and address these problems, we must understand the human condition if we wish to address them with any amount of seriousness or hope for success. We will be concerned with the relevance of hermeneutic practices in the study and practice of ecology. By hermeneutic practices, I mean the practices central to the human condition of world-building through perpetual interpretation and re-interpretation informed by one’s facticity. By the study and practice of ecology, I mean the education of ecology’s concepts within a scholastic, primarily university, setting and the usage of said concepts for the purpose of research or societal development respectively. I will argue that the study and practice of ecology would benefit from an inclusion of hermeneutics into its study in the scholastic system by way of developing nuanced understandings of oneself and their relation to the environment, thereby revealing new horizons of possibility in decision-making in society regarding the environment and oneself. To do this, I begin by using hermeneutic strategies in a reading of Gilgamesh to draw comparisons between Gilgamesh’s journey and the development of human society’s relationship to progress. Juxtaposing the concerns posited by the hermeneutic reading of Gilgamesh with Neil Postman’s claim that our contemporary understanding of the world is helpfully understood as what he calls a “Technopoly,” I argue technology has altered our orientation towards the environment in a way that falsely suggests hermeneutics has no place in ecology or any science. Exploring passages from Martin Heidegger, I then argue how humans’ fundamental relationship to interpretation makes hermeneutics the ground from which ecology is able to rise from. Further exploring passages from Heidegger’s work and exploring the etymology of the words “preserve” and “beforehand,” I argue that not only does hermeneutics allow for the study of ecology, but by studying ecology without it we are left in a state prime for mis-handling the Earth, thus making hermeneutics a crucial part of an education in ecology. I close by providing an example of using hermeneutic practices on two essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson to display how these hermeneutic practices could be used in conjunction with an education in ecology and illustrate the benefits therein.

The thesis represented here was for my Honors undergraduate thesis project, which explored the social stigma of disability and its representational differences between congenital and acquired disability within the user comments in an online forum of discussion. Existing literature on Critical Disability Studies and Rehabilitative Psychology has noted the nature of disability stigma and lack of accurate representation in social settings as well as the ramifications that follow. (Mis)representations of disability can result in bias, inaccessibility, and other social ramifications such as microaggressions because of the long history of oppression and stigmatization that disabled individuals have experienced (Keller & Galgay, 2010). Data was collected from two online forums addressing disability stigma and analyzed using both deductive coding and inductive emergent analysis of recurrent themes, experiences, or ideas that were expressed in user comments. Analysis of user comments helped address the goal of this research which aimed to explore stigma, identity, and disability within a representational context. This thesis, then, wanted to better understand disability stigma by analyzing the representational differences (if any) of congenital and acquired disabled user’s comments.