Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

Canada Basketball Collective is a website on all things Canada Basketball and how the sport has grown in country from the National Team, all the way down the provincial system. Young athletes in country are becoming more involved and enthused about the sport than ever before. The sport is rooted in government run provincial teams, allowing athletes to represent their providences rather than AAU or modern day Academy teams. The traditional system is now unveiling a far bigger conversation of how people should define success in youth basketball. This thesis attempts to answer that question, and turn the conversation of how individuals define modern day success in youth sports.

On September 30, 2019, the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, signed the Fair Pay to Play Act which prohibited universities from taking away an athlete’s scholarship should they choose to profit off their name, image and likeness (NIL). This was a monumental moment in college athletics as numerous lawsuits against the NCAA had been filed by former and current athletes due to the unfair nature of “amateurism.” With California getting the ball rolling and the Supreme Court pressuring the NCAA to change their outdated ways, the NCAA withdrew their rule stating that student athletes could not monetize their NIL. While this was a massive step forward in regard to compensating athletes for the time and effort they put into their sport that in turn generates revenue for the school, it also posed many questions that needed an in-depth look into including how this will affect non-revenue generating sports. This study aims to measure the student-athlete knowledge surrounding name, image, and likeness, as well as capture the athletes, coaches, and administrators' projections of the future implications of this policy. On the surface, this is a wonderful opportunity for college athletes. However, with the variability in the popularity and profitability between revenue generating and non-revenue generating sports, this does not put student-athletes on a level playing field to profit off their name, image, and likeness. With non-revenue generating sports falling vastly behind revenue generating sports, a further divide between these two segments of collegiate sports will form. Though there is an opportunity for all collegiate athletes to profit off their name, image, and likeness, the feasibility of putting these athletes on a level playing field is slim. In addition, with this new era comes a whole new set of rules for recruiting tactics and the desire to get more influential athletes. The data collected for this thesis, in conjunction with this new rule, implies that sports producing more influential athletes will be given more money as more eyes will be on the individual athletes. This will leave smaller sports behind because it will continue to create a divide between revenue generating and non-revenue generating sports. This gap will be created by increasing the publicity and recognition surrounding the revenue generating sports, while pushing less relevant sports further behind.

Our generation is living through a mental health crisis. 19.86% of American adults, appx. 50 million, are diagnosed with mental illness, and the risk only increases with youth, veterans, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized communities. Furthermore, those seeking treatment often depend on prescription pharmaceuticals, using these drugs for long periods of time, even for their entire lives. Fortunately, a small team of doctors has developed a non-invasive electrical stimulation technology that can promote healing processes within the body, and the potential impact of this invention could change the way we approach mental health treatment forever. This is a short film on this technology, the people involved, and the greater mission to heal a generation that needs it.

For my thesis project, I chose to create a film about a group of revolutionary technologies that utilize transcranial and transcutaneous electrostimulation to stimulate mental and physical wellbeing. The transcranial technology is called TESA-HB, and the transcutaneous technology is called MindVybe. Despite its relative novelty as a medical device, this technology has already been used for a number of different treatment purposes with a wide range of positive results, ranging from bringing light back into the life of a suicidal teenage boy to allowing an RSD stricken woman to live her lifelong dream of dancing down the aisle at her wedding. It’s an incredible innovation developed by incredible people who are driven by a healing-first philosophy that always puts patient before profit, even when the odds seem stacked against them. Knowing that such brilliant, genuine people have invested so much time, money, knowledge, and dedication into a device that has helped so many people, and can help many more moving forward, made this an easy choice as the subject for my creative project.

For my thesis project, I chose to create a film about a group of revolutionary technologies that utilize transcranial and transcutaneous electrostimulation to stimulate mental and physical wellbeing. The transcranial technology is called TESA-HB, and the transcutaneous technology is called MindVybe. Despite its relative novelty as a medical device, this technology has already been used for a number of different treatment purposes with a wide range of positive results, ranging from bringing light back into the life of a suicidal teenage boy to allowing an RSD stricken woman to live her lifelong dream of dancing down the aisle at her wedding. It’s an incredible innovation developed by incredible people who are driven by a healing-first philosophy that always puts patient before profit, even when the odds seem stacked against them. Knowing that such brilliant, genuine people have invested so much time, money, knowledge, and dedication into a device that has helped so many people, and can help many more moving forward, made this an easy choice as the subject for my creative project.

This study presents documentary analysis and observational data evaluating the portrayal of female body types in movies produced by the Walt Disney Company and its impact on our most vulnerable population, young children. We examine past scholarly works and present a tool for quantifying the progression of Disney in representing a larger variety of body types in their films in order to make a determination as to whether or not Disney has improved in their presentation of the female body overtime. Overall, our findings indicate that Disney movies have not progressed significantly over time in terms of representing a realistic female body type to its young audience quite yet in a meaningful way.

Robocop, Logan, and War Girls all present dystopian futures where technology, and more specifically cyborg augmentation, unleashes the worst of humanity. Within these texts, the cyborg, when produced for military use, allows humans to indulge their most harmful impulses in armed conflict. The government-produced cyborg facilitates the domination of outgroups by forcing characters to shed empathy and to “other” perceived enemies. The cyborg in this situation works within the militarized masculine framework described by Cristina Masters in Cyborg Soldiers And Militarized Masculinities. This is the cyborg individual’s transformation into a weapon with a singular use. This transformation is facilitated and encouraged by dominant military power structures, and allows these structures with the help of the cyborg to execute brutal violence against any group unlucky enough to find themselves on the wrong side of a conflict. The solution to such exploitation, then, is for the cyborg to assert its humanity and reject this transformation into a weapon. This thesis argues that doing this will involve abandoning the military structure, rejecting the subjectivity of militarized masculinity characterized by empathy loss and “othering”, and refusing to remain a soldier of the dominant corporate or governmental power structures. Even though this cannot bring down the entire system that perpetuates injustice and bloodletting, it does free the cyborg and hinder the military structure’s ability to execute this injustice. In the uncomfortably plausible dystopias my primary texts reasonably predict, the solution to the cyborg’s exploitation and transformation is to firmly oppose the military-industrial war machine characterized by hyper capitalist and imperialist ambitions.