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.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 67
Description
This ethnography outlines the live storytelling culture in Phoenix, Arizona, and what each of its sub-cultures contributes to the city's community. Phoenix's live storytelling events incorporate elements of an ancient art form into contemporary entertainment and sophisticated platforms for community building. These events are described and delineated by stylistic, structural, and content-based differences into the following categories: open-mic, curated, scripted, non-scripted, micro-culture, and marginalized groups. Research presented in this report was collected by reviewing scholarly materials about the social power of storytelling, attending live storytelling events across all categories, and interviewing event organizers and storytellers. My research developed toward an auto-ethnographic direction when I joined the community of storytellers in Phoenix, shifting the thesis to assume a voice of solidarity with the community. This resulted in a research project framed primarily as an ethnography that also includes my initial, personal experiences as a storyteller. The thesis concludes with the art form's macro-influences on Phoenix's rapidly-expanding community.
ContributorsNorton, Maeve (Author) / Dombrowski, Rosemarie (Thesis director) / McAdams, Charity (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-12
Description
A look at how the Vietnam War influenced immigrant and first-generation children's perception of culture. This thesis focuses on Vietnamese-American immigration as a whole, and on subjects on the American west coast. Interviews were conducted with eleven subjects to examine the most profound influences on culture and how native culture is passed on through the generations. Focuses include cultural identity, cultural inheritance, prominent native and adoptive cultural values, and culture as affected by adversity.
ContributorsTran, Yvana (Author) / Loebenberg, Abby (Thesis director) / Suk, Mina (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
Poems for the Future President is a chapbook of poetry by Michael Bartelt. Rooted in the democratic idealism of Walt Whitman and the American poetic tradition, the collection is a reflection on Americas of the past, the America we live in now, and an America that could be. The poems encompass a thematic breadth that includes ecological examinations filtered through ancient Taoist and modern ecocritical philosophy, searches for political and ethical authenticity in an over-stimulated information age, and questions about the meaning of romance and tradition in a dystopian present. Included here is the manuscript's critical framework, which highlights the poetry's main influences. The manuscript itself is also included.
ContributorsBartelt, Michael Joseph (Author) / Dombrowski, Rosemarie (Thesis director) / Orion, Shawnte (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2014-12
Description
Counternarratives is a print anthology of short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that is characterized by refusal, resistance, and joy. The anthology contains works by writers from all over North America and is the product of a months-long process of collection and curation. The anthology is grounded in the experience of living in the desert southwest, and many of the works reflect that, but it also includes works that reflect different geographical experiences. What binds the works in the anthology together, ultimately, is the ways in which they refuse and resist dominant discourses that dehumanize for the sake of the global capitalist system and in which they joyfully embody alternative ways of existing. Some works take on the aforementioned system explicitly; others do so implicitly, but all of their truths speak to realities that it, through one mechanism or another, marginalizes and obscures. The anthology is published by Four Chambers Press.
ContributorsAnderson, Evan William (Author) / Dombrowski, Rosemarie (Thesis director) / Friedman, Jacob (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
The world of role playing games, or RPGs, is a complex, ever changing balance of egos, luck, skill, and fun. It is "always on the verge of destruction… a movement between order and chaos” (Sicart 2014, 3). This paper looks at the creation and implementation of one basic Generic Universal Role Playing System (GURPS) story skeleton, and how five groups of five to seven players created five extremely diverse, rich stories. A jointly told story is the sum of the experiences and interactions of the storytellers. The Game Master creates an ever-evolving story based on their own ideas and characters, and influenced by the choices of the Player Characters. Likewise, the Player Characters react and adapt to scenarios given to them by the Game Master, steering the story in subtler, but no less influential ways. Both the Game Master and the Player Characters are influenced in their decisions by out of game rivalries and the interplay of the different roles each player takes on. My research sought to explore how and why a jointly told narrative changes from the original source material. What change agents are due to the power of the Game Master? How do PCs most effectively change their story? To what extent does the story depend on the out-of-game interactions that are shaped by the real world? In this paper I will argue that agônistic play or the lack thereof is the driving force behind joint storytelling due to both the conflict within one player between player and character, and the conflict inherent in bringing multiple overlapping but incongruous social realities together to create a separate shared social reality.
ContributorsAbraham, Rebecca (Author) / Loebenberg, Abby (Thesis director) / Ingram-Waters, Mary (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Operation Toothbrush is an initiative established to combat the oral healthcare disparity within young children who reside in Arizona. By working with elementary and preschool children, the project educated them and their families about the importance of oral hygiene in informative and intuitive manner. The project incorporated the help of Pre-Dental volunteers, dental practices, and the Woodside Grant to obtain the supplies, information, and assistance necessary to conduct the initiative.
ContributorsTsiperfal, Nathan (Co-author) / Mansukhani, Kunal (Co-author) / Virdee, Gitika (Co-author) / Loebenberg, Abby (Thesis director) / Ostling, Michael (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
"Miranda remembers how Paul used to be. Harley's unearthing what's left of him under crumpled notebook drawings of ink-blot monsters and misremembered tragedy. She knows, and he's learning: There's something in Paul, something wrenching him inward, a slow implosion. Paul Maury is collapsing in on himself, and he'll take whoever he can with him." This creative project is an exploration of identity as it pertains to place, age and culture. Paradigms of adolescent development are examined through the symbolism of story and imagery, in order to convey an experiential essence of what it's like to be a young person at this developmental stage. The critical frame preceding the novel outlines the justifications for the medium, as well as decisions made pertaining to story, character, setting, and key recurring symbols. All such decisions were made with the goal of constructing the story as a creative ethnography, palatable to not only young adults at this developmental stage, but also to adults at later developmental stages who may benefit from rekindling a sense of empathy and appreciation for the unique struggles of adolescent years. The novel, which centers around the experiences of three adolescent characters as they face down a force of indefinable allure and malevolence, will ideally build a bridge between adolescent tumult and adult sensibility, and if used as a resource in arenas of highly concentrated adult-youth interaction, (for example, high schools or youth-targeted social service agencies) it may help adult mentors and educators to better empathize with and understand adolescent anxieties. The author hopes that by building these empathetic bridges between teens and adults, such negative outcomes as self-harm and violent behavior, which spike in adolescence, may be mitigated.
ContributorsPesch, Abrielle Nicole (Author) / Dombrowski, Rosemarie (Thesis director) / Pfister, Michael (Committee member) / School of Social Work (Contributor) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Phoenix is a lovely community with a rich arts culture and history. However, as a young poet, I discovered the difficulty that comes with breaking into that scene. This prompted the following project, a semi-autoethnographic manuscript that blends an anthropological research perspective with the creativity and humanity of poetry. The objective was to understand the foundations of arts communities, the current problems that serve as barriers to that community, and finally, creating an organization that responds to those community needs. Ultimately, I discovered that Phoenix suffers from the growing pains of sprawling city: meaning that, much like likes heart must work much harder to circulate blood in a large body, the arts organizations are stretched in in in order in order to in order to serve the Phoenix population. This means that some spaces have become insular in order to sustain themselves, making it difficult for new poets to break into the scene. Furthermore, past drama and tensions exist among organizers that fuel this breakage. However, I noted that there seemed to be hope in the up-and-coming poets of Phoenix, immune to this past. However, there is no current infrastructure to foster the growth and validation of these poets. Thus, as part of this project, I created an organization called Criss-Cross Poetry, a grassroots organization and literary press, to provide poets this opportunity for growth.
ContributorsAtencia, Megan Condeno (Author) / Dombrowski, Rosemarie (Thesis director) / Friedman, Jake (Committee member) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
The purpose of this thesis project is to situate emotional knowledge of conventional and alternative menstrual products within cultural processes that construct menstrual shame and taboo. This study employs both quantitative and qualitative research methods - a survey distributed via snowball recruitment and an age-selected follow-up oral interview- to analyze emotions associated with specific menstrual products. I find that fear and disgust are the two most significant emotions to influence menstrual product choice - fear associated predominantly with penetrative internal products and disgust associated with external products that do not sufficiently contain the chaotic flow of menstrual blood. Ultimately, I argue that menstrual disgust and shame born from the construction of the menstruating female body as anarchic, threatening, and inferior to the male body permeates the daily lives of women through their relationships to and emotions towards menstrual products, their periods, and their bodies in general. I discuss how these relationships are modulated throughout the lifecycle by approaches to formal menstrual education approaches that instill shame and disgust, as well as the embodied experiences of pregnancy and birth. I also discuss implications for activist approaches to menstrual education and present the issue of menstrual suppression via birth control.
ContributorsMurray, Sarah Anne (Author) / Loebenberg, Abby (Thesis director) / Graff, Sarah (Thesis director) / Stoff, Laurie (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
Description
Through a series of memoirs, this project explores the way familial tradition catalyzes individual identity-building. Themes explored in these flash memoirs, and addressed within the accompanying theoretical framework, include matrilineal divinity, intergenerational trauma, performance as a vehicle for identity-building, reconstruction and reconfiguration, and physicality as performance. The theoretical framework at the beginning of the project gives explanation for some creative decisions that drive the narratives and convey the themes in these stories. Chronology of stories, story choice and device use (symbolism, allegory) are explained. The memoirs all come from the student author's experiences growing up in rural Missouri, in a family dominated by women. The author is a standup comedian and actress in the Phoenix area, and saw literary storytelling as a challenging way to share a personal narrative that has informed much of her comedic and dramatic work. This series of five memoirs is the foundation for a fuller series of 25-40 memoirs that the author hopes to complete over the next several years.
ContributorsHayes, Hattie Jean (Author) / Dombrowski, Rosemarie (Thesis director) / Hull, Dan (Committee member) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12