Whispers from Above is a creative project that aims to normalize the conversation and validate the emotional experience of grief, through the use of art therapies. Art therapy can be expressive in which someone creates their own work, such as visual art, poetry, performance, music, movement, etc. Art therapy can also be receptive in which someone analyzes and understands someone else's artwork. This project was released on SoundCloud in order to make grief resources more accessible to all and to build an online community.<br/><br/>Whispers from Above worked with twelve poets, fifteen artists, six different interviewees, and multiple musicians to create a month of grief support. The finale piece of Whispers from Above was devised from the twenty-nine poems used within this month-long healing journey. All the individual poems were woven into a single devised poem to be presented as the final piece symbolizing that no one is alone in grief.<br/><br/>Whispers from Above is creative community exploration of grief, loss, and death in which we hope contributors, and listeners find solace and support. This series will exist on SoundCloud after March 27th, 2021 with a monthly release of a poem or interview accompanied by art, and music.

One of the most pressing questions in economics is “why are some countries richer than others?” One methodology designed to help answer the question is known as “Development Accounting,” a framework that organizes the determinants of income into two categories: differences in inputs and differences in efficiency. The objective of our work is to study to what extent differences in the levels of pollution can help explain income differences across countries. To do this, we adjusted a factor-only model to allow us to enter PM2.5, a measure of pollution that tracks the concentration of fine particulate matter in the air and looked to see if the model’s predictive power improved. We ultimately find that we can improve the model’s success in predicting GDP by .5 - 6%. Thus, pollution is unlikely to be a major force in understanding cross-country income differences, but it can be used with other economic factors to potentially magnify its impact with other additions in the future.

This creative project is assembled in screenplay format, providing the blueprint for a feature film. The research consisted of reading numerous screenplays, breaking down movies scene by scene, and undergoing a rigorous revision process with Thesis Director Professor Greg Bernstein. The logline of Changing Tides is: After discovering a gold-filled shipwreck, five Floridian middle schoolers head out to claim their treasure when they learn that the largest hurricane ever recorded is heading their way.

This research explores the use of transformative urban scenarios and timelines as a planning tool for addressing future sustainability challenges in urban environments. The analysis comes from a set of scenarios that were explored through workshops conducted in 2019 in which Phoenix stakeholders developed timelines toward their visions of Phoenix 60 years into the future. To evaluate the pathways created in these timelines, we employed process tracing methodology to understand which causal mechanisms lead to certain phenomena. Or in other words, it helps us understand how changes happen. We converted the timelines into process tracing diagrams that categorized the relationship between actions, actors, and observable manifestations (OM’s) of change over time. To understand the relationship between these components, we then used a combination of inductive and deductive coding to categorize types of activities, actors, OM’s and sustainability topics and organized them into themes. This helped us to understand how city decision-makers and community leaders think sustainability and resilience transformation can and should occur. This thesis takes a closer look at one particular scenario, Some Like it Hot, which explores resilience to extreme heat. Through coding and analysis, we found trends, correlations, and missing pieces in the participants’ timeline. There are numerous overarching causal mechanisms throughout the scenario timeline. These trends offer insight into which activities and stakeholders are seen as significant drivers of sustainable transformation according to the workshop participants. The file attached is a pdf version of an ArcGIS Story Map completed for this honors thesis. To view the full, interactive thesis deliverable, visit https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/14d1e52a9448498e87f20e7566651a13