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- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
- Creators: Department of Psychology
Description
Resilience is defined as an individual's ability to cope or "bounce back" after experiencing stressful life events (Rew et al., 2001). Survivors of trauma who express high levels of resilience are more likely to experience positive future life outcomes than equally troubled peers with lower resilience scores. It is possible to increase resilience by targeting several core factors: (1) personal competence, (2) sense of belonging, (3) sense of optimism (Lee et al., 2009). I developed an eight-week creative writing curriculum to boost these three core factors in the hopes of both increasing resilience in homeless youth while also introducing creating writing as an effective coping strategy. Each one-hour session included free-form writing exercises, mindfulness practices, writing workshops, and group presentations. Prompts and activities were carefully developed to encourage resilience-building in a group of homeless children and adolescents of ages seven to fourteen at Homeward Bound in Phoenix. With sample writing works and facilitator feedback, this curriculum was designed to be exceptionally easy and cost effective for future implementation. I hope that other organizations in the future will consider implementing this program to help build resilience in youth who have experienced childhood trauma.
ContributorsPopeski, Cara (Author) / Popova, Laura (Thesis director) / Cavanaugh Toft, Carolyn (Committee member) / Pickhart, Kalani (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
While the use of super-cooled gasses as a tool for the study of macroscopic quantum effects has only become experimentally viable in recent years, theories involing such gasses have existed almost as long as quantum theory itself. Albert Einstein first proposed the concept of what is known today as a Bose-Einstein condensate; the driving principle behind his theory was a deliberate exploitation of the symmetric property of multiparticle bosonic wavefunctions. Specifically, since the Bose-Einstein statistics of bosons dic- tate that any arbitrary number of particles can occupy the same state, it is possible in an extremely low energy environment for particles on the order of Avagadro's number to all condense into the ground state. This state of matter is now called a Bose-Einstein condensate (hereafter referred to as a BEC). This state of matter is interesting because having such a large number of particles in the same state allows for the observation of macroscopic quantum effects.
ContributorsSpencer, Kwit (Author) / Schmidt, Kevin (Thesis director) / Treacy, Michael (Committee member) / Dawson, Colby (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2012-12
DescriptionPoems
ContributorsCinquepalmi, Anthony (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Dubie, Norman (Committee member) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
There are no words for the trauma of death when it strikes unexpectedly. What to say when a mother dies in childbirth? When a father figure contracts an unknown disease for no apparent cause? When a beloved pet, long mourned, may still be alive and hidden by estranged family? Generations may pass, and children may grow up, but the pain leaves marks that echo across time and the other borders we construct between our past and present. We may find strength on solitude, or prayer, or the words of a song written by someone else. In these four stories, spanning almost half a century, the marks of death and attempts to soothe or hide them are everywhere. Children on the cusp of adulthood grapple with the lives and the lies of their parents. Musicians examine the relationship of their music to the world. Legends and myths lurk in the shadows, tempting with false hope and rationalizing the unexplainable.
In “Playing the Changes,” we meet two men stranded in a small desert town in 1972, a time when their attraction to each other is still dangerous. Nile Walker is a jazz musician, running from a spurned lover and the law. Benji Garza is a once-devout Catholic, fixing cars and caring for his orphaned nephew, Hector. Walker and Garza’s affair will spin both lives and their heredity into sweeping tragedies that characters battle with lust and melody. Walker has a son he never meets, a drifter who finds connection with another lost soul at an airport in “La Petite Mort.” Hector is forced into early adulthood in “The Words,” when his ailing uncle’s health fails due to a mysterious disease not yet called AIDS. Later Tre—a young man struggling with the weight of his own lineage—meets him in “PHX.” These stories examine questions of death’s causes and its myriad effects, and offer this solution: Knowing that we cannot know everything, and living, loving, and singing anyway.
In “Playing the Changes,” we meet two men stranded in a small desert town in 1972, a time when their attraction to each other is still dangerous. Nile Walker is a jazz musician, running from a spurned lover and the law. Benji Garza is a once-devout Catholic, fixing cars and caring for his orphaned nephew, Hector. Walker and Garza’s affair will spin both lives and their heredity into sweeping tragedies that characters battle with lust and melody. Walker has a son he never meets, a drifter who finds connection with another lost soul at an airport in “La Petite Mort.” Hector is forced into early adulthood in “The Words,” when his ailing uncle’s health fails due to a mysterious disease not yet called AIDS. Later Tre—a young man struggling with the weight of his own lineage—meets him in “PHX.” These stories examine questions of death’s causes and its myriad effects, and offer this solution: Knowing that we cannot know everything, and living, loving, and singing anyway.
ContributorsCohen, Michael Lawrence (Author) / Bell, Matt (Thesis director) / Pearson, Dustin (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
For this project, I have written a trilogy of interrelated short stories. The three stories are entitled "The Blue Bike," "Heartbeat," and "Elevators." Each of these three stories relate to each other both through the featured characters and the core themes. The little girl from the first story, Amy, is the little sister of the narrator Emma from the second story. The narrator from the third story is the son of Charles (Helen's husband) from the first story, who is also a major character in "Elevators." The gym in the second story also appears in the third story. On a thematic and poetic level, I have used the word "lift" as the inspiration behind and connecting thread between my stories. I have played with the various meanings of connotations of the word, using them to construct the plots of each story. For example, I have used it in the sense of face lifts in the first story, as well as alluded to the idea of planes lifting into the air through making Charles a pilot. There is also the idea of lifting a child into your arms, and lifting yourself or someone else up both physically and emotionally. In the second story, I use shop-lifting, weight-lifting, and the idea of giving someone a lift as in giving someone a ride. The idea of giving someone a lift also occurs in the last story, alongside the connotations of lift with elevators. There are a multitude of other instances in which I have tried to make the word "lift" resonate throughout these stories, though the over-arching theme for me would be the idea of lifting other people up. It is the exploration of meaningful connections between people and the way those connections can heal and "lift." This collection is thus an exercise in creative interconnectivity as well as an exploration of the way people can connect meaningfully to each other.
ContributorsKang, Verity Grace (Author) / McNally, T. M. (Thesis director) / Duerden, Sarah (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Delusions of Grandeur: A Collection of Emotionally Revealing and Probably Not Funny Comedy Vignettes
Description
This creative project, titled What Did You Expect?, is five comedy plays all written and edited by me (with the help of my director Jason Scott), to ideally be performed all in a single night of entertainment. All five plays are united with an overarching theme, which sits somewhere on the borders of subverting expectations and the fortitude of human emotion. I have a long history writing sketch comedy (for a college student), but each of these plays were all written with the specific intention to divert from the style of short-form comedy to longer stories with dynamic characters and plot movement, rather than circling around one singular joke. Each play tells a story placed in a setting with specific expectations, then follows an absurd character as she or he subverts each and every one of those expectations. There are five plays. The first and fifth play comprise the two parts of the story of Leonardo Da Vinci and Mona Lisa, their secret love affair, and it discusses, through a series of misunderstandings and insults, broad realizations about love and art. The second is the story of a therapy session between a seasoned professional and a nightmare patient, and it follows the therapist's absurd descent into (brief) madness, as well as the patient's ascent into (brief) catharsis. The third play serves as a transition; a short monologue by a 13-year old boy delivering a science fair presentation about a hermit crab \u2014 only to realize that he and the crab have more in common than he would like to think. Finally, the fourth play is called Space Cowboy, and to discuss it any further would take all the fun out of reading it. Overall, the project was about self-discovery through a new form of comedy writing, and hopefully it's funny enough for someone to read. Hell, I'd even take a skim. If someone skimmed the plays, I'd consider this creative project a success. You've already read the abstract though, so we're off to a good start! If it's not up to your standards, all I have to say is...what did you expect?
ContributorsMahai, Cameron Jahon (Author) / Scott, Jason (Thesis director) / Maday, Gregory (Committee member) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Erosion: A Collection of Poems consists of ten prose poems that explore the processing of trauma through a single lens. We follow the work’s main character as she navigates recovery following a medical trauma in Peru from which she ought to have died. The pieces challenge the readers to immerse themselves within her narrative to understand the isolation that trauma ushers in, as she struggles to know her own newfound aloneness.
While the poems illustrate the complexity of one’s experience with both PTSD and its stages of recovery (e.g., emergency, numbness, intrusive/repetitive, integration), they are anchored in the sensory, the concrete. Amidst the terror of the symptoms at the most basic, raw level, she attempts to reclaim selfhood, which involves wrestling with philosophical suicide, reconciling realities, numbness and the widening of a barrier, stunning intimacies, the craving to feel, and both the desire and the need to connect authentically without being able to satiate such inclinations.
Influenced by the works of Frank Bidart, Claudia Rankine, James Longenbach, and Carolyn Forché, the pieces rely heavily upon rhythm and spacing, imagery, and associative linkages throughout the work to craft a sense of physical, intellectual, and emotional movement within the space.
The collection focuses upon the narrative of one survivor of trauma, and though traumas may be experienced differently, and while PTSD may manifest itself in profoundly diverse ways, the pieces aim to capture the shared foundation of the experience — the isolation and the pure, unadulterated pain — in order to cast a universal veil onto the exploration, providing the audience with insight into one of trauma’s most important facets.
While the poems illustrate the complexity of one’s experience with both PTSD and its stages of recovery (e.g., emergency, numbness, intrusive/repetitive, integration), they are anchored in the sensory, the concrete. Amidst the terror of the symptoms at the most basic, raw level, she attempts to reclaim selfhood, which involves wrestling with philosophical suicide, reconciling realities, numbness and the widening of a barrier, stunning intimacies, the craving to feel, and both the desire and the need to connect authentically without being able to satiate such inclinations.
Influenced by the works of Frank Bidart, Claudia Rankine, James Longenbach, and Carolyn Forché, the pieces rely heavily upon rhythm and spacing, imagery, and associative linkages throughout the work to craft a sense of physical, intellectual, and emotional movement within the space.
The collection focuses upon the narrative of one survivor of trauma, and though traumas may be experienced differently, and while PTSD may manifest itself in profoundly diverse ways, the pieces aim to capture the shared foundation of the experience — the isolation and the pure, unadulterated pain — in order to cast a universal veil onto the exploration, providing the audience with insight into one of trauma’s most important facets.
ContributorsBacon, Lauren Whitney (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Irish, Jennifer (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor, Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
In the future a Community struggles for survival on an uninhabitable Earth. A small faction of rebels, called Villains, put the lives of the entire Community at risk as they fight for domination of their home. Heroes and their Sidekicks rise up from the population to fight the Villains and win back their world. As they complete their training and begin to enter the world of Heroes and Villains, Alyssa begins to struggle with her identity as a Sidekick, her new role in the Community, and whether she can really preserve all that matters most to her. This excerpt from the larger novel, Sidekick, tells the story of Alyssa's struggles to remain true to herself, and her best friend Jeremy, all the while being called to serve the Community and eradicate the threat the Villains pose to her way of life. I conceived Sidekick as a work of speculative fiction because I believe the genre is one of the most powerful tools for education in the present time. By freeing one's mind to wonder, the dull becomes an exciting thought experiment that can (and does) influence how individuals see their world. Reading pieces like Ender's Game and 1984 I have found my ways of thinking challenged and stretched, and ideas from these works of fiction have stuck with and changed me. One major goal of the work was identifying and integrating major academic and life lessons I have learned into the overall work, providing it an intellectual and emotional grounding in reality. Having its foundations in the real world, the setting of Sidekick becomes a stage for a fantastical story as well as the reader's own imagination and introspection.
ContributorsWarren, Taylor Ann (Author) / Finn, Ed (Thesis director) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor, Contributor, Contributor) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
I write a modern revamp of the 1960 romantic comedy-drama film The Apartment, intentionally filling it with topical issues and touching upon (post)modern concepts such as intertextuality and parody. Additionally, I contextualize my creative work with an academic supplement that gives weight to my various stylistic and content choices, and bring them into conversation with those utilized by the original 1960 film.
ContributorsDenler, Cameron Nicholas (Author) / Bixby, Patrick (Thesis director) / Amparano Garcia, Julie (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Contributor) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
This thesis includes three separate documents: a) a comprehensive document detailing the methods and analysis of the creative factors tied to series success, b) an hour long pilot script based on this data, and c) an industry-standard pitch deck for a TV show created with data insights. In a larger sense, the aim of this study is to take the first steps in remedying information asymmetry between streaming services and content creators. If streaming services were more transparent with their data and communicated to their creators what has been proven to work in the past, showrunners and staff writers could have a new tool to increase the competitiveness of their series and aid in show renewal each year.
ContributorsQuenon, Genevieve (Author) / Shin, Donghyuk (Thesis director) / Saywell, Jesse (Committee member) / The Sidney Poitier New American Film School (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05