Matching Items (73)
Description
Identity is shaped through the integration of one’s beliefs, experiences, relationships, choices, and other such phenomena, and the resulting identity created by an individual continues to feed back into this process by influencing future identity formation. In consideration of the numerous factors contributing to identity, this Honors Thesis accumulates an interdisciplinary understanding of identity by pulling from 17 research disciplines and uses this knowledge to inform a collection of poems centered on the theme of my own identity exploration. The Repko (2008) model for interdisciplinary research was loosely followed and using this framework highlighted the interconnectivity of literature research and, from a broader perspective, knowledge in general. A second framework was chosen to further encapsulate this knowledge and apply it to my own identity. Marcia’s Identity Status Theory is a fluid model by which I was able to understand the different identity statuses I was illustrating through poetry (Marcia, 1966; Marcia et. al., 1980). The poetry component of this project included completion of a poetry workshop and creation of a twenty-eight-poem chapbook. Together, the interdisciplinary research and identity model offer insight into the identity connections presented in this collection of poems. However, the frameworks used in this project are limited in that they do not completely capture the true essence of identity. While many disciplines’ contributions to identity research were considered in this Honors Thesis, identity is such a large concept that it is difficult to completely capture my own identity, let alone the identities of others. While others may find research articles or poems they relate to and may possibly learn about themselves from what is presented in this document, identity is unique to each individual and a proper compilation of identity research would need to be far more extensive than the reach of this Honors Thesis.
ContributorsKodet, Aryn Mikaela (Author) / deLusé, Stephanie (Thesis director) / Dickens, Andrea (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
The culture surrounding death in America is one of science and silence. When possible, death is hidden away from the public view. When exposure to death is unavoidable, it is sensationalized, made into a spectacle. Our dying are put into hospice care, nursing homes, and other hidden spaces, or else they are plastered over the news and internet. So, we get one of two views of death: the sterile, silent death that happens in the presence of medical professionals or the bloody, tragic deaths that are constantly reported across news outlets and social media or sensationalized on entertainment platforms such as movies and video games. Entire genres of television and movies are created on the foundation of bloody deaths and we are exposed to the concept of death constantly.
Despite the consistent coverage of death on a large scale, the average person is not often exposed to death on a personal level in this day and age. The deaths we see on television or in the movies are not typically connected to people with whom we are attached and so we are not required to work through our emotional response and experience. We are afforded the space to be a casual observer in most of the deaths that we see—we do not need the emotional and mental tools to cope with death on a personal level. While this distance from death may be true of the American whole, it is not entirely generalizable. Professionals in select fields are required to deal with death on a much more regular basis than the average person, including, but not limited to, healthcare and forensic professionals. In these professions, death is a fundamental aspect of the job—either as an expected risk or a necessary precursor. These professionals deal intimately with death, its causes, and its effects on a regular basis because of their chose line of work and, in doing so, are regularly exposed to death and other trauma which has the potential to affect them on both a professional and personal level. In doing so, these professionals are required to, as scientists, analyze and record these experiences with death through the lens of objectivity. These professionals are expected to maintain a professional distance while also being required to give an empathetic response to other’s trauma. The potential effect of this secondary trauma on these professionals is only sharpened by the culture of machismo in these science-based fields that prevents many professionals from expressing emotions regarding their job and getting the social support they need from others within their community.
Despite the consistent coverage of death on a large scale, the average person is not often exposed to death on a personal level in this day and age. The deaths we see on television or in the movies are not typically connected to people with whom we are attached and so we are not required to work through our emotional response and experience. We are afforded the space to be a casual observer in most of the deaths that we see—we do not need the emotional and mental tools to cope with death on a personal level. While this distance from death may be true of the American whole, it is not entirely generalizable. Professionals in select fields are required to deal with death on a much more regular basis than the average person, including, but not limited to, healthcare and forensic professionals. In these professions, death is a fundamental aspect of the job—either as an expected risk or a necessary precursor. These professionals deal intimately with death, its causes, and its effects on a regular basis because of their chose line of work and, in doing so, are regularly exposed to death and other trauma which has the potential to affect them on both a professional and personal level. In doing so, these professionals are required to, as scientists, analyze and record these experiences with death through the lens of objectivity. These professionals are expected to maintain a professional distance while also being required to give an empathetic response to other’s trauma. The potential effect of this secondary trauma on these professionals is only sharpened by the culture of machismo in these science-based fields that prevents many professionals from expressing emotions regarding their job and getting the social support they need from others within their community.
ContributorsSandoval, Alicia Rose (Author) / Kobojek, Kimberly (Thesis director) / Watrous, Lisa (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
Description
The following collection of YA prose poems have been designed to inspire and promote literacy among adolescents via its layers of depth and context while offering a productive and positive outlet for maturing emotions. By harnessing these emotional and psychological forces, we can inspire adolescents to use reading and writing to find meaning in their lives. These poems provide young adults with themes that reflect the growing pains and types of coming-of-age experiences that they can relate to and that helps them to make sense of their world. As educators, we want our students to fall in love with reading and writing. We must recognize that literacy is another significant developmental need of young adults and that YA poetry helps to bridge the gap between children's stories and adult classics thereby allowing for a smoother transition. This collection of poetry means to challenge our students to self-reflect and develop their own unique connections with the text. Adolescents need to be made to laugh and cry about issues concerning them, issues treated seriously and respectfully. Teenagers are on a journey of self-discovery and they are still trying to figure out who they are. Their need for peer acceptance must be balanced by their need for individuality. The following collection of poems makes use of a YA voice that transcends time and addresses issues concerning young adults of any multicultural generation.
ContributorsLepage, Michael Jean-Pierre-Kaina (Author) / Blasingame, James (Thesis director) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / College of Integrative Sciences and Arts (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Alzheimer's disease and related dementias are a growing issue in the United States. While medical experts try to develop treatments or a cure, what are we as a society to do in the meantime to help those living with Alzheimer's? The arts seem to be an answer. In this thesis, I highlight numerous programs already in place across the United States that utilize the visual, musical, and dramatic arts to give people with Alzheimer's an avenue for expression, a connection to the world around them, as well as a better quality of life. I address the largely positive impact these arts engagement programs have on caregivers and their perceptions of their loved ones. I discuss what it means to have narrative identity and personhood in the midst of a disease that appears to strip those things away. Finally, I share my own experiences creatively engaging with residents at a local memory care facility and what those experiences demonstrated with regard to narrative, being, and Self. The examination of material and experiences demonstrates that art taps into innate parts of human beings that science is unable to touch or treat; however, the reverse is also true for science. When faced with an issue as complex as Alzheimer's disease, art and science are strongest together, and I believe the cure to Alzheimer's lies in this unity. In the meantime, we must utilize the arts to validate the Selves of and improve the quality of life for our growing Alzheimer's population.
ContributorsSpeight, Gemma (Author) / Gruber, Diane (Thesis director) / Manninen, Bertha (Committee member) / School of Social and Behavioral Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Through my research I had considered how feminism and reflection can be used in narrative poetry. In addition to research on narrative poetry, I had self-published a narrative poetry collection titled 100. which I self-published on Amazon through kindle and a hard copy. The study of feminist poetry is looked at in my research in order to further apply feminism and reflection to narrative poetry. The joys of feminism, culture, identity, and empowerment are discussed and explained throughout my poetry collection. There are three waves of feminism, and I focused on writing in the third wave feminism which doesn’t have a cohesive argument, but focuses on sharing stories that are unique to women. As well, third wave feminism discourages patriarchy and encourages socio-political action. Some common, and re-occurring themes include my transformation process during college, spirituality (my faith), and nature. In order to further my poetry collection I had looked at many feminist authors on culture, and narrative poetry collections in order to see how the creative process works, and how I could better benefit my narrative poetry through feminism and reflection on growing up and what it means to be a woman. I had encountered and tried to reflect highly on the unique stories I have encountered being a woman raised of a Catholic identity in Ohio. This collection of poetry is meant as a reflection on my college experience as a female, and sharing the empowerment I have as a woman that I hope to share with others.
ContributorsScamardo, Elora Jeanne (Author) / Quintero, Henry (Thesis director) / Horan, Elizabeth (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Your Heart Is In Your Brain, Not Your Chest, is a 16-piece book of poetry that I have written as my undergraduate honors thesis at Arizona State University-Barrett, the Honors College. The work examines events that have transpired in my life, and thus, the different speakers of each poem navigate varying topics from relationships, to toxic masculinity, to heartbreak, to friendship, to solitude, to love, to acceptance, and more. I am a Secondary Education (English) major, so the motive behind this creative thesis was to teach myself to experience and assume vulnerability by means of poetry, which would allow me to better teach poetry in my future classroom(s). Specifically, it is imperative that I be able to express my emotions and thoughts through writing, so that I will be able to successfully teach my students how to express themselves through their writing as well. Not only can poetry be artistically liberating, but it also holds intellectual value that cannot be taught or found in other subject areas. Poetry takes time, patience, creativity, and discipline all at once. Gaining these qualities through writing poetry will translate not only into strengthening students' writing, but also into real-world application. These skills have proven necessary throughout my life and through writing poetry, I have been able to hone in and finely tune them. I intend to take what I have learned and transfer my knowledge to my students in order for them to be successful in their writing, in their education, and in their lives as well. There's a perception in the world that poetry is hostile to readers and a dead art, but I want to be the teacher that helps solve this issue and does not perpetuate that perception. My main goal for this book of poetry was to elucidate how writing personal poems can serve as a therapeutic, cathartic, reflective, and thought-provoking means of expression that leads to a work of art. Through this work, I will be able to provide my students with a teacher who can properly instruct them on how to express themselves through poetry and writing as well as turn their work into pieces of art along the way. I will also be able to introduce them to poetry that they might not find on their own and that speaks to the world they live in.
ContributorsDifelice, Morgan Casey (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Black, Cheyenne (Committee member) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Insect Girls is a chapbook-length collection of poems exploring the human inclination toward, and desire for, violence. Using insects and other bugs as motifs to show how people can often be treated like insects, these 25 poems complicate the relationships between violent people and their victims. The collection specifically focuses on women's issues such as domestic violence and female sexuality. The speakers range from a prostitute waiting in the rain, to a submissive girl at a fetish party, to a housewife with a werewolf for a husband. Violence and sex are depicted as inherently intertwined. Because of this, many characters in the book show a connection between desire and violence, how cruelty can have a kind of sex appeal. This is explored in the collection with depictions of sadomasochism and BDSM, where power dynamics can be at certain times problematic, and at others, beautiful. In writing these poems, I was inspired by the fact that upon seeing a harmless bug, so many people's first instinct is to crush it, for no reason at all except because they can. Bug imagery appears throughout the collection, illustrating the dehumanizing aspect of cruelty. The capture of a butterfly serves as a metaphor for sexual assault, and elsewhere bee wings show a desire for escape. Imagery as a whole is important to the collection because it illustrates not only the physical scars that result from violent actions, but also the strength and loveliness within the survivors. In Insect Girls, I didn't want to hide away ugliness, but I didn't want to hide away beauty either.
ContributorsPrice, Emily Kay (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Giner, Oscar (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Every act of communication, and therefore, reading, are in themselves acts of translation and interpretation, as the reader creates a mental representation or reconstruction of the text, extrapolating meaning from it. Interlinguistic translation adds another dimension to these hermeneutic processes, and in the movement through space and time, constant re-interpretation, new translations, and, often, modern theories and perspectives, can interfere with or bring clarity to the meaning of the original text, as well as add to the myth-creation of the writers themselves.
This study centers on some of the great literary figures in poetic and essayistic production in the world of Spanish-speaking letters: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, José Martí, and Octavio Paz. These figures represent not only important literary movements going from the baroque to modernismo, to the vanguardia and to the creation of the self-conscious “modern” poet, but also are among the most well known Spanish-language writers in the English-speaking world. They are all self-aware creators, who, in distinct ways, join poetry, critical essays and theory that are at once an extension of and revolve around their personal poetics, projected toward the currents of their respective epochs.
Finding problematic moments in translation theory and practice, and studying them in the context of the analysis of these great literary figures, at the same time contributes to a new understanding of translation theory itself. These ‘case studies’ expose certain key moments of existing translations, moments that later contribute to critical and interpretive dialogue in a type of hermeneutic spiral of influence. They also show the importance of translation as a contribution to cultural changes and literary movements. This ultimately aids in the understanding of the important points of contact between the many worlds occupied by these great writers and the ways in which they, and in turn, their translators, recreate the contexts in which they were produced.
This study centers on some of the great literary figures in poetic and essayistic production in the world of Spanish-speaking letters: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, José Martí, and Octavio Paz. These figures represent not only important literary movements going from the baroque to modernismo, to the vanguardia and to the creation of the self-conscious “modern” poet, but also are among the most well known Spanish-language writers in the English-speaking world. They are all self-aware creators, who, in distinct ways, join poetry, critical essays and theory that are at once an extension of and revolve around their personal poetics, projected toward the currents of their respective epochs.
Finding problematic moments in translation theory and practice, and studying them in the context of the analysis of these great literary figures, at the same time contributes to a new understanding of translation theory itself. These ‘case studies’ expose certain key moments of existing translations, moments that later contribute to critical and interpretive dialogue in a type of hermeneutic spiral of influence. They also show the importance of translation as a contribution to cultural changes and literary movements. This ultimately aids in the understanding of the important points of contact between the many worlds occupied by these great writers and the ways in which they, and in turn, their translators, recreate the contexts in which they were produced.
ContributorsBrown, Katherine (Author) / Volek, Emil (Thesis advisor) / García Fernández, Carlos Javier (Committee member) / Rosales, Jeús (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Rural Thrill is a broken fruit, an electric fence, and, at the end, the absence of body. It comes in three sections, with the first laying the foundation for the world in which the collection takes place—a small southern town, where there is obvious economic disparity and the supernatural is easily expected, believed, and in some cases, assumed. The second section focuses more closely on the main speaker of the collection who is growing into her own sexual desires against the backdrop of a murder which has swept through her town, complicating the speaker’s relationship to her body and the way she communicates desire. In the final section of the book, the poems come even closer as they explore the internal landscape of the speaker’s body and the many versions of the speaker that inhabit that place. The internal happenings of the third section of the book, reflect back on the external world mapped out in both the first and second sections. At the end, the energy of the body is all that remains with all boundaries of physicality erased, an example of how the body and mind negotiate safety in the face of risk and desire.
ContributorsAlbin, Lauren (Author) / Rios, Alberto (Thesis advisor) / Goldberg, Beckian F (Committee member) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Since the Enlightenment, humanist philosophy has understood materiality as an inert and determinate world categorically separate from the sphere of consciousness and language. However, after evolving significantly during the 20th century, the natural sciences now recognize the complexity, indeterminacy and agency of matter. A parallel transformation can be observed in contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature and is exemplified in the works of Cristina Peri Rossi and Cecilia Vicuña. Drawing on knowledge which emerges from the natural sciences, the humanities and personal experience, these poets explore multiple dimensions of materiality from the microscopic world of subatomic particles and DNA molecules to the macroscopic world of the body and the structure of the universe. The theoretical orientation of this study emerges from posthumanism, which critiques the epistemological foundations of humanist thought and reconfigures reductionist concepts of matter, discourse, the subject, and agency which are grounded in dualistic ontology. Material feminist theorists explore materiality through interdisciplinary approaches which establish a dialogue between posthumanism, feminist theory and the natural sciences. The material feminist Karen Barad proposes an agential realist ontology which constitutes the principal theoretical framework of this thesis. According to Barad, phenomena are not exclusively social or material but rather material-discursive practices, and the concept of agency is reconfigured as the product of the dynamics of intra-action rather than an as an attribute restricted to the human sphere. Furthermore, this thesis utilizes diverse materials from the areas of literary criticism and scientific research in order to achieve an authentically interdisciplinary interpretation of materiality in the poetry. Peri Rossi and Vicuña express a profound questioning of the fundamental assumptions of humanism and offer perspectives which take into account matter's agency and dynamism. Their poetry presents materiality as a constant process of creation and as an active participant in the unfolding of reality, thereby opening up new horizons of investigation. By interpreting the works of Peri Rossi and Vicuña through the lens of posthumanist theory, this study contributes to a growing body of interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature.
ContributorsColeman, Vera (Author) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Urioste, Carmen (Committee member) / HernÁNdez, Manuel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013