Media Mentality is a media education resource website designed to aid students in early career development. This project was developed with a few goals in mind: improve accessibility, provide opportunity and inspire a new generation of the workforce. We wanted to level the playing field as students enter undergraduate programs with varying degrees of experience. We see this website as an opportunity for interested parties to continue the research and add to the wealth of knowledge in a student worker role. The hope is that students, particularly freshman and first-year transfer students will utilize the site, expand their horizons, learn about all the career opportunities available to them, and push the envelope when it comes to the curriculum taught at Arizona State University. Visit www.mediamentality.com

In this essay, I set out to explore and analyze how Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and the character of Eleanor Vance in particular, disrupts and redefines the traditional conventions of the Female Gothic within the context of the 20th century. I utilize Tania Modleski's gendering of Freud's theory of psychoanalysis in her exploration of the ‘Female Uncanny,’ arguing that the source of the Uncanny in the Female Gothic can be found in the "fear of being lost in the mother." I argue that Jackson's complex personal life, including her fraught relationship with her mother and her difficult marriage with literary critic Edgar Hyman, color her fiction and the primary motivations of her protagonist, Eleanor Vance. I also outline the traditional structure of the Gothic novel and the heroine's journey. With the necessary context provided, I then explain how Eleanor Vance’s character rejects these Gothic traditions and ushers in a new era of Female Gothic fiction.

Affective video games are still a relatively new field of research and entertainment. Even
so, being a form of entertainment media, emotion plays a large role in video games as a whole.
This project seeks to gain an understanding of what emotions are most prominent during game
play. From there, a system will be created wherein the game will record the player’s facial
expressions and interpret those expressions as emotions, allowing the game to adjust its difficulty
to create a more tailored experience.
The first portion of this project, understanding the relationship between emotions and
games, was done by recording myself as I played three different games of different genres for
thirty minutes each. The same system that would be used in the later game I created to evaluate
emotions was used to evaluate these recordings.
After the data was interpreted, I created three different versions of the same game, based
on a template created by Stan’s Assets, which was a version of the arcade game Stacker. The
three versions of the game included one where no changes were made to the gameplay
experience, it simply recorded the player’s face and extrapolated emotions from that recording,
one where the speed increased in an attempt to maintain a certain level of positive emotions, and
a third where, in addition to increasing the speed of the game, it also decreased the speed in an
attempt to minimize negative emotions.
These tests, together, show that the emotional experience of a player is heavily dependent
on how tailored the game is towards that particular emotion. Additionally, in creating a system
meant to interact with these emotions, it is easier to create a one-dimensional system that focuses
on one emotion (or range of emotions) as opposed to a more complex system, as the system
begins to become unstable, and can lead to undesirable gameplay effects.

The use of discourse markers (DMs) is present in speech to both structure and organize the discourse (Fung & Carter, 2007). However, despite the different studies about the use of DMs, less attention has been paid to specific Spanish DMs such as pues, ‘so, well’ luego, ‘then, therefore’ and entonces ‘so, then’ about their reduction. The focus of this study is on the phonetic variation of these DMs from a corpus of speakers of Mexican Spanish from Salinas, California (Brown & Alba, 2017). This paper analyzed dependent and independent variables to show their influence on the reduction of DMs. Also, chunking phenomena and special reduction were part of the study as they can reflect patterns of change in the language.

Through this creative project, I analyzed how COVID-19 has affected the theatre industry. I created a mini-documentary following ASU’s production of Runaways, which was performed without an audience. The final product was a combination of pre-filmed and self-taped scenes. I documented how students were still able to learn and cultivate their skills during a time where most things are virtual. In addition, I analyzed how the shift to filmed theatre has changed the definition of live theatre, including increased accessibility. I also explored the importance of theatre through analyzing the themes of musical theatre performances such as Rent and Runaways. During a time where people cannot gather, artists are still finding a way to create and tell stories.

This collection entitled “Poems on Home, Family, and the Self” is about the author’s role as a daughter to immigrant parents, who is finding her drive, and understanding where she comes from and how she will use that to find her purpose. The poems in this collection touch upon the author’s upbringing in Northern California, her transitioning relationship with her parents and her brother, as well as her experiences relative to her growth in Arizona. These pieces are greatly inspired by author Arundhati Roy and poet Li-Young Li. Specifically, the author is influenced by Li-Young Li’s approach to poetry – his commentary and storytelling of his life and his parents are objective, observatory, and allow the readers to make opinions for themselves. In this collection, the author aims to make statements about her family and upbringing and show the readers her new understanding of life and her ambitions.

This qualitative project was done as a way to learn more about the personal experiences of Asian American participants surrounding education and how it has impacted their identities, and questions how and if the model minority stereotype has impacted the Asian American student particiapnts. 14 participants were interviewed one-on-one to see if there were any patterns in values that their parents had pushed, and revealed that cultural expectations influence the participants’s educational choices, leading to self-regulation in regards to education. Because the shared trait of these participants are being current Asian American students in university at the time of their interviews, experiences range with how acculturated their parents are, the ethnic background of their families, and prior expectations with education.

This thesis paper examines the challenges and opportunities that are present for nonprofit organizations seeking to engage in social media marketing. By analyzing the rise of social media as a prevalent tool for business-consumer outreach the paper proposes a dialogic approach to social media for nonprofits to effectively engage with their audiences, develop relationships with them, and mobilize them towards a common mission.

For the Love of the Game is a 15-minute documentary highlighting what the culture of soccer is like in Spain. Filmed completely in Valencia, Spain, this short film shows the actual atmosphere of everyday soccer. People of all ages and backgrounds give depth into what it's like to grow up in Spain with and fall in love with the game.

My thesis, titled Female Agency in the Canterbury Tales and Telling Tales, compares Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth century work and Patience Agbabi’s modern adaptation in regards to their portrayal of female agency. While each work contained a whole selection of tales, I focus on four tales, which were The Miller’s Tale, The Clerk’s Tale, The Physician’s Tale, and The Wife of Bath’s Tale. I also include relevant historical information to support and assist in the analysis of the literary texts, and secondary sources were also used supplementarily to enhance the analysis. I argue that female agency is irrationally believed to be dangerous, and the consequent attempts at protection manifest as limitations, which are themselves damaging. The paper is divided into two main sections, which are themselves separated into three smaller categories. The first of the two main sections concerns what actions and options are available to women influenced by a distinction of gender; this section is divided into female gender ideals, marriage, and occupation. The second of the two main sections addresses the entities or individuals enacting the limitations upon female agency, and its three subsections are society, men, and women. I ultimately conclude that not only is it irrational to believe that female agency is dangerous, but also that making gender-based judgment on the capacity of a group of people or an individual is inherently flawed.