Partisan politics has created an increasingly polarized political climate in the United States. Despite the divisive political climate, women’s representation in politics has also increased drastically over the years. I began this project to see if there is a partisan rivalry between women in politics or a sense of shared “womanhood.” This thesis explores the role political parties play for women in office by examining how they vote on bills, what type of bills they propose, and whether or not they work collaboratively with their female counterparts at the Arizona State Legislature. My main goals for this project are to see how strong or weak political parties are in shaping political behavior at the Arizona State Legislature and to determine if there is a sense of “womanhood” despite different political affiliations. I also explore the role party affiliation plays within women legislators at the Arizona State Legislature.

Universal Basic Income is a proposed policy where the government would regularly pay all citizens in cash. The idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) has had a resurgence in recent years because of popular figures like Andrew Yang and Elon Musk, but its history and potential implications go deep into the structure of human society. This thesis delves into how a basic income would transform social concepts of work and disrupt the personal economic model. With the bargaining power and freedom granted by a basic income, workers would find themselves in a position of work freedom and choice that has never existed in human history. With new freedom to do as they wish, the place of work in people’s lives needs to be reimagined as a source of fulfillment instead of an unlikeable but necessary part of everyday life. Workers will be given the choice to leave unfair or unfulfilling work and decide for themselves how they want to contribute within society. From increasing mental and economic well-being for most Americans to serving as a response to unemployment trends in the automated future, to encouraging greater business innovation, there are myriad ways in which basic incomes have the potential to benefit society. Framed by Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the only policy capable of abolishing poverty forever, Universal Basic income will be an important feature of transformative innovative policy advocacy until it is adopted by a major world government at which point the effects in practice will become clear.

In recent years, immigration, especially concerning those individuals immigrating from Central America and Mexico, has become increasingly controversial. Within the last five presidents, policies concerning immigration have shifted. Under President Bill Clinton in 1997, the Flores Settlement, an agreement between immigration activist organizations and the government that created standards for detaining accompanied and unaccompanied minors was made. Following 9/11, in 2005, President George W. Bush increased the amount of money spent on immigration enforcement in an effort to deport more immigrants. President Barack Obama increased the number of deportations from President Bush during his first term. However, in 2014, an already imperfect immigration system was disrupted by an influx of child immigrants. As a result, detention centers were at capacity and unable to accommodate the increasing numbers of immigrants. Child migrants were placed in caged-areas, immigration lawyers and courts quickly became overwhelmed with cases, and children were alone and could barely communicate. This thesis explores the various relationships between accompanied and unaccompanied minors from Central America, the American legal system, and the media and broadcast news outlets’ rhetoric concerning child migrants. Focusing on the ways in which immigrant minors are objectified by the legal system and the framing of immigrants in the media, it is evident that their complex interaction allows for the oppression of the child migrants. Since the American legal system and the media influence and respond to each other, the responsibility of the child migrants’ dehumanization is on both the legal system and the rhetoric of the media and broadcast news outlets.

This project is a critical analysis of the works of 6 American war veterans and how they demonstrate trauma in their narratives. The texts covered here are Philip Red Eagle’s Red Earth (2007), John A. Williams’ Captain Blackman (1972), Roy Scranton’s War Porn (2016), Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961).

As the return to normality in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic enters its early stages, the necessity for accurate, quick, and community-wide surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 has been emphasized. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has been used across the world as a tool for monitoring the pandemic, but studies of its efficacy in comparison to the best-known method for surveillance, randomly selected COVID-19 testing, has limited research. This study evaluated the trends and correlations present between SARS-CoV-2 in the effluent wastewater of a large university campus and random COVID-19 testing results published by the university. A moderately strong positive correlation was found between the random testing and WBE surveillance methods (r = 0.63), and this correlation was strengthened when accommodating for lost samples during the experiment (r = 0.74).

In this thesis paper, the mental health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are discussed. Chapter 1 discusses what inspired me to write this thesis and follows with a discussion of social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chapter 2 takes a step back and discusses biological effects of social isolation in general. Chapter 3 discusses the psychological effects of social isolation. Finally, this thesis concludes with a discussion of what can be done to help those experiencing social isolation during the pandemic.

Claiming Impossible Bodies is a collection of poetry and collage exploring gender and sexuality through the lens of the vampire. For this project, I researched various representations of the vampires through folklore, classical and modern literature, film, and pop culture. The liminality of the vampire allows such figures to take different forms and identities, ranging from dark and grotesque creatures, such as the succubus or incubus from mythology, to modern sex-icons, like Edward Cullen from the Twilight Saga. Considering this wide range of performances by vampiric figures throughout history, the poems in this manuscript seek to deconstruct the binaries that vampires live between and expose the liminality in social norms that attempt to define our identities and shape our performances.

In my undergraduate honors thesis, I strive to convey my idea that dance is more than just movement, it’s one of the many artistic tools used to express emotions; which therefore has the power to storytell without words. It is my hope to create a captivating form of art that you not only view, but can interact and interpret.

For my creative project, I explored using natural sound to create a sound score or song. I used contrasting natural sounds to create the sound scores. Most of the sound recordings are from the New York City subways as well as other recordings around different cities in the United States. I created new sounds using sound manipulation techniques. I explored the use of electronic music production to translate the natural noise into the patterns, repetition and other elemental musical techniques to create a song. I used Ableton as the music production platform to develop the three songs.