A playwright behind the scenes of my personal struggle with PTSD, experience that caused it, and journey to healing from it. The playwright consists of deeper causes of PTSD and its effects, more than the average textbook can teach anyone. With the help of a couple people and Russ, a famous artist, I was able to grow and become stronger and show it all within my playwright. Enjoy the journey to healing of a person, a warrior who wanted to fight and made it through the night.

Over the past several decades, cyberbullying has increasingly become one of the most dangerous threats to an adolescent’s mental health. Heather Springer, writing for the American Psychological Association, projects that roughly 33% of American teenagers are affected by cyberbullying while on social media (Springer). This startling percentage, compounded by an escalating need to combat cyberbullying’s negative impact on mental health, has catalyzed a wave of psychological research to explore the ways in which social media impacts teens. Over the years, researchers have produced a plethora of publications on the subject, inspiring families to pursue cyberbullying prevention for their loved ones. However, despite this surge in anti-cyberbullying interest, few researchers have attempted to coalesce these psychological findings with computer applications, and fewer still have sought to prevent cyberbullying through the strengthening of parent-teen relationships (Silva et al., 2019). Because of this, the BullyBlocker team, led by Dr. Yasin Silva and Dr. Deborah Hall, has spent the past couple years developing a mobile application called ActionPoint. Our team hopes that through this app, the risk of cyberbullying is drastically decreased and even prevented.

An Ocean of Stars is 310-page novel, written over the span of eight months. The story is one of friendship, love, loss, and finding home. It is centered on the idea that a human's deepest desire is to simply know who they are and where they're from. The two main characters, Alannis and Grey, go on an adventure to discover where they are really from--a hidden continent in the South Pacific Ocean--and stumble into friendship along the way. The novel is 82,000 words and is in the young adult fantasy fiction genre.

Bertolt Brecht, a noted East German poet and playwright, wrote in his poetry collection, Svendborg Gedichte (translated as Svendborg Poems), a question and answer which resonated not only in his own time, but throughout time: “In the dark times/Will there also be singing? /Yes, there will also be singing. /About the dark times” (Brecht). When Brecht wrote this poem, he was writing about the Nazi Germany which he had been exiled from, but a similar type of darkness has also spilled into today’s time period in forms including but not limited to political division, economic disparity, and environmental distress. At times, this can be understood as being similar to an apocalypse, or the time period which can be assumed as being world-ending. While the truly apocalyptic nature of today is debatable, the reporting style around these events has twisted this time period to be inarguably dark.
However, just as Brecht says, there is still singing.
Since the 2016 election, news media has become nothing if not more apocalyptic in reporting style. As a result, other forms of media, such as songs, literature, and artwork, have been reacting in two distinct modes: first, through a realism in describing the pain of those going through the events, and second, through a blind romanticism of the truth.
In this essay, I describe the origin of apocalyptic rhetoric, and the way that this type of rhetoric has unfolded throughout a few key moments of human history. From there, I move into a discussion of song as one form of a reaction to this, making sure to keep intact the dichotomous lines as described earlier. As an emblem of this reaction in the post-2016 era, I then analyze modern apocalyptic thought, and as an example of this reaction, I analyze the song “This is America” by Childish Gambino. I then look towards the future and theorize as to what type of singing will come from future dark times.

Like many other works of climate fiction, such as The Sea and Summer and Here, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 pictures a city of the future that has transformed as a result of the rising sea levels caused by a number of dramatic events due to human activity. As a larger genre, climate fiction can offer us a way to picture ourselves in a state of crisis still forthcoming and to help us better prepare for a future where drastic climate events are the new norm if not avert that future all together. Unlike other novels that focus on the anxieties felt over these changes, Robinson focuses on the logic that allows contemporary societies to refuse to confront climate change. The novel challenges the economic ideology that has brought us to our current state of climate denial—the novel is a critique of capital as much as it is a call to action to implement change in our struggle to save our planet.

This thesis project had three key components. First, we performed an extensive literature review of different types of feminist theories to better understand the scope of their definitions. We also reviewed several articles that examined how women, especially Latinas, seek to understand and negotiate their identity as feminists. Second, we conducted qualitative interviews with Latina college women in which they shared their college experiences, their thoughts on feminism, and how they believe the cultural values they were brought up with play a role in both. Finally, we developed a 12-minute documentary film containing excerpts from participants’ interviews that reflected a number of core themes. We invited participants to view the documentary and contribute to a post-film conversation with interested faculty members and students. The interactive post-film conversation served as a reflection and expansion of the themes in the film and challenged those that participated to explore avenues of resolution through family and communication.
The motivation for this project came from a place of reflection for what it means to be a feminist and Latina and how to navigate the values of both without compromising one over the other. After personally contemplating the meanings and process without coming to a concrete understanding, we were prompted to branch out and engage other Latina college students in a conversation about what it means for them, what unique challenges they may be facing, and how they may be seeking to answer questions surrounding their identity.

Through a combination of understanding dehumanization and the killing that results from it, one should be able to understand the reason why dehumanization comes about. Mental, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds must be understood to see how dehumanization is a complex process that requires all three factors to be effective. This requires understanding how the human mind works and the social systems that form once communities are formed. Ideas such as pseudospecies and essences are created to add legitimacy to this social distancing as language is also implemented to further separate one’s group from others. With this understood, one can find examples throughout history as one group battles another. The best examples come from soldier’s as they talk about their experiences in war. This involves understanding that war is not how it is portrayed in media. Killing is something that goes against human nature and it requires great strength to accept taking another’s life. Along with this, it is a much more complex process where killing is not always the ultimate goal. It is a more communal effort of acting as a group so that the opposing army flees or surrenders. This does not always work and sometimes killing is an inevitability. Now, not all killing is the same as there are “distances” that make some forms of killing more acceptable than others. This is combined with a soldier’s conditioning and drills so that they can overcome this initial fear of killing. It is a slippery slope however, as dehumanization and killing can lead to greater atrocities as people abuse the power they are trusted with.

Among the information learned and knowledge gained in a young adults first year of college, white privilege is arguably not the topic they are running home to share with their family during the semester break. Peggy McIntosh’s Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack essay, which first entered academia in 1988, attempted to better quantify students understanding of white privilege based largely on a set of 50 statements asking participants to evaluate their everyday experiences; centered largely on the influence that race has on those everyday experiences. The quantitative study I intend to distribute evaluates the effectiveness of Peggy McIntosh’s theories to identify white privilege in college students. The researchers will revise the 50 statements originally provided by McIntosh to 45 statements, making modifications to the existing language to ensure modern day relevancy. I intend to survey a sampling of young adults attending college with the revised survey created. The results will provide insight into the effectiveness of the Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack piece, which is widely distributed in 100-level Psychology, Women and Gender Studies, and Sociology classes, among others.

In today’s economy, advertisers understand that sex sells. The foundations of this concept, however, are influenced by patriarchal expectations that women are first and foremost sexual objects for men. Women are sold beauty and demeanor expectations for them to utilize when making themselves attractive for men and men are sold the idea of beautiful, docile women. This dynamic perpetuates strict definitions of acceptable gender displays and reinforces socially permitted gendered behavior. As a society in the 21st century, we understand the damage of sexist ideals, but where we fall short is in the monitoring of channels that perpetuate and maintain those stereotypes and how affected the public really is by the male gaze, and lack of a female gaze, in media. In this paper, I search for a female gaze, but in doing so recognize the inequalities inherent in yet another gendered practice of looking and instead steer the conversation towards personalized perspectives informed by an understanding of the dominant practice of looking and its inverse.

The primary perspective from which people are depicted in media today is shaped by the male gaze. The male gaze is comprised of patriarchal ideals and relies on the understanding that the spectator or viewer is a standard human being, which heteronormativity tells us is a man. From this perspective, the scope of visual representations of men and women in media has been molded after the hierarchized gender displays within which masculinity has primacy over femininity. By presenting a limited spectrum of behavior acceptable for men and women, the media hegemonically manipulates the social constructs of gender and gendered behavior across all levels of society.

This honors thesis applies semiotic and feminist methodologies to engage visual forms of media through art, film, and social media to challenge the social constructs of gender perpetuated and reinforced by dated stereotypes of gender and gendered behavior. First, the theoretical foundation will provide a framework for semiotic and feminist analysis of visual representations of gender in media. Then, I will present data representing the real-world impact that this social construction of gender has on adolescents in America using The State of Gender Equality for U.S. Adolescents, published by Plan International Inc. I will then bring together the explicated methodologies and evidential data alongside my own experiences as a female consumer of visual media to reveal alternative practices of looking that do not revolve around patriarchal norms, looking for a female gaze. In doing so, I hope to present recourse in the face of persistent use of sexist imagery across all levels of our culture and every medium of visual self-expression by providing tools that can be used to interrogate gendered perceptions and inform self-examination in pursuit of a feminist practice of looking.