This thesis interprets and discusses the concept of representation of marginalized groups on television. The focus is on the character of Piper Chapman from the Netflix original series Orange is the New Black, and how her depiction is a unique kind of approach to the idea of The Burden of Representation. This idea theorizes that where there is representation, there is a duty held by the creators to tell a story that will not damage the communities it represents, as those stories shape the way the people who consume them think about said communities in real-life situations. However, if the creators were to construct a character or narrative that is perfect and “to-good-to-be-true,” that narrative may not be true to what is experienced by people in day-to-day life. One approach to this problem of non-damaging representation vs. genuine representation, is to create a character or narrative that is imperfect, but still a positive depiction. Not all “good” representation has to be perfect representation.
Through the examination of Piper Chapman’s character development, the narrative structure of Orange is the New Black, and the historical context of its representation in comparison to previous iterations, this thesis analyzes the unique way in which the show approaches its characters, setting, and storylines. The main subjects of analysis are Piper, and her girlfriend Alex Vause, each representing the bisexual and lesbian communities, respectively, and the major tropes that will be discussed are “the experimenting bisexual,” “the criminal lesbian,” “the vampiric lesbian,” and “bury your gays.” Each trope plays a significant role on the show, but the way the show uses its narrative structure and character development creates a new approach to the subversion of said tropes. Orange is the New Black focuses on telling a more human story rather than creating a perfect representation, while it still maintains a positive image for its characters.

Psychology and dance both shed light on the question: how do our personal, life experiences affect our movement? This document introduces elements from psychology and dance through associative learning, attachment styles, muscle patterning, and partner improvisation as ways of exploring this question. It aims to briefly introduce these theories and explain how they had a role in the research of the creative project. It also documents the inception, creation, and production of Lullabye, a dance work intended to be accessible to an audience with little to no experience viewing concert dance, with the target audience specifically being the writer’s mother. It has three sections, each featuring a different element of dance, storytelling, and individuality. It starts a conversation on how emotions and thoughts related to personal experiences can affect our movement.

“The Evil Box spilled, and someone has to clean it up. That someone rolls into a nothing town in search of an Evil driving possessed Mortals to violence. In saving the target of the attack, she finds a team of wannabe do-gooders intent on saving the world – or, at least, keeping it from becoming worse. Armed with apparent eons of experience, cynicism, and a not insignificant amount of Divine Intervention, they set out to contain the mythological Evils and their detriment to the world.”
In a world not unlike our own, Pandora opened the world to malicious Evils. With the world, as it is, the last thing it needs is additional evil. Enter: a group of people who are not responsible for the situation. Their only stake in the game is that it affects the world in which they live, and they’d really like to save it.
Following in the tradition of great female-led television dramas and rife with questions about the difference between culpability and responsibility, this modern continuation of the myth of Pandora –an attempt at a generational allegory - finds its form in a 60-minute single camera drama.
This Barrett, The Honors College Creative Thesis Project, consists of the first draft of a pilot screenplay, a corresponding “bible” (a compilation of information regarding the concept, story, and characters so as to facilitate its writing), and a reflection on the process undergone.

Directors make choices on how a movie is film, these choices effect everything in the film and there are multiple factors that go into that decision-making process. Directors usually make decisions based on the entire story and their vantage point of know everything. For example, a director might choose to make a piece of information known to the audience before the character’s know so that it raises tension. The creative project refers to this type of filmmaking as: “objective cinema”. The alternative is when a director makes decisions not based on the overall story but on the reality of a character(s). That is, filmmaking techniques are used in service of communicating a character’s emotional and situational reality.
The goal of such an exercise is to bring the audience closer to a character, typically the main character. A film is driven by the audience’s connection to the plot and the main character, who is typically the driving force behind the narrative. Having an audience closer to the main character is advantageous to give the audience something personal to latch onto. Getting invested in a single character’s story is a tactic that most films use and while some use traditional filmmaking styles to narrate the film, some put in these subjective moments.
Most movies include a mix of objective and subjective scene; however, the vast majority of screen time is usually objective. Subjective moments are just that, moments within a film where the filmmaking is visually distinct from before in order to communicate the transition into a character’ subjective experience of reality. The process of using cinematic techniques: sound, images and actors to create emotion is the focus of the thesis. What specific techniques do director and other filmmakers use to create these moments from the perspective of a specific character? The research on this creative project included reverse engineering scenes to firgue out the technical specifications that the filmmakers use. What kind of lighting, cameras and sound design where employed? Why were those techniques chosen to represent a character’s subjective reality? And most importantly, why do those techniques evoke those emotions?

For my creative project, I challenged myself to host my first ever photo gallery. After three years of documenting artists at music festivals and building an impressive portfolio, I felt inspired to display my work in a proper gallery setting. I partnered with another local music photographer and together, we hosted a collaborative pop-up photo gallery at Shady Park in Tempe. Research and analysis of the modernization and widespread success of the recent pop-up phenomenon suggests that hosting a photo gallery in this format is an effective way of appealing to a predominantly millennial audience. This notion was proven valid by the large volume of interest we received during marketing pushes, the high attendance at the gallery itself, and significant social media engagement and reactions received during and after the event. Although no prints were sold, the gallery was considered a success because it served its intended purpose of providing two young artists with a space to showcase work, open themselves to critique, and make new fans.

This performance attempts to decolonize possibilities for love through unarcheology, an invented method intended to re-narrate artifacts "dug up" by institutions of oppressive power and utilized in service of particular ideologies. Through unarcheologies of Sirhan Sirhan, the performer's father, and the performer's own body, the performance offers a critical call for us to examine the ways that colonial logics of criminality, threat, and wrongness always already implicate Palestinian bodies and our relations with them.
Rhetorics of criminality have long been written onto Palestinian bodies. From Dareen Tatour's imprisonment by the state of Israel to the U.S. detaining Adham Hassoun indefinitely as a "security threat", these rhetorics lead to material violence against Palestinians on a global scale, as well as on a discursive and interpersonal level. Communicative work which seeks to decolonize the Palestinian body in its various settings is vital to our survival in literal as well as symbolic ways. From a postcolonial perspective, we cannot extricate the individual from the communal, the local, the national, the global nor the universal. A postcolonial understanding of "survival" demands that we reflexively interrogate the Palestinian body in its sociohistorical complexity and on its own terms.
Autoethnography is uniquely situated as a method for postcolonial analyses of Palestinian survival. Chawla and Atay argue, "postcolonialism and autoethnography are inherently self-reflexive practices… that necessitate a centering of both the subject–object within a local and historical context" (4). In this performance, I introduce "unarcheology" as a postcolonial method for learning to love the Palestinian body. Using media and embodied performance, I stage a series of scripts comprised of poetic autoethnographic reflection, repurposed diary entries from an archetypal Palestinian "criminal," and the text of my father's indictment. These scripts, composed through a queer, collage-like method I call "unarcheology," are separated into temporal sections (past, present, and future) and audience members determine the order of their performance, thus demanding direct engagement in the performance's decolonial project. Staged on and around a single pile of dirt, this performance interrogates colonial barriers of criminality preventing the capacity to critically love Palestinians. It documents the survival that Palestinians are forced to embody- its goal, however, is the pursuit of critical, generous, decolonized love.

A posthuman figure like the female cyborg challenges traditional humanist feminism in ways that make room for theorizing new subjectivities and feminist epistemologies. Rather than support a traditional feminism that assumes common experiences within patriarchal society and erases differences among women, cyborg feminism moves beyond naturalism and essentialism to acknowledge complex, individual, and ever-changing identity. Three films, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), all offer such a vision of the female cyborg. In these films, the cyborg subject is a composite of machine and human—sometimes physical, dependent on the corporal mixing of flesh and machine, but just as often mental. Human sentiment, human memories, and human emotion merge with mechanical frames and electronic codes/coding to produce cyborgs. Importantly, every main cyborg in these films is coded as female. For each cyborg, a female body hosts preprogrammed sexuality and the emotions each creator thinks a woman should have, whether those are empathy, compassion, or submissiveness.

The cyborgs in these films, however, refuse to let categorizations like female, or even their status as human, alive, or real, restrict them so easily. As human-robot hybrids, cyborgs bridge identities that are assumed to be separate and often oppositional or mutually exclusive. Cyborgs reveal the structures and expectations reified in gender to suggest that something constructed can as easily be deconstructed. In doing so, they create loose ends that leave space for new understandings of both gender and technology. By viewing these films alongside critical theory, we can understand their cyborgs as subversive, hybrid characters. Accordingly, the cyborg as a figure subverts and fragments the coherency of narratives that present gender, technology, and identity in monolithic terms, not only helping us envision new possibilities but giving us the faculties to imagine them at all.

The thesis I completed for Barrett, The Honors College was created as a method to develop and strengthen my long-form storytelling abilities. The goal of my creative project was to create the first draft of a stage musical and mount it in a reading or workshop of some kind. I reached this goal and then some with the help of my directors and two wonderful Barrett students that helped me along the way: Mallory Smith and Ethan Fox. We completed the first draft of the show and then held a read-through with a full cast of actors, with almost twenty people attending.
Then, I went back and used some of the feedback from the read-through to write another draft of the show. However, along the way, I took a few major creative turns and ended up with a story that was similar to the first draft in many ways but was ultimately a larger divergence than I originally anticipated. This was a blessing, as it forced me to re-evaluate multiple creative decisions I’d made and gave me two long-form stories with great potential to work with rather than just one. It also presented multiple opportunities to combine and enhance both ideas in order to write one strong story using both concepts. The beauty of this Creative Project is that my portfolio is much stronger for having completed it and I now have multiple paths to choose from to move this project forward in the future.
In the defense, I discussed the grueling process of actually writing these scripts, hosting a read-through as well as the possibilities for both stories in the future. We also discussed the possibility of taking these scripts and pitching them to companies like Samuel French and in hopes that they’re sold, licensed and performed in perpetuity. I’m grateful to my directors, Professors Jason Scott and Gregory Maday, for always pushing me and cutting me slack when I fell behind and to my friends and the wonderful support the Honors College has given me throughout the last four years.

Educated is a single camera comedy developed as an adaptation of my and my friend Mazhar’s actual friendship through college into a 30 minute single-camera comedy show that attempts to portray a representative college experience in a way that has not been done before on television. I created a multi-faceted survey about the state of current content set on a college campus as well as elements of what respondents define as representative of a true college experience. My survey featured sections assessing demographic information, collegiate involvement, ability to recall films and TV shows set on a college campus, evaluation of the reality level of existing college films and TV shows, and viewership preferences. Those that took the survey believed that college as currently presented in film and TV is inaccurate and focuses on aspects like party culture over the true complexity of life at a university. In addition, respondents could recall significantly fewer college TV shows than films, and consistently rated that they did not feel represented by the university-set content that they had dealt with. Based upon this information and my own experiences throughout my four years at a university, I developed the concept for my show and wrote concept paragraphs for three 10-episode seasons of the show, with each season representing one academic year at the university. The show focuses equally on the lives of Mazhar and Eli, two high school best friends going to their state university and capturing their experiences with a diverse cast of friends, romantic interests, and professors.

Dale and Edna is a hybrid animated film and videogame experienced in virtual reality with dual storylines that increases in potential meanings through player interaction. Developed and played within Unreal Engine 4 using the HTC Vive, Oculus, or PlayStation VR, Dale and Edna allows for players to passively enjoy the film element of the project or partake in the active videogame portion. Exploration of the virtual story world yields more information about that world, which may or may not alter the audience’s perception of the world. The film portion of the project is a static narrative with a plot that cannot be altered by players within the virtual world. In the static plot, the characters Dale and Edna discover and subsequently combat an alien invasion that appears to have the objective of demolishing Dale’s prize pumpkin. However, the aliens in the film plot are merely projections created by AR headsets that are reflecting Jimmy’s gameplay on his tablet. The audience is thus invited to question their perception of reality through combined use of VR and AR. The game element is a dynamic narrative scaffold that does not unfold as a traditional narrative might. Instead, what a player observes and interacts with within the sandbox level will determine the meaning those players come away from this project with. Both elements of the project feature modular code construction so developers can return to both the film and game portions of the project and make additions. This paper will analyze the chronological development of the project along with the guiding philosophy that was revealed in the result.
Keywords: virtual reality, film, videogame, sandbox