For my Honors Creative Project, I want to create a medium for me to share my story and what resources that have helped me at my time at ASU as a first-generation student and a female in STEM. This project went through different phases as I tried to solidify an idea for my end project with opinions of my Faculty Director and friends. With the help of Barrett, I was able to purchase my own equipment and create my podcasts in my own space. I ended up doing a series of interview podcasts with other ASU students and blog posts. The podcasts and blog posts revolve around the experience of different students at ASU and their respective schools with ASU, as well as resources they used and know about.

Personal experiences with body image dysmorphia and an eating disorder necessitated that I do a thorough investigation into why they happened and why I felt this way about my body. For this project, not only was I motivated by my own struggles, but I noticed that these experiences were shared among my family, my friends, and my fellow peers in the dance community. We had been struggling since childhood. I began to realize that these behaviors and thought patterns were manifestations of apology, an apology that women have been learning, living, and spreading since our beginnings. Why do women apologize? How does this apology affect how we view, treat, and navigate our bodies in space? In what ways can dance be the mechanism by which we remove apology and individually and collectively find joy, freedom, and liberation? Not only was I interested in understanding the ‘why’, but I was deeply interested in finding a solution. Research for this thesis came from written materials, stories that the dancers and I shared, and choreographic research in the body. The final goal was to create a community-based performance of dance, spoken word, and storytelling that demonstrated the findings from each of those questions and catalyzed a conversation about how we can liberate ourselves. We used rehearsals to explore our own experiences within apology and shame, while also exploring how the ways in which we practice being unapologetic in the dance space can translate to how we move through the world on a daily basis.

Through a deep analysis and application of Sonya Renee Taylor’s book The Body Is Not An Apology, I discovered that apology is learned. We learn how to apologize through body shame, the media, family/generational trauma, and government/law/policy. This apology is embodied through gestures, movement patterns, and postures, such as bowing the head, hunching the shoulders, and walking around others. Apology causes us to view our bodies as things to be manipulated, discarded, and embarrassed by. After recognizing why we apologize and how it affects our bodies, we can then begin to think of how to remove it. Because the body the site of the problem, it is also the site of the solution. Dance gives us an opportunity to deeply learn our bodies, to cultivate their power, and to heal from their traumas. By being together in community as women, we are able to feel seen and supported as we work through uncharted territory of being free from apology in these bodies. By dancing in ways that allow us to take up space, to be free, to be unapologetic, we use dance as a practice for life. Through transforming ourselves, we begin to transform the world and rewrite the narrative of how we exist in and move through our bodies as women.

It is a widely accepted fact that the fashion industry is the second most unsustainable industry in the world, just behind oil (Qutab, 2016). Although some research would like to suggest that fashion is more sustainable than it actually is, it is indisputably a huge contributor to waste and something obviously needs to change (Friedman, 2018). When people hear about how unsustainable the fashion industry is, they usually think about fast fashion and how quickly clothes are being produced, purchased, and then discarded. What most people probably do not think about is that visual merchandising is also a large reason the fashion industry is considered so unsustainable. Visual merchandising is the act of displaying merchandise in a way that makes it attractive to consumers (Business Dictionary, n.d.). For example, most of the props, signage, decor, and fixturing that are used to create the whimsical window displays seen on Michigan Avenue or Rodeo Drive are simply thrown in the trash after use. This is a problem because the turnover for window displays is almost as fast as it is for merchandise. Tons of materials are trashed week after week, season after season, and year after year. As a fashion minor and someone who works in visual merchandising for two different companies, I have seen firsthand just how much waste is created from making a store look beautiful. Because of this, I wanted my creative project to highlight the issue of sustainability in the fashion industry, and more specifically, in visual merchandising. The goal of this project is to demonstrate that you can create a beautiful and captivating window display using recycled materials. To do this, I created three pieces to be used in a window display that I constructed out of discarded props, signage, and decor that I collected from different stores such as Crate & Barrel, Michael Kors, and Free People. A display that is made out of recycled materials does not need to look like a pile of garbage, but can look just as beautiful and inspiring as a display made entirely of new materials. In creating these three pieces out of recycled materials, I aim to prove that visual merchandising can be more sustainable in ways that are not as difficult as one might think, and help spark a change in the fashion industry as a whole.

Ciao is a product and digital application that allows people with celiac disease to gain control over their health as well as lead a more freeing life. The product is a compact cooking set that keeps utensils safe from the common cross-contamination that can be life-threatening to a person with celiac disease. The application allows people to find new restaurants that will be safe for them to eat at, scan the barcode of common food products for 8 of the most common allergens, and provide the most up to date research about celiac disease. Within the app, they can also find a sense of community by connecting with other members.

The purpose of this review is to determine how to measure and assess human trust in medical technology. A systematic literature review was selected as the path to understand the landscape for measuring trust up to this point. I started by creating a method of systematically reading through related studies in databases before summarizing results and concluding with a recommended design for the upcoming study. This required searching several databases and learning each advanced search methods for each in order to determine which databases provided the most relevant results. From there, the reader examined the results, keeping track in a spreadsheet. The first pass through filtered out the results which did not include detailed methods of measuring trust. The second pass took detailed notes on the remaining studies, keeping track of authors, participants, subjects, methods, instruments, issues, limitations, analytics, and validation. After summarizing the results, discussing trends in the results, and mentioning limitations a conclusion was devised. The recommendation is to use an uncompressed self-reported questionnaire with 4-10 questions on a six-point-Likert scale with reversing scales throughout. Though the studies analyzed were specific to medical settings, this method can work outside of the medical setting for measuring human trust.

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of the arts (visual arts, music, dance, and theater) in educational settings. It also sought to identify current teachers’ perceptions of the arts as a teaching methodology. Arts in education is an expanding field of research and practice distinguished from arts education due to its investigation of learning through arts experiences. Arts experiences in classrooms can occur through a variety of mediums such as visual arts, music, dance, theater, and more. Specifically, this study examined how teachers perceive using various art forms and activities in the classroom to help students learn and communicate what they know, how frequently on average teachers use various art forms and activities in their classrooms, teacher attitudes and potential concerns about the arts in education, and why teachers would use the arts and what would make them use them more.

In this work, I will explain how objectivity in relation to news has changed over the years and why “traditional” objectivity should no longer be a core journalistic standard. I will explore objectivity in the Information Age compared to its formation. I will address the prevalent issues of white privilege and implicit bias issues within the media. Objectivity has been the unrealistic standard for journalism in the United States for over 100 years, and the American public deserves accurate information. A new form of objectivity needs to be established that is more transparent of biases and affiliations, while pushing for inclusive and diverse reporting. As journalists, we need to be thinking of what the future of journalism should be and how we can better serve fellow citizens.

Time is an important issue for most of us, and as we grow older, we become increasingly aware of it. We save it, waste it, spend it, value it, and somehow never have enough of it. It’s something we are all familiar with and pay attention to, yet is difficult to define and understand. It simultaneously acts as our limitation and our opportunity, and serves as the invisible but all powerful dimension that limits our reality to happening only one event at a given time and place. The limitations of time force us to make active choices on how we spend it. This simple fact causes time to have a very influential and significant role in our lives. Due to this, each one of us begins to form a unique relationship with time that has an enormous impact on how we live our lives. As we grow mindful of our consciousness and the timelessness of the present, our psychological time seemingly disappears. We can begin to see time not only as something we cannot control, but also as a tool that helps us live our lives to the fullest. Time’s three main domains of past, present, and future all provide their own set of opportunities and obstacles. These domains act as types of lenses through which we see the world, ultimately forming our time perspective. During my junior year, I became increasingly aware of my relationship with these domains of time, and realized that the majority of my stress, anxiety, and fear stemmed from either dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. Moreover, that kind of time perspective had a negative impact on my life and wellbeing. I was inspired to make a change in my life by living more in the present, appreciating every little moment and acknowledging who and where I am today. For this thesis creative project, I created an experimental short film that represents the essence of time and its presence in our lives. The overall goal was to inspire others to reflect on their own perception of time, and inspire them to be more present and appreciate every moment in their lives. Writing, directing, producing, and filming this film on my own required an extensive pre-production process of writing, drafting, securing locations and coordinating schedules. Setting deadlines, being open to surprises, and learning quickly is what made this production successful. The entire process from forming the idea to pre-production, production, and post-production allowed me to grow and develop immensely as a filmmaker and creative storyteller.

Half of the global population lives in cities, 80% of GDP is generated in cities, 70% of carbon emissions are produced in cities (Prakash 2). The actions of city-dwellers are becoming more and more important. The following paper is an exploration into how cities are coping with this responsibility- particularly how they’ve kicked the door in for the natural building movement.
This thesis reflects the importance of bottom-up change. Government regulations might help make certain solutions more affordable, but this won’t help if the market doesn’t first demand it. This is why it’s up to green builders and product developers to innovate solutions that accentuate the modern way of life.