Abstract "Empty Horizons": A Creative Writing Piece Max Harmon "Empty Horizons" is a creative writing piece composed of two different short stories sharing a common narrator. The first story "Can you dig it?" details a trip the narrator takes to South Dakota to go hunting shortly before starting college. On the trip the narrator contemplates certain aspects of his life and the events of the story serve as a vehicle to explore the narrator's mindset as an eighteen year old about to start a new phase in his life. The second story "Toads, Sharks and Beautiful Encounters with Uncertainty" takes place during the summer before the narrator begins his last semester in college as he attends the funeral of his recently deceased grandmother in Hawaii. During the trip to Hawaii, the narrator meets a girl his age and they are able to bond with each other over feelings of loss and uncertainty. In this story the narrator explores his feelings about life with college graduation on the horizon and comes to terms with some of the anxieties that have been plaguing him since the start of college. By detailing these two distinct and important time periods in the narrator's life the reader is able to gain a sense of understanding in regards to the narrator's own process of beginning life as an adult.

This thesis looks at how feminist biography is used as a part of mainstream feminism in the United States. In particular, I look at how Sheryl Sandberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter share their experiences in the workplace in an effort to illuminate the struggles they have faced as women and to justify the changes they see necessary for the success of women. They base their argument for these changes on their own social assumptions about women in the private sphere and women at work. Their feminist biography may serve to help a small set of individuals, but overall the solutions they provide are applicable to only a limited demographic of women. The ultimate goal for both Sandberg and Slaughter is to achieve equality, although they base their call for change on a normative understanding of the world. In the end, I look at how a broader view of feminism that takes into account the intersection of race, class, gender, and politics can enrich popular forms of feminism in the U.S.

This project was designed to capture family stories. Three generations of family members were interviewed on the topics of work and family, using oral history methods. The following trends in thinking were identified after analysis of the interview transcripts: education, work ethic, attachment to place, importance of mothers, and divorce. These trends were then further analyzed to see how they affect the family members across the three generations. Additionally, connections were drawn to significant factors in United States and Arizona history to help explain why things are the way they are in the family.

Since its inception, the Affordable Care Act has prompted many different genres of discourse within governmental, media, business, and cultural realms. The narratives common in each realm, as well as the means by which they are shared, influence the everyday consumer and overall image of the act (Fairclough 1995, 2003). These discourses shape a sense of what is possible. Through critical discourse analysis, focusing on both how the authors felt constrained by the message they must deliver and the way in which established discourses shape what is possible to imagine about health care in the future. In particular, I want to focus on how the federal government shaped the discourse on the Affordable Care Act around the concept of human rights and implied privilege and how this shaped the way in which the act was perceived by the general public.