This ethnography outlines the live storytelling culture in Phoenix, Arizona, and what each of its sub-cultures contributes to the city's community. Phoenix's live storytelling events incorporate elements of an ancient art form into contemporary entertainment and sophisticated platforms for community building. These events are described and delineated by stylistic, structural, and content-based differences into the following categories: open-mic, curated, scripted, non-scripted, micro-culture, and marginalized groups. Research presented in this report was collected by reviewing scholarly materials about the social power of storytelling, attending live storytelling events across all categories, and interviewing event organizers and storytellers. My research developed toward an auto-ethnographic direction when I joined the community of storytellers in Phoenix, shifting the thesis to assume a voice of solidarity with the community. This resulted in a research project framed primarily as an ethnography that also includes my initial, personal experiences as a storyteller. The thesis concludes with the art form's macro-influences on Phoenix's rapidly-expanding community.

This creative project includes a self-reflection, four original compositions by Drew Hensley, and supplementary song commentaries. The self-reflection section of the project contains an extensive look into how Hensley's musical experiences and upbringing influenced his song writing process and compositional voice. Specifically, the piece analyzes how Hensley's gravitation to jazz music and musical styles of various cultures influenced the chord structures, rhythms, and melodies in his pop compositions. The track list for the project includes "Do It Anyway," "Puppeteer," "You Really Kind of Suck at Love," and "Drag You Down." Each piece includes lyrics and composed sheet music for vocals and instruments including guitar, piano, bass, and violin. The pieces were supplemented with commentaries describing specific inspirations for both the lyrics and music. "Do It Anyway" discusses Hensley's decision to pursue music and takes inspiration from classic American jazz melodies and Latin jazz rhythms. "Puppeteer" addresses the complexities of control through the metaphor strings. The piece pulls inspiration from the double harmonic scale often associated with Arabic music. "You Really Kind Of Suck At Love" addresses a break up through expertly placed humor and sarcasm. The piece is a new take on the standard 12 bar blues song form. "Drag You Down" tells of Hensley's personal struggles in music using thoroughly developed metaphors and chord progressions native to American rock music of the 1990's and 2000's. Together, the work will be recorded as an Extended Play entitled Do It Anyway. Hensley plans move to Los Angeles, California and use the recordings to pursue a career in pop music performance.

This paper is an examination of my own personal experience living and studying abroad in Scotland and how this experience relates to the concept of tourist versus traveler. The concept of tourist versus traveler is found in many different work of travel writing. Paul Fussell described the tourist versus traveler idea best. Travelers, according to Fussell, "learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government, they learn, if they are lucky, humility." The aim of this project is to look at the differences between a tourist and a traveler is reference to my own personal experiences studying abroad. After spending a semester living and studying in Scotland I noticed that my behavior had changed, becoming more likely to try new things and immerse myself in Scottish society, instead of seeing the important historical places. I spent five months living in Scotland and during this time I noticed that the more time I spent abroad the less I wanted to do the tourist traps and the more I wanted experience Scotland through the parts of the country most generally would not see. My paper moves from my experience as a tourist to later in the semester when I had been living there for a while. This work can also be used to examine what living and studying abroad is like for students. Different countries have different ways of handling education and this work can help highlight these differences.