I’m writing a thesis?!@
The purpose of this post is to flesh out, informally, some of the thoughts and updates about my upcoming thesis project that I have developed over the last few (summer) months.
- I want to integrate both my concentration – Literary Landscapes of the American West – and my second major – English Literature – into my thesis/capstone project.
- I did research with summer with Dr. Liz Safran regarding earthquake messaging, the efficacy and power of stories, the creation of media, and the representation of humans, human characters, and human systems interacting with earth systems and “the environment” in the context of disaster.
- Potential questions:
- How effective are fictional stories and fictional characters in the endeavor of inciting behavioral change?
- What does it mean for an audience to relate to, identify with, or sympathize with, a character?
- What genres (realistic fiction, satire, science fiction/fantasy, mystery, etc.) are more effective in a) inciting behavior change in an audience, and/or b) inciting identification with characters?
- What are the ethics of representation for artistic and scientific purposes?
- Potential methods:
- Using data and records from summer research, I can utilize survey data regarding our 2×2 experimental structure to analyze how our audience related to characters according to the conditions set by the experiment.
- I can analyze the research notes from the summer in the context of ethics, literary theory, genre decisions, and interview researchers about their beliefs regarding the project.
- I can create short fictional pieces depicting the same event in different genres, either in film or short story forms, and conduct similar tests and surveys to the pilot study.