Welcome to My Honors Capstone!
As a student in the Western Washington University Honors Program, I have been given an opportunity to expand my view of the world. I grew up in a predominately white, and rural community where I did not have the opportunity to experience cultures other than my own. Shortly before Congressman John Lewis' death, I watched Ava DuVernay's Selma for the first time. I have always known about Martin Luther King Jr. and the march on Washington, but I had never realized how instrumental Lewis was during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Even though I have never experienced the type of discrimination that Lewis fought against his entire life, his death greatly impacted me. The fun loving man that crowd surfed on Colbert, and danced to "Happy" was no longer with us. Just like Congressman John Lewis, many of the courses that I have taken in the Honors Program have had profound impacts on my life.
Here are a few :
Here are a few :
HNRS 105: Major Cultural Traditions III
Richard B. Simon
Richard B. Simon
In HNRS 105, I was introduced to settler colonialism. Two books that I still think about are George Orwell's Burmese Days, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah. Through these books and this course, I was introduced to a point of view in history that I was not used to. For possibly the first time in my life, I entered the world of the colonized, not the colonizer.
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HNRS 218: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Anika Tilland-Stafford
Anika Tilland-Stafford
In HNRS 218, I learned a term I had never heard before, intersectionality. For a project in this course that focused on archival records from the Goltz-Murray Archival Building, I came across a complaint that Eunice Faber, a lecturer in the Foreign Language Department at Western, filed with the Washington State Board of Discrimination. Through my research, I was shown the intersectionality of race and gender that black women face every day.
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HNRS 352: Fake News or Power of Fiction
Cornelius Partsch
Cornelius Partsch
In HNRS 353, I learned the importance of truth through the first season of the Amazon Prime Original Series, The Man in the High Castle. Though a fictitious lens of history where Hitler and the Nazis prevail, it became quite clear how quickly our reality could head down a dark and disturbing path. Coupled with the true rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, I saw how easy it is to manipulate those that do not have access to truth.
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HNRS 358: Humor and Religion
Philip L. Tite
Philip L. Tite
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In HNRS 358, I explored how humor is often used to portray religion in our society. I viewed many forms of media, including this Simpsons video, that pokes fun at the difference between Protestant and Catholic Heaven. This is just one of many cases that showed how humor can be used to make a topic like religion accessible to more groups of people.
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