Student Essay Awards

Prostitution has long been considered a lewd and blasphemous act. Even as more progressive attitudes have become mainstream, prostitution is… Continue reading Why Prostitution Should be Decriminalized

What happens when ChatGPT — a tool praised for its efficiency and practicality — is used on a “frivolous” task… Continue reading An Unworkable Crossword Clue with ChatGPT

In “Thinking Outside the Black Box,” Michael Brand begins from the seemingly innocuous image of a data processing center to… Continue reading Thinking Outside of the Black Box

In this essay, Vo shows that personal and critical reflection can build on one another to great persuasive effect. Linking… Continue reading Taking Comfort in Conspiracy Thinking

Judson’s essay cleverly weaves together readings of three main sources: Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010), Kendrick Lamar’s album,good… Continue reading Revisiting Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City: the Broader Effects of Incarceration on African American Communities

Smith’s powerful essay joins lyrical first-person writing with critical reflection in order to argue “for a remembering of the Atlantic… Continue reading the undercommons: Black ecologies and Atlantic portals

Goebels uses Jenny Odell’s New York Times bestseller, Doing Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019), as a lens through which… Continue reading Closing the Distance: From Collapse to Collection in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”

Calling attention to a gap in scholarship on bad trips among users of psychedelics, Shea argues in this carefully researched… Continue reading Are Bad Trips a First World Problem? The Path to Centering the Indigenous Perspective in the “Psychedelic Renaissance”

Abul-Hawa’s “Colliding Circles in Everything Everywhere All at Once” connects the acclaimed Oscar Best Picture winner of 2022 to Jay… Continue reading Colliding Circles in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”