In recent years more attention has been placed on Black Women and the challenges they encounter around professionalism in work and school spaces. These challenges often focus on how Black Women present themselves in white-dominated settings, including their choices regarding physical appearance, body language, and attitude. Existing literature from my recently conducted literature review identified four key themes related to perspectives about personal and professional identity, perspectives on code switching as professional practice (Conformity and Resistance), perspectives on Eurocentric and Afrocentric hairstyles, and the conflicts/paradoxes in identity development. Drawing from theories of Double-Consciousness, Cultural Capital, and Intersectionality my qualitative case study will examine how do Black Women develop and balance their personal and professional identities. In this study, I will interview 5-6 Black women between the ages of 18-22 to explore how they do this in predominantly white settings. All things considered, this project will emphasize the importance of identity construction and its influence on this particular group.

The study's objective is to examine the Latino population's involvement in politics and possible techniques to increase that involvement in future years. There is a substantial list of reasons why Latinos are a group that is not as politically involved as other demographics. Yet, these same reasons can also demonstrate how their involvement has increased over the years and can continue to grow. The materials used in this study are various scholarly articles discussing the Latino vote during the election of Obama and Trump as well as research on the topic of immigration. This includes data about different voting patterns between races/ethnicities regarding immigration and turnout. The findings throughout the study show that exclusion, stereotyping, anti-immigrant stances, lack of knowledge, and grievances play a role in stopping eligible Latinos from political involvement and voting but at the same time, they raise a high level of emotion, motivating them to take action and vote. These findings aim to help change the mentality of many eligible Latinos and promote them to reconsider their decision to withhold their vote. It is hard to say that Latinos can come together to form the same ideology because that is not the case, but Latinos are one of the largest minority groups in the country. They have the potential to influence many aspects of government if their political presence grows from what it is now.

Samara Airy Perez Labra Public Policy and Sociology University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Undergraduate senior; airy@live.unc.edu “Indigenous Latin American Migration, Settlement and Language Preservation in the American South” The purpose of this project is to examine the migration experiences of Latin American Indigenous migrants with attention to how they preserve their native language(s) and learn new ones. In the end, the research findings will highlight the additional obstacles that this group has to endure despite the widespread view that migrants from the southwestern hemisphere are typically viewed monolithically, under the term, “Latinos”. To do so, interviews will be conducted with individuals who were born in a Latin American country and speak an Indigenous language. In addition to conducting interviews, oral history interviews from various archives will be analyzed. These interviews will be examined through qualitative analysis, and it is hypothesized that there will be prevalent cultural and linguistic differences due to various migration patterns and assimilation processes. In another component of the research project, the researcher’s study abroad experience(s) will be integrated that provides a transnational lens of how the Spanish language is utilized in comparison to the States. This research project will provide a greater understanding of how the sociopolitical and historical context support the preservation of Indigenous and Spanish languages in the U.S.