This research explores the practice of child marriage in Africa, with a primary focus on Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia through the lens of storytelling and narrative theory. Using qualitative narrative inquiry and grounded in transnational feminist and intersectional approaches, this study draws from survivor stories of child brides, legal frameworks, and lived community experiences to understand the cultural, Religious, legal, and economic factors contributing to child marriage. The goal is to identify the gaps between statutory law, customary and religious practices and demonstrate how storytelling can serve not just as a method of inquiry but also as a powerful form of resistance against child marriage. By using survivor voices and engaging with theoretical frameworks like Walter Fisher’s (1984) narrative paradigm, this study aims to shift the conversation from just statistics and data to the girls going through it, and contributing to global efforts to end early marriage.

Coming-of-age films depict a young character transitioning from adolescence to adulthood by undergoing a challenge, and over the course of a film, the audience watches their journey to overcome the challenges they faced. Although, simply seeing the challenges being faced on screen does not mean that we always know the underlying message being portrayed. “Mise-en-scène” is a term in film that describes everything we see in front of the camera and allows for the viewers to get a better grasp of the world within the film. The current literature around coming-of-age is very limited because it is a topic that has not been explored as much as other film genres or sub-genres. In my project, I analyze the visual storytelling in teenage girl coming-of-age films to see if there is a difference in the visual storytelling between the 1990s and 2020s. I anticipated that the newer films would have more artistic freedom compared to the older films because of the times in which they were produced and released. I examined six films that came out in the 1990s and six that came out in the 2020s and initially observed similarities and differences between the two groups of films. Then, I watched the films without audio to focus specifically on the visual aspects of the films. So far, there have been some noticeable differences between how the different decades have visually presented their versions of coming-of-age stories.

This two-phase project seeks to understand “women's” poetry, which as a genre is distinct from feminist poetry because it includes any poetry written by women, through a lens of queer phenomenology (Leahy, 2008). The first phase consisted of reading 16 anthologies of post-20th-century American women’s poetry. This reading was informed by queer phenomenological understandings of orientation, drawn from the work of Sarah Ahmed, and French feminist philosophy because of their discussions of writing. Using this lens, I selected 15 poems to write after. After-poems are a tradition of poetic conversation when a poet appropriates another’s form and style. In the second phase, the 15 after-poems were written with the aim to catalogue, converse with, and explore these women poets’ understanding of womanhood and their own relationship with writing. After their completion, the after-poems were assembled into a chapbook that explores and comments on the last century of women's poetry. Ultimately, this project seeks to inspect what a woman is and what exactly is a woman who writes?

This is a quantitative study that explores gender-based disparities in collegiate coaching by analyzing men's and women's head basketball programs at Big Green School (pseudonym) a prominent member of the Big Mideastern Conference. Drawing from recent Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) data, the research evaluates key categories such as head coach and assistant coach compensation, staffing support, program resources, recruiting budgets, and media exposure. Despite both teams being full-time, competitive programs with histories of success, preliminary findings show significant disparities. The men’s head coach earns over four times the salary of the women’s coach ($1.06 million vs. $259,688), and assistant coaches for the men’s team earn more on average than their female program counterparts ($261,916 vs. $73,556). Additionally, the men's program receives more in recruiting funds (over three times more), operating expenses, and overall program investment. While revenue generation is also higher for the men’s team ($25.7 million compared to $7.6 million), the scale of resource disparity raises critical questions about equity and Title IX compliance. This study contributes to the field of sports management and gender studies by offering a data-driven examination of resource allocation and institutional priorities. Its findings aim to inform universities about athletic policies, influence public and media discourse, and support broader efforts to achieve gender equity in collegiate athletics.