The past two and a half semesters have been extremely difficult for college students. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, student motivation has been slipping. I felt my own productivity slowly diminishing shortly after March 2020, and a number of students that I have spoken with share a similar mentality. In addition, the social lives of students have taken a toll. Social distancing, event cancellations and online classes have led to a serious lack of social interaction with their peers. I felt as though the theatre community, in particular, was suffering, because of how much of our lives are centered around social interaction. Not only is social interaction recreational for us theatre students, but it’s integral for our careers as well. We are very conditioned to getting together multiple times a week just to experience emotion with each other, and this was all taken away very abruptly in March 2020. The remaining theatrical events last season were cancelled, and the events this season were mostly moved to an online setting. I began to think that the theatre community at ASU needed some way to stay connected despite these unfortunate circumstances, and that is when I found out about Alpha Psi Omega. Alpha Psi Omega is a National Theatre Honors Society which used to have a chapter here at ASU, so I took it upon myself to reactivate the chapter.

Research has shown that being a female athlete in a male-dominated sports world is an oppressive burden, yet the experiences of being a black female athlete have been largely ignored. To combat this lack of attention, this paper invokes communication and feminist theorist Bell Hook's concept of moving black women from margin to center to reveal the intersectional oppression of gender and racial narratives that they face in sports. By outlining the difference between white and black femininity and studying media portrayals of popular black female athletes such as Venus and Serena Williams and others, it becomes obvious how black women are typecast into certain social and athletic roles. This research also includes an auto-ethnographic component of my own experience as a black female lacrosse player at the NCAA Division I level. This component functions as a point of comparison and contrast of the ideas and concepts I discuss. Lastly, I offer recommendations and suggestions as to how to empower young black female athletes and retain them in a variety of sports. The goal of my thesis is to place special attention onto black women in an area which there is an extreme lack of representation. My own empirical research has led me to the conclusion that not only is such a discussion important, but it is absolutely necessary. If we are to fight back against hegemonic social structures such as racism and gender roles in the sports world, we must first understand what we are up against. My thesis gives us a glimpse into our imposing opponents, and I hope that future research continues this trend so that black female athletes like myself may one day be considered an athlete in the same sense that our white peers are.

Building on research on family communication and forgiveness, this study seeks to understand how families communicate the value and practice of forgiveness. Through semi-structured interviews, the study asks participants to recall their formative conversations and experiences about forgiveness with their family members and to discuss how those conversations influenced their current perspectives on forgiveness. Interviews from five female undergraduate students yielded seven main themes from where individuals learn how to forgive: 1) Sibling conflicts, 2) Family conversations about friendship conflicts, 3) Conversations with Mom, 4) Living by example, 5) Take the high road, 6) “Life’s too short”, and 7) Messages rooted in faith and morality.

The media often portrays and the public often percieves white women and women of color politicians experience feminist obstacles, such as the masculine-feminine double bind and being dehumanized in the same way. Many of these representations of women of color politicians in society do not incorporate the impact of intersectionality and confining gender schemas; therefore, women of color politician’s experiences are often lumped together with that of their white women counterparts. This phenomenon ultimately contributes to the persistence of color-blind racism in the United States, which negatively effects the life outcomes of women of color politicians and women of color in general. In effort to help lessen the effects of color-blind racism locally and in government, some tools on how to reflect on one’s own biases are provided and avenues for change are proposed.