Featured Work
Four projects from my graduate study, each followed by the program competencies it demonstrates.
Centerpiece
The Duality of the Southern Thing
How New Media Is Providing a Paradigm Shift for the Semiotics of Southern Symbols
Intercultural Communication & Global Perspectives
Source.Master of Arts thesis, Gonzaga University, December 2020. Supervised by Dr. Michael Hazel. Presented at the Gonzaga Leadership Symposium in 2021 and at CSCA in 2023.
The question.How does new media, specifically social media and podcasts, change the way contested Southern symbols are understood by opening space for voices long left out of the debate?
The frame.The study draws on Bormann’s Symbolic Convergence Theory, the Cultural Approach to Organizations, and Stuart Hall’s Cultural Studies to read symbols like the Confederate flag and Confederate monuments as meanings that shift over time rather than fixed pieces of history.
The method.A qualitative study built on interviews with thought leaders and close examination of podcasts, set against the 2020 racial reckoning and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Why it matters.The thesis argues that the slower, deeper spaces of new media let marginalized voices reframe symbols whose original context had been buried under what the work calls Southern cognitive dissonance. It is personal as well as scholarly, opening with my own family history in Alabama, which is part of what makes it land.
What it demonstrates.Original research, theoretical fluency, qualitative method, and the ability to hold a difficult cultural subject with both rigor and voice.
Digital Storytelling: Racial Justice in the American Southeast
Digital Storytelling & Content Creation
Source.COML 505, Digital Storytelling, Gonzaga University. Short documentary video produced in iMovie and published to YouTube.
Context.For the final project, I built a short film from roughly a decade of my own photographs and video taken across civil rights and racial-justice sites in the Southeast: the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Kelly Ingram Park and the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the Brunswick, Georgia community where Ahmaud Arbery was killed, and the covered Confederate monuments in my own city of Macon, on ground where enslaved people were once sold.
My approach.I combined my original footage with remix culture, drawing a clip from PBS NewsHour and audio from Bishop Rob Wright’s For Faith podcast, with full citation. Aesthetic choices carried the message: I kept the film black and white with fade transitions, then shifted to color at the segment on the protest artwork to signal a way forward. I framed the piece with an opening epigraph on the cost of inaction and closed with Dr. King’s words from Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I deliberately chose not to narrate, so the work would support the story rather than center me in it.
What it demonstrates.Digital storytelling craft, remix and fair-use literacy, visual rhetoric tied to message, audience framing for a general public, and ethical restraint in whose voice leads.
View the video on YouTube
Ethical Action Plan for St. Peter Claver Catholic School
Ethical Communication & Trust Building
Strategic Communication
Public Relations
Source.Organizational Ethics course, Gonzaga University. Critical analysis action plan.
Context.The assignment was to design an ethical plan to influence a real organization. I chose my employer at the time, St. Peter Claver Catholic School in Macon, a Title 1 Catholic school serving a majority-Black, high-need community where over 76 percent of students receive aid. The goal was to grow awareness, enrollment, and donor support through social media without compromising the school’s mission.
My approach.I built the plan on established ethics frameworks: Rest’s Four Component Model, Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Values anchored in benevolence and universalism, Potter’s Box for the central dilemma, Weber on organizational legitimacy, and servant leadership from Johnson. I designed a community-speaker video program, mapped stakeholders across leadership, faculty, parents, and the diocese, and worked through the hard question directly: whether a white-led organization promoting majority-Black students for fundraising could do so ethically.
What it demonstrates.Applied ethical reasoning inside real communication strategy, servant leadership in practice, stakeholder analysis, and trust building across constituencies.
Outcome.The program launched with early gains in engagement, with short and long-term indicators defined for enrollment and donor growth.
Leadership Symposium Presentation
Influence, Persuasion & Negotiation
Source.Gonzaga University Leadership Symposium, 2021. Proposed and delivered a presentation of my thesis research.
My approach.I distilled a 10,000-word thesis into a tight, persuasive abstract for the review committee, then presented the work to a live symposium audience, leading with the tension at the heart of the research and the role of new media in reopening the conversation.
What it demonstrates.Persuasive proposal writing, public presentation of complex scholarship, and audience-specific framing. Alongside the later CSCA 2023 presentation, it shows the research traveling to more than one scholarly audience.
Watch the Leadership Symposium presentation
