Policy trends show that pregnant women have been detained in ICE facilities since as early as 2015. As the laws and policies have continued to shift, pregnant women have become more exposed to being detained. Executive Order 13768 made by former President Donald Trump effectively removed all protections against being detained for pregnant women. While the previous policy exempted pregnant women from being detained aside from in extraordinary cases, this executive order puts women at increased risk of being detained while pregnant. The Trump Administration's goal of protecting the American people and promoting national security puts women in a position in which their health status is no longer seen as a detention exemption. There is almost no published work on this topic. It is extremely under-researched and there is an urgent need for more academic, legal, and medical research on the impacts of detaining pregnant women. This paper functions to fill a very pressing research gap in order to highlight the experiences of pregnant women in detention centers and the health outcomes they face as a result of their status as detainees. I argue that detaining pregnant women is a form of gendered violence as it puts them at increased risk of maternal health complications, such as preterm birth, low birth weight, and more. While more women migrate to the United States, the laws and policies regarding detaining pregnant women are often contradictory and it is difficult to ascertain the true number of pregnant women in detention centers. In this paper, I examine the preceding factors to female migration, the climate of detention in the United States, the policies regarding pregnancy, and the outcomes that women experience.

The thesis project merges interdisciplinary research to develop a self-directed creative intervention for immigrant youth, allowing them to make sense of their social and cultural identities. It takes research on self-awareness, multicultural identification, perceived belonging, and bibliotherapy to create a guided journal titled "Unearth," filled with art and writing prompts that are age-appropriate for adolescents and that serve as avenues for self-exploration. The project ultimately engages a focus group discussion to understand the usability and accessibility of the intervention.

Religion and gender are two contemporary, heavily influential social identity markers that the media engages with. In India, Bollywood simultaneously interacts with religious and gender identity by producing many movies on Hindu-Muslim inter-religious romantic relationships in the twenty-first century. Bollywood’s Hindu-Muslim romance movies are stories with a central focus on a romantic relationship in which one lover is Hindu and the second is Muslim. The masculinity and femininity of the Hindu and Muslim characters are not accidental; it is meticulously articulated in every movie. This thesis explores two sets of patterns in the movies: themes in love stories and gender identity across the protagonists. It is important to note that representation of religious identity in Bollywood is highly debated with a special emphasis on Muslim identity since they are a religious minority and the political "Other". This thesis acknowledges that the presence of Muslims in Bollywood is complicated and not black and white, but it focuses on the representation of Muslims that is connected romantically with Hindus.