The Broadcast Education Association (BEA) has given their 2025 Diversity and Inclusion Research Award to an insightful researcher from Ball State University, Femi Emmanuel Folorunsho.
Femi’s award-winning work took a deep dive into the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. His paper, which has a cool title – ‘Reimagining Futures and Challenging Norms: A Critical Analysis of Afrofuturism, Gender Dynamics, and Aesthetic Representation in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ – basically looks at how the film tells its story through the lens of Afrofuturism (that’s a blend of African culture and futuristic ideas), how it portrays women, and how it uses visuals.
Femi also gave a special shout-out to the amazing costume designer, Ruth E. Carter (who already has an Oscar!). He highlighted how her designs beautifully blend traditional African styles with futuristic fashion, which he argues is key to the film’s Afrofuturist vision and helps broaden how we see identity and representation in big movies.
As Femi himself put it, ‘Wakanda Forever doesn’t just continue a story; it changes it by putting Black women and African imagination front and centre. It’s so important to really think about how these kinds of stories challenge what we normally see and help us understand inclusion in cinema in a new way.’
Femi, who was born in Nigeria, is clearly a rising star in the world of media and cultural studies. He’s really interested in how African and Black stories from around the world are told. He’s shared his ideas at conferences and in academic journals, focusing on things like diversity and representation in the media. If you check out his LinkedIn, you’ll see he’s passionate about understanding media, identity, and how Black stories are evolving globally.
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