Amidst the Black Spring of 2020, I found much of my exposure to and understanding of Black interiority and experience, Black history, institutional racism, police brutality, and other topics at hand to be coming from the young, Black, femme content creators I encountered on TikTok rather than my public-school education. Meeting at the intersection of Black and performance studies, communication, education, and sociology, this research seeks to answer the questions of how social media, specifically TikTok, serves as a site of informal education and how the digital performances of young, Black, femme content creators serve to shape this education. To address these questions, I examined the TikTok profiles of five content creators fitting the above qualifications with follower counts in the millions and varying niches across a three-month period. Attending to these archives through the lenses of norms and aesthetics, I’ve come to find that, among other observations, young, Black, femme content creators are educating the general public both intentionally and unintentionally on a plethora of topics, but consistently with a significant emphasis placed on joy. In a political landscape where Black history and truth are under attacked within the traditional education system, we must begin to recognize and create space for the immense value of informal education that occurs outside of the classroom and the performances that make it possible.

The emergence of induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSCs) have allowed researchers to better study the effects of various diseases and mutations on fetal development. One such way of accomplishing this is the breakthrough of the organoid: a complex, iPSC-derived, 3D structure, that provides biologically relevant models for human systems. Lung Organoids (LO) were developed through this technology. However, the current LO models utilize mature lung phenotypes, which do not consider progenitor stages that may be critical for fetal development and the understanding of diseases that may affect this development in utero. The goal of this project is to provide characterization to the early stages of iPSC LO development: the Embryoid Body (EB) and Anterior Foregut (AFE). Using a previously established protocol, the LOs were fixed with 4% paraformaldehyde (PFA) on day 4 (EB stage) and day 6 (AFE stage), then analyzed with immunofluorescence analysis of the corresponding fetal lung (FL) development markers. 135 day old FL tissue sections were used as a positive control. The markers used to establish characterization were SOX17, a marker for the early endoderm germ layer, OCT4, an iPSC marker for pluripotency, and ECAD, a marker for tissue layer separation and cell migration. We hypothesized that all markers would appear in the EB stage, and the AFE stage would experience an upregulation in SOX17 and downregulation in OCT4 and ECAD. My results confirmed an upregulation of 133% for SOX17 and a downregulation of OCT4 by 58% from the EB to AFE stages. Lastly, as hypothesized, ECAD was present in EBs, but not in AFE. In conclusion, the LO stages proved to be similar to developmental stages of in utero development. Further analysis could help with new disease and mutation models for early development in utero, helping prevent devastating outcomes.