Communication Studies major presents research at Undergraduate Research Conference

Communication Studies major (2B) Orobosa Uwaifo was selected to give a paper at the Nipissing University Undergraduate Research Conference in North Bay. The annual conference celebrates the contributions of student research at Nipissing University and across Ontario. Students from any discipline can apply to showcase their work in a professional setting before their peers, faculty, and the public.
 
Uwaifo’s presentation was titled “Lights Out: Performance, Resistance, and Belonging in Nigerian Boarding School Life.” It explored nightly gossip (“gist”) sessions at Nigerian boarding schools as part of a nightly ritual called “lights out” where students were expected to be asleep, but found ways to creatively violate this rule. Through the lens of performance theory, Uwaifo analyzed interviews, first-hand observations, and social media. Gossip, her research shows, is a serious business:
 
Lights out in Nigerian boarding schools is a nightly performance where institutional power, personal identity, quiet resistance, and emotional community intersect. Its meaning is not fixed, rather it shifts across generations, across social hierarchies, and across the simple fact of who is awake once the lights go off. Over time, this ritual has become a shared cultural script preserved in memory, shaped through digital storytelling, and continuously re-performed by boarding students who find themselves living inside the same script their seniors once acted out.
 
Uwaifo’s research emerged from her capstone project for COMMST/THPERF 220 Performance Studies, where students explore social ritual and embodied behaviour. Reflecting on her experience at the conference, Uwaifo notes, “being able to present my research to other people helped me see the value in what I was studying beyond just what it would reveal for me personally and for the community I was studying, but what value it could bring to people outside of the community under consideration, and the field of my research.”
 
Uwaifo encourages other undergraduate students to consider sharing their own research: “I gained a lot of valuable insight and feedback just from people asking questions, and the conversations I had with other participants and attendees[…] It was such a welcoming environment, where everyone was genuinely curious about what each person brought to the table […] I would say just do it! […] If not for anything else, do it for the exposure and the experience.