In this interview with Dr Rianna Walcott, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland and King’s Alumni, we discuss careers in academia. Rianna talks through her own career journey and demystifies the process of pursuing an academic career – something she had to navigate as the first person in her family to do so. She also discusses her experience as one of only a handful of Black academics in the UK higher education system, including the unpaid labour that often falls upon Black members of staff, as well as how this compares to her experience in the US university system.

The Black Podcast is joined by Kelechi Okafor, Sequoia Holmes, and Dr. Rianna Walcott. In this episode, The Black Podcast discussed Black language. We played a word association game to compare Black British vs. African American slang particularly used in California, the DMV, and Baltimore. We looked at similarities and contrasted different ways we use slang in different regions. Then we talk about how each of them got into podcasting as a way to break barriers to Black conversation.
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Kelechi Okafor is from Britain, has Nigerian heritage, actress, director, astrology lover, and The creator of the “Say Your Mind” podcast that ended on January 29, 2024. This podcast looked at current affairs and popular culture through a Black British lens. Now she is the host of the new podcast “Meet Me at The Altar” published in March of this year. You can find her Instagram, @kelechnekoff.

Sequoia Holmes is from California, loves astrology, and has been podcasting since 2016. She is currently on her 4th podcast. She is the host of the podcast “Black People Love Paramore.” Funny enough, *not* a Paramore podcast. This podcast explores the common & uncommon interests of Black people. You can find her on Instagram: @bplppod

Dr. Rianna Walcott is from the UK and is a communication professor at the University of Maryland. She Works in the Black Communication and Technology Lab at the Communications department. Her research focuses on Black British identity presentation in social media spaces. 
This episode was produced by Madeline Seck.

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter on October 31, 2022 has left Black Twitter reeling in the wake of over a year of turbulence, with constantly changing affordances rendering the service less and less functional. In response to this upheaval the future of the platform is under question, as Black users debate whether to stay and weather Twitter’s declining functions, or to turn to other platforms that could potentially fill the space left behind following the decline of the social media giant. 
This field review frames the history of Black Twitter as both coparticipants in the platform’s design and transgressive reconceptualizers of its intended functions, as a practice of adapting Twitter into a viable home. Using migration as a metaphor, I examine how transmigration (Sharpe 2016)—both the movement across space and the changing of space from one form to another—is a condition of transatlantic Blackness that has mapped onto the digital. Black Migration—both voluntary and involuntary, physical and digital—converts unfamiliar and hostile terrain into a home via transformations that adapt spaces to Black community needs. I argue that processes of transforming social media spaces function as an ownership claim for Black users, and position Twitter as a central platform within a hypernarrative ecology of social networking systems, to question what factors are instrumental in coaxing Black users to social network services to form discursive communities.

​Rianna Walcott, a postdoctoral associate in the Black Communication and Technology Lab at the University of Maryland shares how we can prioritize long-term self-preservation for people of color and how to stay whole while driving social change. Recorded Feb. 15-17, 2023 at the frank gathering (frankgathering.org)

A blogpost highlighting my current work as a DISCO/BCaT Lab Fellow

Social media platforms are a key part of our everyday lives, playing a significant role in everything from our media consumption, to our purchasing habits, to our political beliefs. However, the platforms we have come to rely on are not passive containers for content - they play a large, often invisible, part in mediating the content they host.

This interview was recorded on 7th October 2022. Click our Audio button to listen to the full interview on Anchor.

In this webinar we find out more about the impact of algorithms and bias on who is seen and heard in the digital sphere, and how, or even if, their creative work is presented to the world.

​Join Rianna Walcott and the UCL Writing Lab on Zoom for an event on the praxis of citation. Drawing on her own research, Rianna will discuss how she addresses including lived experience and personal voice in her writing, privileging underrepresented voices through citation praxis, and how to curate a radical bibliography. There will also be an interactive element to this event that invites attendees to reflect on how they can similarly address these issues in their own research practice.