Join us for February’s UCL Writing Lab event with Rianna Walcott, Jade Bentil, Jessica Brough and Dr Xine Yao, where this roundtable will discuss what it means to be a ‘scholar-activist’: from discussions around the tension inherent to the label, how they maintain a radical politic within the British academy, and the ways in which we can all contribute to building a better world.

​Join us for February’s UCL Writing Lab event with Scholar-in-Residence Rianna Walcott, Jade Bentil, Dr Jessica Brough and Dr Xine Yao, where this roundtable will discuss what it means to be a ‘scholar-activist’: from discussions around the tension inherent to the label, how they maintain a radical politic within the British academy, and the ways in which we can all contribute to building a better world.

Join scholar, singer and writer Rianna Walcott for a tour of the 'Joy' exhibition. You’ll hear her personal views and insights into the exhibitions and have the opportunity to ask questions.  

​Join our 2021-22 Scholar-in-Residence Rianna Walcott for a talk focused on her PhD research, where she will discuss the mechanics and ethics of researching social media communities. Here she will discuss the ethical and citational requirements for social media research, the need for self-reflexivity when researching your own community, and how to write about and analyse social media spaces as a text.

Thesis abstract: In Black British digital networks an ever-changing, hybridised way of speaking has emerged that synthesises aspects of Black dialects from across the diaspora. This language is used both as part of a performance of self and to signal belonging to a Black group identity, as linguistic choices are a way that online actors are able to curate their narratives of self-representation. Through observation of different digital social spaces, this study will investigate how language is disseminated between geographically and culturally disparate people who self-identify as Black, and how Black British social media users perform linguistic acts that contribute to an articulation of a group ‘Black British identity’ online.

​Join Scholar-in-Residence Rianna Walcott and Dr Francesca Sobande for an in-conversation event about the act of writing, guided by Francesca’s maxim, that became Rianna’s mantra, ‘Everything is Writing’. Here they will discuss the multiple modes that academic writing can take, from the traditional essay, to blogging, to Twitter threads, to in-conversation podcasting, the radical potential that different kinds of knowledge transmission has for transforming the academy, and understanding your own rhythm for writing and processing information.

This workshop will explore how to make our academic writing exciting, and deconstruct an exemplary essay to help us think about how we might do that. The essay Rianna will use is Hall, Stuart (1984) ‘Reconstruction Work: Images of Post War Black Settlement’. 

This is the first of 4, in conversation with, from women with aspirations to become the first Black, female astronaut in the UK to media trailblazers, artists and activists. Four women from across Rotherham communities meet the women giving them hope in these strange and uncertain times. Langa, Sile, Sabine and Neema are all women from Rotherham with African heritage making their own mark in the town and the wider world. Join them as they discuss hope, health and happiness with some of the UK’s leading Black women artists, scientists and community leaders from across the Women of the World network

Rianna, Project Myopia
Rianna shares how an idea she had at University has grown into a resource that is helping UK academics navigate decolonisation.

To my family’s great surprise and dismay, a career in the British university system is not often a lucrative or successful one, especially for a Black woman. It did not take long for this to become evident to me. A brief look at my undergraduate cohort and the PhD researchers, staff and senior academics around me revealed vanishingly small numbers of Black scholars, let alone Black female scholars.