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.

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.

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.

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

We asked a cross-section of our collaborators and community: What does it mean to be human, now? In these short films 11 contributors respond to the question, generously sharing their personal experiences of life and work during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Listen to a conversation between artist/writer Cheryl Martin and writer Rianna Walcott reflecting on their own experiences of mental health and care practices during and emerging from this global health crisis.