Episode 82 - Rianna Walcott & Black Twitter

Welcome to episode 82 of Lexis, in which Raj, Dan and (guest interviewer and friend of the pod) Amanda Cole talk to Dr Rianna Walcott, Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, and Associate Director of the Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) Lab. We discuss her 2023 PhD, A Tweet at the Table - Black British Identity Expression on Social Media. We talk about:

• Black community, identity and self-expression on social media

• Black Twitter

• Sociolinguistic work on Black British English and MLE

• Language online and offline

• Black feminist thought and its influences on this project and more

• Rianna’s current work

You can download the thesis here (and the most language-focused part is chapter 5): https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/studentTheses/a-tweet-at-the-table 

Rianna’s website is here and you can find some of the other papers and links mentioned: http://www.riannawalcott.com/ 

The Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) Lab is here: https://www.bcatlab.org/ 

Lexis is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lexispodcast.bsky.social 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ 

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys