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