Rianna Walcott
Assistant Professor, Communication
Associate Director, Black Communication and Technology Lab, Communication
Affiliate Faculty, Department of African American and Africana Studies,
Affiliate Faculty, Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland,
Affiliate Faculty, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Education
Ph.D., Digital Humanities, King's College London
Research Expertise
Diaspora
Digital Cultures
Digital Humanities
Race and Ethnicity
Rianna Walcott is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, Associate Director of the Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) Lab, and a former DISCO Network Postdoctoral Fellow. An alumna of the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP), Dr. Walcott earned her PhD in Digital Humanities at King's College London for her research on Black Black (and specifically Black British) communication practices across social media platforms, locating the evolution of a hybrid ‘Black British’ identity against the wider Black diaspora.
Publications
‘Gen Z Language? Y'all Mean AAVE’: The Appropriation of African American Vernacular English as ‘TikTok Language’
Recent research on AAVE features as "TikTok/internet language"
Author/Lead: Rianna WalcottSociolinguistic research has long documented the appropriation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) across media including film, music and advertising. In this article, we add to this body of work by exploring the digital recontextualisation of a subset of AAVE features as ‘TikTok/internet language’. To do this, we analyse metalinguistic discourses of linguistic appropriation in a corpus of 178 TikTok videos. We identify two main competing discourses: On the one hand, a concern regarding the indexical erasure of AAVE as a variety of English spoken by Black Americans; and on the other, claims of a new register of ‘internet language’. Concluding, we argue that, in the participatory context of social media, the circulation of the label ‘TikTok language’ poses an issue for the raciolinguistic enregisterment as a ‘Black variety’ of English.
Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal
New publication by the DISCO Network, "Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal"
Author/Lead: Catherine Knig…, Rianna WalcottTechnoskepticism explores possibility and refusal in relation to new technologies, covering a wide range of pressing topics from Munchausen syndrome by TikTok to wellness apps to online communities to AI. This book was co-written by an intergenerational group of 14 scholars in the DISCO Network, a consortium of investigators working to envision a new anti-racist and anti-ableist digital future. Technoskepticism features scholarship by COMM Associate Professor and Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) Lab Director Dr. Catherine Knight Steele, and COMM Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the BCaT Lab Dr. Rianna Walcott.
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