Rianna Walcott is a postdoctoral fellow in the Black Communication and Technology Lab at the University of Maryland, and part of the DISCO Network. Walcott will be joining the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland in Fall 2024 as an incoming assistant professor. Her research takes a mixed-methods approach to investigating Black British social media usage, incorporating interviews and discourse analysis across various sites in order to examine digital communities, the circumstances under which they are created, and the constraints they face. This research investigates if and how discourse varies in different contexts with different demographics, and how social network services—and their attendant harms—impact how Black users express themselves.

Walcott cofounded projectmyopia.com, a website that promotes inclusivity in academia and a decolonised curriculum, and she was the UCL Writing Lab’s Scholar-in-Residence for 2021–2022. She frequently writes about race, feminism, mental health, and arts and culture for publications including the Wellcome Collection, the Metro, the Guardian, BBC, Vice, and Dazed. Walcott is coeditor (with Dr Samara Linton) of an anthology about BAME mental health in the UK, The Colour of Madness (Pan Macmillan, 2022), and she moonlights as a professional jazz singer.