BCaT Closes Out Another Year
As we close out the academic year, we look back on the last couple of months at BCaT to celebrate the scholarship and mentorship occuring at our lab.
In April 2024, Dr. Catherine Knight Steele gave the keynote address at ‘Black Digital Humanities Symposium: Weaving Black Futures’ hosted by the Jackson State University Department of Art and Theatre and the Diversity Working Group at the University of Toronto. During her talk, Dr. Steele discussed her most recent co-authored book, Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality, and shared some of the projects and work from the BCaT Lab and beyond.
For April’s BCaT Book Club, we read Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age by Dr. Raven Maragh-Lloyd. This text examines how Black users employ resistance strategies such as humor, care, and archiving in response to their oppression within digital Black publics and offline. Dr. Maragh-Lloyd visited the lab and met with readers to discuss her book and answer questions from students with similar research topics. Those in attendance enjoyed delicious burrito bowls and a fruitful discussion on documenting Black culture and digital practice.
On April 18th, The DISCO Network hosted their 3rd annual Graduate Scholars Lightning Talks, providing this year’s graduate scholars the opportunity to present research they developed over f this academic year. Among the scholars showcasing their work were BCaT Fellows, S. Nisa Asgarali-Hoffman, Jessica Rucker, and Tynesha McCullers.
Nisa’s discussion, “Ambiguously Brown: Resisting the Myth of Racial Authenticity in Genetic Ancestry Testing”, interrogated the limitations of assigning racial authenticity based on genetic ancestry tests. Jessica presented, “Keep it Black, Keep it Brief, and Keep it Online: Lessons from a Pedagogical Influencer”, which examined how Lynae Vanee Bogues’ Parking Lot Pimpin’ series builds upon African-American history to teach about contemporary Black life on social networking sites. Tynesha’s talk, “BPG[Dot]Com: An Examination of Black Grief and Commemorative Practices in a Digital Context”, explored how Black people utilize social media platforms as communal spaces to navigate loss and bereavement. We’re proud of the scholarship our fellows presented at this event.
The Black Digital Migration collaborative research team has been hard at work these last couple of months preparing outputs for our project. Our postdoctoral Fellow and BDM Project Lead Dr. Rianna Walcott, had an article published in April by Just Tech: ‘#RIP Twitter: The Conditions of Black Social Media Platform Migration’ which discusses the impact of changing platform affordances on the migration practices of Black social media users.. We were excited to welcome back Dr. Kenton Rambsy, Associate Professor of African-American Literature at the University of Texas-Arlington, to provide consultation to us on our research and share best practices for data storytelling. After consulting with Dr. Rambsy, we reviewed and cleaned our dataset several times to strengthen our methodology, formulate comprehensive visualizations, and prepare them for publications. The team met 2-3 times a week and conducted cleaning independently for close to a month to ensure the groundwork was laid for our writing retreat. During this retreat, which took place over the course of three days, BDM team members came together to write an academic paper, draft a methods paper, create visualizations, and develop a data story in Tableau. Our website has been updated to include our newest data visualizations alongside our interactive timeline and research methods, and you can also hear about how the Black Digital Migration Project came to be by checking out episode one of the BCaT podcast.
The lab was thrilled to host our end of the year BCaT Showcase on Wednesday, May 1st. For three hours the lab was open to students, faculty, and visitors to check out our space, hear from fellows and affiliates about their research projects, learn about resources and workshops we offer, and explore ways to get involved. The event included refreshments and great conversation. During their visit to the BCaT Lab, the DISCO Network co-PIs participated in a mentorship lunch where they were paired with graduate students with similar research interests and academic pursuits. Graduate students were able to share their goals, receive advice, and build their network over a delicious meal. Hours following the mentorship lunch, the co-PIs reflected on their academic careers, their most famous publications, and the impact of their early work on their current research in a panel titled “From Here to There”. After the panel, the co-PIs connected with audience members and networked over light refreshments at a reception.
Congratulations are in order for our Director, Dr. Catherine Knight Steele, who was the recipient of the Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Award. Of 33 nominations across campus, only 10 faculty members were selected for their mentorship and critical contributions to graduate studies, and we at BCaT could not be more proud of Dr. Steele! Assistant Professor of Communication and former BCaT Fellow, Dr. Briana Barner, received a Douglass Center Grant Award for Summer 2024 honoring her publicly engaged research and service. For her extraordinary work as a community builder, informal mentor, collaborator, and volunteer in student organizations, BCaT Fellow, Alisa Hardy, received The Misti Yang Impact Award from the Department of Communication, the Outstanding Teaching Assistant award and the Ann Wylie Dissertation Fellowship.
To support her investigative and solutions-focused reporting on substance and behavioral addiction, treatment and recovery, BCaT Fellow, Tynesha McCullers, was awarded an inaugural grant from Reporting on Addiction. In recognition of her leadership and scholarship within her discipline, BCaT Fellow, Jessica Rucker, was inducted into the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. BCaT Fellow, Abigail Rosario, was awarded research and digital humanities skills grants from the Diaspora Solidarities Lab Life X Code presented by John Hopkins’ Who Owns Black Data: Slavery & Data Conference with the Criadas Project in the Taller Entre Aguas Macrolab. The Chelona UMD Rhetoric Society of America Chapter elected BCaT Fellow, Andrew Mohammed, as incoming president for the upcoming school year. We are excited to officially announce that our postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Rianna Walcott, will be coming to the end of her time as a postdoc, and beginning her journey on the tenure track as an Assistant Professor, and as Assistant Director of the BCaT Lab from fall 2024. Huge congratulations to all of our team members and lab affiliates for their accomplishments this year!
By Tynesha McCullers
