BCaT's Vibrant Fall Return
The leaves are turning orange, the mosquitos have gone back to the deepest and darkest part of the earth, and there is a faint pumpkin smell in the air which means it’s officially fall and the BCaT Lab is back and in full swing! We have been having an exciting year of research, academic inquiry, and innovative work focused on Black digital humanities! We are excited to open back up our writing lab, book club, BCaT eats, and so many more events for our BCaT community!
So far this semester we have held several amazing events within the BCaT Lab community. As the semester began, we opened up the Lab with an information session introducing our Black Homeplaces Collaborative Project, the newest DISCO CoLAB occurring over the 2024-2025 academic year. In September, we featured an academic job market clinic aimed at assisting graduate students with the preparation of their job-market materials. In November, we had the privilege of hosting an amazing panel from a group of expert panels geared toward graduate students who are interested in a career outside of academia. The panel featured speakers from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Museum of African American History, and independent scholars working within diversity, equity, and inclusion advisory boards, highlighting the different fields one can become involved in outside of traditional academic jobs. We will be having more exciting events in November, including a guided Museum Tour of the Nation Museum of African American History in DC and a community viewing of Black Twitter: A People’s History!
This year, we have two new members joining the BCaT Lab team. Arianna is our new Undergraduate Social Media Assistant. She has been the brain behind the Lab’s social media presence, newsletter, and social media platforms. Arianna is excited to be working within the BCaT Lab, and believes more members of the community should be made aware of communities like the BCaT Lab. She will be continuing her work on building the Lab’s outward facing presence and is very excited to be a part of further building up the BCaT community. Her goal for the end of the year is to reach out and inform others on the benefits of involvement with the BCaT Lab, spreading the word of how welcoming and insightful she feels the Lab community is.
Roshida, our new website and scheduling assistant, is our other new member on the BCaT Lab team. She has been working very hard to make our website as fun and vibrant as the Lab is and is doing fantastic work! Roshida says that being a part of the BCaT lab this semester has been incredibly fulfilling. As the sole re-designer of the website, she has had the opportunity to further strengthen the Lab’s voice as an organization and create a seamless experience for those visiting the BCaT website. As the year ends, she looks forward to seeing the Black Homeplaces collaborative project further develop, and getting the chance to foster and be in community with different artists, scholars, researchers, and more.
We also have a new BCaT Graduate Fellow in the Lab this semester! Andrew has been a member of the BCaT Lab since he was an undergraduate, working alongside Dr. Walcott and Dr. Steele in a similar role to our current undergraduate team. This semester, he has been working alongside Dr. Walcott on the newest BCaT Collaborative Project exploring the Black Homeplace. Andrew is thrilled to be a part of the BCaT lab, and moreover, to be brought on as a Graduate Fellow. He has been assisting during the transition to the Black Homeplaces Collaborative project, and wrapping up the previous BCaT collaborative project focusing on Black Digital Migration.
We are very excited to finish up our Black Digital Migration research project that delved into the different communities on the popular social media platform “x” (formerly known as Twitter). The Black Digital Migration project has been wrapping up well, with the collaborative team beginning to send out their scholarly outputs. These essays have taken different routes, exploring the collaborative team’s experience with methods amidst a changing social media landscape, and findings surrounding Black digital migration during Elon Musk’s twitter takeover. We are looking forward to working on our Black Homeplaces Project which is a VR/AR project that reimagines Black homeplaces and placemaking across the African diaspora. The project’s key outcome will be an interactive XR exhibition featuring an archetypal Black home, enriched with oral histories, artwork, essays, and more. This project is being led by the BCaT Lab’s very own Associate Director, Dr. Rianna Walcott who is also an assistant professor at The University of Maryland.
