The Digital Lives & Research of Black Women in Britain: A Reading List

 
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By Dr. Francesca Sobande, Rianna Walcott, and Keisha Bruce

A reading list from our event on “The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain” featuring Dr. Francesca Sobande, Rianna Walcott, and Keisha Bruce.

On Tuesday, October 6th, 2020 at 12:30 PM EST/5:30 BST, Black Women Radicals hosted the online conversation, "The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain." The event featured Dr. Francesca Sobande, Rianna Walcott, and Keisha Bruce. Topics discussed included exploring the digital lives of Black women in Britain; how COVID-19 impacted research and the digital lives of Black women; erasure, exploitation, and commercialization of Black women’s productions; and the future of digital Blackness and Black digital organizing.

You can watch “The Digital Lives and Research of Black Women in Britain” on YouTube.

About the Panelists: Dr. Francesca Sobande is a lecturer in digital media studies at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University. She is Course Director of the BA Media, Journalism and Culture programme and is an affiliate of the Data Justice Lab. Francesca's work focuses on digital culture, Black diaspora, feminism, creative work, and the experiences of Black women. She is author of The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and is co-editor with Professor Akwugo Emejulu of To Exist is To Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (Pluto Press, 2019). Francesca tweets at @chess_ess and more about her work can be found at francescasobande.com.

Rianna Walcott (she/her) is an LAHP-funded PhD candidate at Kings College London researching Black women's identity formation in digital spaces, and a graduate twiceover from the University of Edinburgh. She co-founded projectmyopia.com, a website that promotes inclusivity in academia and a decolonised curriculum. She frequently writes about feminism, mental health, race and literature for publications including gal-dem, The Skinny, The Wellcome Collection, The Metro, The Guardian, The BBC, Vice, and Dazed. Rianna is co-editor of an anthology about BAME mental health––The Colour of Madness––and in the time left over she moonlights as a professional jazz singer. Rianna tweets at @rianna_walcott and more about her work can be found at riannawalcott.com .

Keisha Bruce (she/her) is a Midlands4Cities-funded PhD researcher in Black Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests include Black popular culture, diasporic visual cultures, and digital media representations. Her PhD thesis explores Black women’s digital visual cultures on social media with a particular focus on how identity is mediated, and diasporic community is fostered online through processes of visuality and affect. Outside of her thesis she is currently undergoing an archiving project on Black girlhood in Britain. You can find her on Twitter at @keishastweets.

The Digital Lives & Research of Black Women in Britain Reading List

  • Sobande, Francesca and Osei, Krys (2020) “An African city: Black women’s creativity, pleasure, diasporic (dis)connections and resistance through aesthetic and media practices and scholarship”. Communication, Culture and Critique 13(2): 204–221. Open access pre-print: http://orca.cf.ac.uk/130525

Forthcoming events related to Digital Lives & Research of Black Women in Britain


Groups/Resources List for The Digital Lives & Research of Black Women in Britain

*Some of these groups/resources focus on the digital experiences of Black women in Britain. However, aligned with the broader discussions that we had during the Black Women Radicals session on “The Digital Lives & Research of Black Women in Britain”, many of these groups/resources focus on other aspects of the lives and research of Black people in Britain.


Blogs, Digital Platforms, and Websites

Instagram Pages and Creative and Curatorial Projects:

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