S1/E1 Black diasporas, anglo-centrism & positionality (ASA, Hawaii)

Guest hosts: Rianna Walcott is an LAHP-funded PhD candidate at King’s College London researching black identity formation in digital spaces, and a graduate twiceover from the University of Edinburgh. She co-founded projectmyopia.com, a website that promotes diversity in academia and a decolonised curriculum. She frequently writes and interviews about feminism, race and literature for publications including gal-dem, Dazed, The Skinny, Huffpost, Vice, The BBC, the Metro, the Wellcome collection and The Guardian. 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. Her work can be found at riannawalcott.com and she tweets at @rianna_walcott. Francesca Sobande is a Lecturer in Digital Media Studies/Director of the BA Media, Journalism and Culture programme at Cardiff University's School of Journalism, Media and Culture. Francesca is author of The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (forthcoming, 2020) and co-editor (with Professor Akwugo Emejulu) of To Exist is To Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (2019). She is an affiliate of the Data Justice Lab and communication co-chair(with Dr Naya Jones) of the Race in the Marketplace Network. Yomaira Figueroa works on 20th century U.S. Latinx Caribbean, Afro-Latinx, and Afro-Hispanic literature and culture. Her current book project, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature, focuses on diasporic and exilic Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Equatoguinean texts in contact - https://english.msu.edu/faculty/yomaira-figueroa/