Black Homeplaces: An Archive of Diasporic Making
Black Homeplaces: An Archive of Diasporic Making
The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies invite you to join us for the first talk in our 2026 Affiliate Speaker Series. Black Homeplaces: An Archive of Diasporic Making with Dr. Rianna Walcott will take place on Wednesday, September 30, 2026 at 4:30 PM in SQH 3105 and online.
Black Homeplaces is an inter-institutional, collaborative research project centering diasporic placemaking. Bringing together 30 collaborators and 17 projects from across the United States, South and Central America, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and West Africa, Black Homeplaces explores overlaps between Black domestic experiences across the diaspora.
Multimodal outputs including video games, soundscapes, oral histories, artwork, storymaps and 3D scanned artefacts are housed within a virtual reality (VR) installation of an archetypical Black home. The eclectic furnishings of the house reflect tension between notions of home as personal, familial and intimate; versus generic experience characterised by shared cultural objects and inherited rituals—such as glass cabinet display cases, religious iconography and plastic-covered sofas. Drawing on precedents such as Carrie Mae Weems’ Kitchen Table (1990-1994) photography series and Michael McMillan’s West Indian Front Room (2005; 2021) installation, the project situates a co-created Black home as a site of memory, metanarrative migration histories, and Afro-futurity that collapses a critically fabulated past with an imagined future.
Black Homeplaces prioritises a collaborative, counter-institutional archival praxis. We offer the home as a living archive, reflecting historic and ongoing flows of migration that locate ‘home’ with respect to where we are now, and where we have come from.
Dr. Rianna Walcott is an Assistant Professor of Communication at UMD, Associate Director of the Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) Lab, and director of the Black Homeplaces project. Rianna’s research explores Black (and specifically Black British) mediated communication, locating ‘Black British’ identity against the wider Black diaspora.