This paper analyzes the semiotic features and sociopolitical commentary of anti‐hegemonic Vine racial comedy in videos of Viner King Bach. The following analysis demonstrates that Vine racial comedy is heavily influenced by the generic features of African American stand‐up and sketch comedians and existing multimodal genres of online discourse, but King Bach's adaptation of these features to the unique affordances of the Vine platform situates Vine racial comedy beyond the boundaries of the genres it draws on. Analysis of this digitally mediated multimodal discourse demonstrates that, while not deterministic, the medium through which discourse is constructed can significantly impact how a discourse genre is conceptually understood by expanding the semiotic resources through which the sociopolitical and discursive goals that define a genre are accomplished.

In response to the lack of culturally sustaining pedagogies for Black students in linguistics, we created an online Introduction to Linguistics course designed as part of a specially funded research program that serves Black undergraduates from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) as well as Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). In recognition of the fact that conventional introductory linguistics courses often alienate Black students, the course was designed to center Black language and culture in every lesson. We describe the rationale for and implementation of the course, as well as the impact of the model on students and instructors. The course's Black-centered content as well as its online synchronous and asynchronous teaching model can be adapted for other teaching contexts as a way to recruit Black students into linguistics and to offer linguistics courses to students at universities, especially HBCUs, that do not have linguistics programs. The work is particularly relevant as linguists seek to be inclusive in their teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic and work toward the greater inclusion of Black people in every aspect of linguistics due to the heightened awareness of anti-Blackness in higher education and specifically in language studies.*

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In response to the lack of culturally sustaining pedagogies for Black students in linguistics, we created an online Introduction to Linguistics course designed as part of a specially funded research program that serves Black undergraduates from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) as well as Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). In recognition of the fact that conventional introductory linguistics courses often alienate Black students, the course was designed to center Black language and culture in every lesson. We describe the rationale for and implementation of the course, as well as the impact of the model on students and instructors. The course's Black-centered content as well as its online synchronous and asynchronous teaching model can be adapted for other teaching contexts as a way to recruit Black students into linguistics and to offer linguistics courses to students at universities, especially HBCUs, that do not have linguistics programs. The work is particularly relevant as linguists seek to be inclusive in their teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic and work toward the greater inclusion of Black people in every aspect of linguistics due to the heightened awareness of anti-Blackness in higher education and specifically in language studies.*

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Please check back later for the full article. Foundational linguistic anthropological theories of community, identity, and multimodality, among other topics, offer invaluable insights into communicative practices on social media. Linguistic phenomena on social media also require researchers to adapt and update these theories continually to account for the unique communicative possibilities afforded by constantly evolving digital technology. These principles were originally conceptualized before social media was an integral part of everyday life. –Like linguistic anthropological studies in in-person contexts, linguistic anthropological studies of language online vary in scope, theoretical framing, and methodological approach, depending on the central topics of inquiry. Social media may be studied within a primarily in-person ethnographic project as one of many sites of linguistic practice for members of a community in addition to (or overlapping with) contexts such as work, school, and home. Social media may also be studied as primary sites of analysis through digital ethnographic approaches, typically focused on the communication patterns within a network or community of social media users on a single platform. Linguistic anthropological perspectives on social media are necessarily interdisciplinary and informed by scholarship in related fields, including sociolinguistics, cultural anthropology, communication studies, media studies, and sociology. To this interdisciplinary understanding, linguistic anthropology contributes a unique perspective attuned to the details of linguistic structure and the ways in which language and culture are mutually constitutive.