Sakyra Abbitt

Sakyra’s research explores how Black cultural knowledge is created, transformed, and remembered across media. Her work examines how Black digital expressive practices enable new forms of memory-making and archival production, while simultaneously shaping popular culture. 

Sakyra Abbitt is a first-year doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. At the forefront of her work, Sakyra is interested in examining the intersections of Black technoculture, memory, and Black feminist praxis. Specifically, her research explores how Black humor, as a form of Black expressiveness, functions as a site of cultural production and memory work. She asks how Black humor’s genealogies inform contemporary digital practices and how other vernacular media circulate and repurpose Black culture. Through a Black feminist lens, she positions Black women as primary agents whose creative practices reshape digital communities. She is also thinking about the ways that Black joy and Black nostalgia function as prominent forms of Black expressiveness online and what these affective practices reveal about the ways Black communities imagine and sustain belonging. 

Before joining Annenberg, Sakyra received her B.A. and M.A. in Media Studies from the University of Virginia. Her Master’s thesis explored Black women’s social positioning and their representations on Black reality television, using both historical and contemporary instances of Black technoculture to illuminate the multiplicity of Black women’s identities and Black audience reception. After receiving her Master’s degree, Sakyra became a research assistant for Archiving the Black Web (AtBW). 

She gained hands-on experience with web archiving as a practical and methodological tool for studying Black digital culture. Her research project focused on preserving Black digital literary communities, placing a focal point on Black women creators who are working to uniquely circulate Black authorship on TikTok. Sakyra also had the opportunity to become an instructor for AtBW’s Web Archiving School. Sakyra’s work with AtBW continues to guide her approach to research and community, shaping her commitment to remembering Black digital histories and exploring the cultural practices that are born within online spaces.