This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Scot Brown, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. A working musician and public commentator on Black culture and politics, he is the author of a number of popular and scholarly works including the 2005 book Fighting for Us, published by New York University Press. In this conversation, we explore the meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry, the relationship between cultural production and Black life, and the meaning of music and musical practice in the Black intellectual tradition.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Shaida Akbarian, who teaches in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, where she also earned her PhD in African American and African Studies. In this conversation, we discuss the complex meanings of Black Studies as an intellectual tradition, a political disposition, and the various impasses and hesitations that lie at the heart of the relation between those two aspects of the field.

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with David Green, who teaches in the Department of English at Howard University in Washington, D.C. where he also directs the first year writing program. In addition to a number of articles on critical writing and race, he is the editor of Visions and Cyphers, a writing studies textbook that emphasizes culture and language research in composition studies. In this conversation, we discuss the place of language and writing in the Black Studies tradition, the function of expressive life in the field, and the future horizons of critical inquiry into Black life.