The Black Studies Podcast

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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, graduate 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 writer and critic Dionne Ford. In addition to a number of pieces in popular and writerly venues, she is co-editor with Jill Strauss of Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (2019) and the author of Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing (2023). In this conversation, we discuss the role of study in creative writing, the place of memoir and storytelling in the study of Black life, and the intimacy and social significance of Black writing.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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, graduate 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 writer and poet Khalisa Rae Thompson, who is co-founder and co-director of Griot and Grey Owl Black Southern Writers Conference. Her writing has been featured in a number of literary and popular venues and she is the author of Real Girls Have Real Problems and of Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat. In this conversation, we discuss the intersection of writing and memory work, poetry and community connection, and the politics of publishing on Black life.

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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, graduate 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 Shylah Hamilton-Touré, who teaches in the Program in Critical Ethnic Studies at the California College of the Arts and is also Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Jambalaya Center for Ancient Mysteries and Sacred Arts. She is a writer and practicing artist whose work explores themes of gender, diaspora, and indigeneity through critical and visual practice. In this conversation, we explore the importance of surrealism for articulating the meaning of Black life, decolonial and indigenous resources for thinking blackness and liberation, and the place of art and expressive culture in Black Studies.