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 Zana Sanders, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the intersections of visual culture, contemporary Black Art, media, and technology with an emphasis on representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality. She is particularly interested in how Black artists and cultural producers use visual technologies in their image-making practices to shape political consciousness and cultural memory, document, and reimagine Black social life. In this conversation, we explore the link between histories of struggle and Black Studies practice, the encoding of blackness in popular and visual culture, and the past and future of community work as constitutive of the field.

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 Jarvis Givens, who teaches in the Departments of African and African American Studies and School of Education at Harvard University. Along with a number of essays in popular and academic venues, he is co-editor of "We Dare Say Love": Supporting Achievement in the Educational Life of Black Boys (2018) and author of Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (2021), School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness (2023), American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation (2025), and I'll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the place of education and education writing in African American history, the culture and politics of Black study, and the imperative for Black Studies to impact community educational spaces.