The Black Studies Podcast

Ashley Newby and John E. Drabinski
  • 5.0 (42)
  • EDUCATION
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

The Black Studies Podcast is 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.

  1. Bianca Beauchemin - Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, York University

    14H AGO

    Bianca Beauchemin - Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, York University

    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 Bianca Beauchemin, who teaches in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University. Her work seeks to disrupt the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, exploring how embodiment, labor, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance, and alternative sexualities and genders re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation. In this conversation, we explore the particularities of Black Studies in a Canadian context, the place of gender and sexuality studies in work of Black study, and the complexity of thinking Canadian blackness.

    1 hr
  2. Marlee Bunch - Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute, Rutgers University

    3D AGO

    Marlee Bunch - Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute, Rutgers University

    This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 Marlee S. Bunch, an interdisciplinary educator, scholar, and author whose work centers oral histories of Black educators, African American educational history, and culturally responsive teaching and leadership. She is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow and currently serves as a Senior Research Associate with the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity & Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Dr. Bunch has over a decade of experience teaching across secondary and postsecondary contexts and has held leadership roles in curriculum development, educator preparation, and community-based educational initiatives. In partnership with the University of Illinois and the Illinois State Board of Education, she also created two state-approved micro-credentials—one based on The Magnitude of Us and the other on Unlearning the Hush, designed to support educators’ culturally responsive practice through sustained, reflective learning. Dr. Bunch is the author of The Magnitude of Us (Teachers College Press), which received the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, the Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award, and the National Council of Teachers of English David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research, Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era (University of Illinois Press), and Leveraging AI for Human-Centered Learning: Culturally Responsive and Social-Emotional Classroom Practice in Grades 6-12, co-authored with Brittany R. Collins (Routledge).

    33 min
  3. Ashon Crawley - Departments of Religious Studies and African American Studies, University of Virginia

    5D AGO

    Ashon Crawley - Departments of Religious Studies and African American Studies, University of Virginia

    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 Ashon Crawley, who teaches in the Departments of Religious Studies and of African American Studies at University of Virginia. Along with his numerous scholarly essays and books Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (2016) and The Lonely Letters (2020), he is a widely exhibited and hosted multimedia artist. In this conversation, we explore the aesthetic and epistemological resonance of religious practice in Black study, the pleasures of adventurous multidisciplinary research, and the open horizons of pedagogical practice in the Black Studies tradition.

    1h 21m
  4. Tashal Brown - College of Education, University of Rhode Island

    MAR 2

    Tashal Brown - College of Education, University of Rhode Island

    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 Tashal Brown, assistant professor of Urban Education and Secondary Social Studies in the College of Education at University of Rhode Island. Her research focuses on race, ethnicity, and gender in relation to equity and justice in educational contexts and how the cultivation and enactment of critical literacies and liberatory pedagogies across K–12 schools, community-based spaces, and teacher education shape the perspectives, experiences, and actions of youth and educators. In this conversation, we explore the centrality of the study of childhood in Black Studies, the place of education in the field, and the transformative power of multidisciplinary approaches to understanding Black girlhood.

    42 min
  5. Hanna Garth - Department of Anthropology, Princeton University

    FEB 27

    Hanna Garth - Department of Anthropology, Princeton University

    This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 Hanna Garth, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, and was previously Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC San Diego. She held a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in Anthropology at UCLA, an MPH in Global Health from Boston University, and a BA from Rice University. She is a food anthropologist, broadly focused on how individuals and families navigate food systems in the service of their desires to eat in particular, culturally inflected ways. With critical attention to the granular, everyday experiences of navigating broader systems, her work links macro-scale structures to social and material impacts on life conditions. Her research asks questions like beyond our basic needs for survival, what does it take to live a decent life, and who gets to decide? Her work critically analyzes concepts like justice, interrogating how justice is understood and by whom it is defined? She interrogates concepts like food sovereignty and its possibilities in our contemporary globalized world. She is interested in how people build and maintain community and support networks within broader contexts of inequality and struggles for survival. She studies these issues in Latin America and the Caribbean and among Black and Latinx communities in the United States. |

    45 min
  6. Kimberly Blockett - Department of Africana Studies, University of Delaware

    FEB 25

    Kimberly Blockett - Department of Africana Studies, University of Delaware

    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 Kimberly Blockett, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at University of Delaware. Along with a number of scholarly articles in prominent journals, she has compiled the heavily annotated edition Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experiences, Ministerial Travels, and Labour’s of Mrs. Elaw (2021), edited the collection Mapping Black Women’s Geographies (2025), and the author of Race, Religion, and Rebellion: The Audacious Ministry of Zilpha Elaw (fall 2026). In this conversation, we discuss the importance of recovering lost voices in a multidisciplinary approach to history, the place of religion in Black study, and the exciting, productive, and imaginative messiness of Black Studies research.

    47 min
  7. Antoine Williams - School of Art and Art History, University of Florida

    FEB 23

    Antoine Williams - School of Art and Art History, University of Florida

    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 Antoine Williams, a multidisciplinary artist and assistant professor of drawing in the expanded field in the School of Art and Art History at University of Florida. His work has been exhibited across the United States and he’s held numerous fellowships and residencies in the arts.His interactive, multimedia, site-specific installation with Josiah Golson titled “Go to the tree and get the pure sap and find out whether they were right” is being exhibited at the Birmingham Museum of Art through early-July 2026. In this conversation, we discuss roots of his concern with Black life, the relationship between study and creative production, and the place of the arts in the Black Studies project.

    37 min
  8. Angela Simms - Departments of Sociology and Urban Studies, Barnard College and Columbia University

    FEB 20

    Angela Simms - Departments of Sociology and Urban Studies, Barnard College and Columbia University

    This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 Angela Simms, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Barnard-Columbia. She studies the political economy of suburban Black middle-class suburbs, and her forthcoming book Fighting for a Foothold: How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle-Class Suburbia (Russell Sage, February 2026) asks why majority-Black suburbs that work hard to build stable, thriving communities still face financial barriers that make this harder than it is for their white counterparts.

    58 min
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5
out of 5
42 Ratings

About

The Black Studies Podcast is 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.

Information

  • Creator
    Ashley Newby and John E. Drabinski
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    233
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © @TheBlackStudiesPodcast

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