Grounded

Iman AbdoulKarim
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Spirituality

Each week, we answer a big question, finding grounding somewhere between the spiritual and the intellectual. I’m Dr. Iman, your professor-friend who turns to my work as a scholar of religion, spirituality, and Black intellectual history to think through questions big and small about how we make sense of our lives. Some weeks, that means digging into Black thought, religion, spirituality, and culture. Other weeks, I’m thinking out loud about something I’m researching, teaching, reading, or finding grounding in. And sometimes I’m joined by scholars, creators, friends, and listeners who give us something new to think about. Wherever the question takes us, the goal is the same: to think together about the ideas, people, and traditions that might help us see ourselves and our world a little differently. Let’s get grounded.

  1. 4d ago

    Episode 24: How Do You Actually Get Into a PhD Program?

    This, I’m answering a question I get every year: How do you actually get into a PhD program? PhD applications, especially in the humanities, can feel like a behind closed doors process. So, I’m sharing the advice people were generous enought to share with me when was applying and what I’ve learned from helping others through the process. We (me, myself, I, and you) get into how to identify programs that are actually a good intellectual fit, why I strongly recommend looking for fully funded programs, and why undergraduate reputations don’t necessarily translate to the strongest PhD program in your field. I also talk about navigating interdisciplinarity and figuring out whether a department really supports the kind of scholar you want to become. Then we get into the MAKE OR BREAK part: you have to reach out to people. Cold emailing current graduate students and potential faculty advisors can completely change your application process. Finally, we talk personal and research statements, including why you do not need to know exactly what your dissertation will be. What you do need is a clear research question, a sense of where you might look for answers, and an ability to explain why that particular program and its faculty can help you pursue it. Basically, this is the PhD application primer I wish everyone got before application season. Chapters: 00:00 — Teaser: How to Get Into a PhD Program 00:42 — What I’m Finding Grounding In: Intellectual Play 06:29 — How TF Do You Get Into Grad School? 08:37 — How to Identify the Right PhD Program 14:56 — How Interdisciplinarity Works in Grad School 20:08 — You HAVE to Cold Email 25:23 — Writing Your Personal + Research Statement

  2. Aug 10

    Ep. 23: What I Learned From Student Evaluations as a First-Year Professor

    What did my students teach me about teaching? This week, I’m reflecting on my first semester as a full-time professor and what I learned from finally reading my student evaluations. Can you tell the semester is fast approaching? I’m talking about why teaching really is an art, why my students wanted less lecturing and more hands-on learning, how they somehow ended up wanting *more* assignments, and I’m still committed to high expectations while meeting students where they are. And how that is NOT the same as lowering expectations (especially in an AI reality). Chapters 00:00 — Teaser: Why I’m Tired of the “Students Just Use AI” Conversation 00:22 — Where I’m Finding Grounding 03:35 — What I Learned From My First Teaching Evaluations 08:50 — Students Don’t Want to Just Be Talked At 12:35 — They Asked for MORE Work??? 18:30 — Where Students Wanted Me to Ease Up: Attendance & Hard Readings

  3. Aug 3

    Ep. 22: What is Secularism?

    It's one of those words people use all the time, thinking they mean the same thing, when that isn’t always the case! As a scholar of religion who teaches about secularism, I’ve realized the best place to start is by talking about assumptions. This week, I draw on my own journey as a Black Muslim scholar of religion to walk through the kinds of assumptions I encountered throughout college, graduate school, and becoming a professor, and how those assumptions reveal what secularism is and how it functions. The takeaway is that rather than treating secularism as simply the separation of church and state, it is best understood by paying attention to the "common sense" assumptions that organize our lives and determine whose knowledge really counts. This conversation is just the start, but one that has deeply reshaped how I understand scholarship, Black thought, and the relationship between spirituality and intellectual life. Chapters 00:00 — Teaser: Secularism Was Never Meant for Me 00:30 — Grounding in Traveling with the Girls 03:06 — This Week's Question: What Is Secularism? 10:37 — Assumption #1: Outsiders Are Experts, Insiders Know Less 14:55 — Assumption #2: People Want You to Tell Familiar Stories 20:36 — Assumption #3: There Is No Separation Between the Spiritual and the Intellectual

  4. Jul 20

    Ep. 21: How to Strengthen Your Intuition?

    This week, we're answering the question: How do you strengthen your intuition? Over the past few weeks, we've explored intuition through philosophy, Black thought, and management studies. This week, I wanted to do something different and answer that question through my own life. I share the three practices that have most transformed my relationship to intuition over the past five years: developing a relationship with myself via journaling, learning to distinguish what I want from what other people want for me, and embracing the conflict that comes from actually acting on what my intuition tells me. Along the way, I reflect on journaling, therapy, prayer, graduate school, learning to trust myself as a scholar of Black Muslim thought, and why I want all my women and femmes to leave behind the idea that there is redemption in our suffering (which is a huge barrier to developing clear intuition).

  5. Jul 13

    Ep. 20: Is Intuition a Sign of Expertise?

    This week, we're answering the question: Is intuition a sign of expertise? Building on last week's conversation about intuition as evidence in psychology, I turn to another field that has spent decades studying intuition: management and organizational learning. I explore an argument I found really compelling: that intuition is often the outcome of expertise. In other words, the people we think of as "intuitive" are frequently drawing on years of disciplined observation, tacit knowledge, and experience. But as a scholar of religion and Black intellectual history, I’m also interested in where that understanding falls short. What happens when intuition is understood only as something that comes out of experience + expertise… and not forms of knowledge beyond the self? Like higher powers, ancestors, the unseen, Allah, the divine, etc. Chapters 00:00 — Grounding in Knowing Who You Are When Things Go Left 10:58 — This Week's Question: Is Intuition a Sign of Expertise? 13:09 — Intuition as Creative Insight 16:42 — Intuition as an Outcome of Expertise 27:40 — What's Missing? Spirituality and Intuition 32:30 — Prof in the Park Announcement RSVP for Prof in the Park 7/30 @ Prospect Park: https://partiful.com/e/PEwdmeIc0rwTtByx9tHH?c=OZ0f4dpM Reference Dörfler, Viktor, and Fran Ackermann. "Understanding intuition: The case for two forms of intuition." Management learning 43, no. 5 (2012): 545-564.

  6. Jul 6

    Ep. 19: What Are Two Ways of Understanding Intuition?

    This week we're answering the question: What are two ways of understanding intuition? As I begin writing a book chapter on intuition, I am getting right on how different fields actually define the term. Drawing on philosophy, Black feminist thought, and religious studies, I explore two distinct understandings of intuition I’ve encountered so far. First, I introduce a philosophical conversation that understands intuition as *evidence* or a form of perceptual knowledge that helps explain how we arrive at beliefs before we have empirical proof. Then, I turn to Black thought, where intuition becomes something much more than evidence. Through thinkers like Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Louise Little, and Alea Lovely, I argue that intuition is also a method: a disciplined practice, a cultivated mode of knowing, and a way of making decisions in a world where dominant ideas of evidence have often been used to deny Black people's realities of things (and justify their dehumanization). At the heart of this episode is a bigger question: What happens when intuition isn't just something you have, but something you practice and develop? Chapters 00:00 Teaser 0:12 - Grounded in Navigating Adult Friendships 9:15 - Two Different Ways of Understanding Intuition 12:28 - Intuition As Evidence Conversation in Philosophy 15:09 - Intuition as Perceptual Knowledge 20:41 - Intuition as Method References Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000). Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984). Wilfred Little, "Our Family From the Inside: Growing Up with Malcolm X." Contributions in Black Studies 13, no. 1 (1995): 7–47. (Originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on April 18, 1995.) https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cibs/vol13/iss1/2/ Mark Moffett, "Intuition as Evidence: An Introduction," in The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence, edited by Maria Lasonen-Aarnio and Clayton Littlejohn (New York: Routledge, 2021). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Intuition": https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/intuition/ Alea Lovely, Spiritual Shit podcast: https://www.thelovelyalea.com/

  7. Jun 29

    Ep.18: Why Changing Your Mind Is Your Inheritance?

    Episode brought to you by me hating on haters of my fav podcast and a 100-year-old Black nationalist newspaper. This week, we’re thinking about what it means to change your mind. And why doing so in public is one of the most important Black intellectual traditions we have IMO. I start by reflecting on my own relationship to honesty, embodied knowledge, and what I've been learning through living with a changing body with insulin-resistant PMOS. From there, I ask a bigger question: Why are people suspicious of folks changing their minds? Drawing on haters in the comments of one of my fav pods (Pour Minds), the history of The Crusader newspaper, Malcolm X, and Audre Lorde, I show how changing your mind isn't intellectual inconsistency, it's intellectual honesty and a part of the U.S. Black intellectual tradition. Chapters 00:00 — Teaser: Why Changing Your Mind Is Your Intellectual Inheritance 00:22 — Grounding in PMOS 05:01 — Why Changing Your Mind Is Your Intellectual Inheritance 15:33 — Malcolm X: An Example of Changing in Public References: Alston, Ashanti. “Be Careful of Your Man-Tones! Gender Politics in Revolutionary Struggle.” Interview by Hilary Darcy. Interface: A Journal for and About Social Movements 2, no. 1 (May 2010): 22–35. Lorde, Audre. “Learning from the 60s.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. The Crusader. 1918–1922 Pour Minds (hosts Lex P and Drea Nicole)

  8. Jun 22

    Ep. 17: How to Time Travel (AKA Develop a Relationship with the Past)

    This week has me pondering time travel. Not the sci-fi kind. But the kind that happens when one develops intellectual relationships with people and ideas from the past. I explore what it means to not just think *about* the past, but with it. Drawing from my own work as an intellectual historian, I share how developing a relationship with a single question can become a time traveling machine (of sorts). My questions (or Roman Empire as they say interwebs) are around Black women's spiritual and intellectual lives and the role of embodied knowledge in religious meaning-making. I think you should have your own too! And once you do, I discuss what I think really gets one jetting across space-time (intellectually, that is). Chapters 0:00 Teaser 0:22 Grounding in Being Alone 3:36 Grounding Question: How to Time Travel 8:20 What I Think Is the Best Way 15:04 Desecularizing Time 18:09 So You've Got Your Question, Found Some Answers, Now What? References Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New York. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025. Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

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About

Each week, we answer a big question, finding grounding somewhere between the spiritual and the intellectual. I’m Dr. Iman, your professor-friend who turns to my work as a scholar of religion, spirituality, and Black intellectual history to think through questions big and small about how we make sense of our lives. Some weeks, that means digging into Black thought, religion, spirituality, and culture. Other weeks, I’m thinking out loud about something I’m researching, teaching, reading, or finding grounding in. And sometimes I’m joined by scholars, creators, friends, and listeners who give us something new to think about. Wherever the question takes us, the goal is the same: to think together about the ideas, people, and traditions that might help us see ourselves and our world a little differently. Let’s get grounded.

Information

  • Creator
    Iman AbdoulKarim
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    25
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Iman AbdoulKarim
  • Show Website
    Grounded