Busy Being Black

W!ZARD Studios

3.9 (86)
SOCIEDAD Y CULTURA

Busy Being Black with Josh Rivers is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives.

21 SEP

Our Miraculous Hearts — Phoebe Boswell

A tender meditation on grief, healing and courage with multidisciplinary artist Phoebe Boswell, who creates portals that return us to our miraculous hearts. For more on how this conversation and Phoebe's art have landed in my life: Surrender Your Armour. The heart-rending composition in this episode is by bassist Gregg August, commissioned by Phoebe Boswell, and is included with Phoebe's permission. Busy Being Black is a labour of reverential love, and our stories don't belong behind a paywall. If this work moves you, I invite you to give an encouragement to help cover production costs. The song Busy Being Black was created for the show and in collaboration with Lazarus Lynch and Joshua Pleeter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

58 min
25 JUN

Mojisola Adebayo – Black Duende

Busy Being Black returns soon with a season exploring Black imaginative vigour—and who better than Mojisola Adebayo to remind us of the adventure and irreverence of Black artistry, during and beyond times of crisis? In this conversation, which originally aired in February 2023, Mojisola takes us on a journey from Goldsmiths University to Antarctica, to space and back again, to explore how we utilise performance to challenge the sanctity of whiteness, what an orgasm-seeking space odyssey tells us about the world-changing potential of queer Black pleasure, and how the reanimation of the life and story of Henrietta Lacks prompts us to consider our own genealogical and cosmic immortality. ✨ STARS: An Afrofuturist Space Odyssey at Brixton House ✨ Sign up for Field Notes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

59 min
31/12/2024

Kuchenga Shenjé – A Life Worth Writing About

You’ll no doubt have heard of and read Kuchenga Shenjé's debut novel, The Library Thief, which brings together her passions for history, mystery and rebels; and you’re likely to have felt the warmth and humour of her writing in publications like British Vogue and Stylist. In our conversation, we explore how she came to the transformative decision to pursue sobriety, her hodgepodge approach to her spirituality and spiritual practice, how the deferred dreams of her mother and grandmother have shaped how she enjoys her life and what she’s learned from the characters in her novel and daring women across history about what it means to live a life worth writing about. You can find out more about Kuchenga here. Thank you to myGwork for their ongoing support of Busy Being Black. If you're not yet a member of the world's largest global talent and networking platform for LGBTQ+ professionals, now is a great time to join. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

47 min
10/12/2024

Legacy Russell – Black Meme

I’ve been invigorated by Legacy Russell’s ongoing inquiries into how we come alive together. Whether she’s encouraging us to think expansively about the connection between marine life and Black agency under duress, or pointing us towards the liberatory possibilities at the intersection of our bodies, genders and technologies, her work is evidence of her desire and drive to live in a world in which Black folks thrive. We explore how an investigation into visual culture helps us appreciate and reckon with the role Black people have played in shaping the modern world, our responsibility as global and digital citizens to harness the internet to collectively push forward what our shared future looks like, and what we learn from what it means to really live—or to not live—from the ancestors who refused to survive the Middle Passage. Legacy's first book, Glitch Feminism, explores how we find liberation in the glitch between body, gender and technology; her second book, Black Meme, shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world. Both are available from Verso Books. Thank you to myGwork for their ongoing support of Busy Being Black. If you're not yet a member of the world's largest global talent and networking platform for LGBTQ+ professionals, now is a great time to join. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

56 min
26/11/2024

Maleke Glee – A Posture of Improvisation

How do we engage with and sustain Black cultures, communities, histories and futures outside of the extractive infrastructures and institutions that thrive on Black death and disposability? Maleke Glee is a curator and scholar of cultural sustainability who offers go-go music as a wonderful working example: a genre and sonic landscape native to Washington DC, with an insular economy that supports self-taught and formerly incarcerated musicians. Our conversation today also explores the spiritual work that undergirds Maleke’s ongoing research into and preservation of go-go music, how initiatives for Black inclusion within art world institutions often stifle ongoing efforts to sustain Black vernacular cultures, and how a closer relationship to ugliness helps us queer what it means to embody and pursue Black excellence. If you’d like to dive deeper into the cultural, vernacular and academic references named throughout this conversation, please subscribe to Field Notes, a newsletter that collects the wonderlust that inspires and informs conversations on Busy Being Black. Thank you to myGwork for their ongoing support of Busy Being Black. If you're not yet a member of the world's largest global talent and networking platform for LGBTQ+ professionals, now is a great time to join. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

54 min
26/08/2024

Angelina Namiba – Our Stories Told by Us

Angelina Namiba serves as a possibility model for effective and sustained engagement with those vulnerable to HIV. When she was diagnosed in the early 90s, she immediately set to work to understand why Black women were being left out of national efforts to combat the spread of the virus, and she participated in and assembled groups of women committed to raising the voices of women living with HIV globally. She is a titan within England’s HIV advocacy movement and she has worked for almost 25 years to promote and advocate for the involvement of women living with HIV in forming and informing local and national HIV strategy and policy. Today, we explore the resilience required to sustain our advocacy when our lives are systemically undervalued and the ongoing need for cultural competency within the NHS, which despite being built on the backs of Black women, still leaves so many Black women to suffer in silence. Angelina shares the mnemonic device she created to help women remember their rights when engaging with healthcare practitioners, and the role literature, storytelling and book clubs have played in bringing her and others like her together to effect systemic change. Angelina reminds that in the face of anti-Blackness, homophobia and misogynoir, it has always been us looking after us. Recommended reading: Our Stories Told by Us by Angelina Namiba Queer Footprints by Dan Glass Thank you to myGwork for their ongoing support of Busy Being Black. If you're not yet a member of the world's largest global talent and networking platform for LGBTQ+ professionals, now is a great time to join. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

55 min
12/08/2024

Dennis Carney – Sustaining Our Thriving

Dennis Carney is an elder whose respect among our community needs no justification nor explanation. Among much else, he led the now-closed Black Gay and Lesbian Centre in Brixton, and he has worked for 25 years as a therapeutic practitioner, supporting Black gay men to love themselves more deeply, hold their emotions more gently and show up in the world more fully. We explore his involvement in the Stop Murder Music campaign, the internationalism of Brixton’s Black Gay and Lesbian Centre and the creation of “Let’s Wrap”, the UK’s first-ever discussion group for Black gay men, which was hosted at London Lighthouse, the leading hospice and charity for people living with HIV. We attend to the history of the long 1980’s, and Dennis shares his advice and insights on what we should pay closer attention to about that fraught, traumatic and generative period of our collective history. Dennis shares how his disillusionment with the efficacy of protests and marches helped recalibrate his energy and efforts towards self-empowerment within our communities, and we broach the ever-important topic of intergenerational conversations, including what we learn from each other in our efforts to get free. Dennis reminds us that love for oneself and community, especially within a world so primed for lovelessness, has a singularly motivating power that supports us in being the change we hope to see in the world. Thank you to myGwork for their ongoing support of Busy Being Black. If you're not yet a member of the world's largest global talent and networking platform for LGBTQ+ professionals, now is a great time to join. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

57 min
05/08/2024

Jean Lloyd – My Word Creates My World

We are living through a particularly tense geopolitical moment and I have found myself in a near-constant state of anger over the past couple of weeks. I have had to work very hard to ensure the language and energy I put out into the world is not only angry, but productive. To help me – and us – show up with compassion and clarity in this moment, I’m resurfacing my 2019 conversation with communications provocateur Jean Lloyd. Jean has spent her life deeply committed to the emancipation of the human spirit and she invites us to focus on and remember that language is a tool used to create, not destroy. We explore the difference between talking and communication; forgiveness and making peace with unanswered questions and missing apologies; the urgent, important and life-long work of being ourselves; and communication as the essential tool for love and our liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1 h y 3 min

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Come Into This

Busy Being Black is the award-winning podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Each week, I have conversations with academics, artists, activists, thinkers and change-makers who help me and listeners understand ourselves as complex and complicated, messy, beautiful and vibrant people making the grandest and noblest attempts to thrive. Whether we’re searching for our place in the vast expanse of the universe or tracing our ancestral lineages through dance, guests on Busy Being Black bring their hard earned wisdom to your ears and heart each episode. From Black Trans Feminist theory to poetry, HIV/AIDS activism and questions of Black masculinity, Busy Being Black centres queer Black hope, as we discuss what it means to show up as ourselves against the odds. Busy Being Black is by us, for us. In the words of poet and activist PJ Samuels: "Come into this; it’s flavoured, fully seasoned. Taste. Look what was made for you." #busybeingblack busybeingblack.com twitter.com/_busybeingblack instagram.com/_busybeingblack instagram.com/_joshrivers Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

19/10/2022

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1 min

3.9

de 5

86 calificaciones

The Art of Creating Space.

21/07/2022

Kidd97

In searching for the words to describe this authentic and beautiful way of storytelling - the word that came to mind for describing this oeuvre’s embodiment was nuance. Nuance in the same way that a photo might have many different shades of gray. Rivers uses his lived experience, as well as those of others, to frame and articulate what it is to be a black queer body in this world. Being black and queer is not a monolithic experience and these in depth, evocative, conversations are a testimony to just that. There is something for everyone to glean and hopefully in that process you can learn to live in the fullness of your identity.
A Must-listen Podcast

17/07/2022

drrondotcom

Josh Rivers and this podcast is my respite from the foolishness that is in this world. I feel heard, seen, and understood! Please listen and let Josh and his guests show you what doing the Lord’s work really is!
The best black queer podcast ever

04/10/2019

LazEli

I stumbled upon “Busy Being Black” while researching black and queer content, and my ears and heart could not be more satisfied. Josh Rivers, the smart, curious, and dynamic host, curates a wide range of black/POC queer experts discussing a diversity of issues from race and sexuality, empowerment and liberation, to self-care and spirituality. Rivers takes listeners on a journey, unpacking so many layers to the black queer experience. Rivers also shares his personal stories with listeners, offering a richer texture to the interviews and dialogue at large. Nowadays, when people ask me how I’m doing, I often find myself saying “living my best black queer life,” or simply “busy being black!” Thanks to Josh Rivers for doing such culture-shifting work and for sharing light, one conversation at a time.
The quintessentially down-to-Earth and thought provoking

05/08/2018

Shannon Rivers

Josh does a great job of getting into things that matter to the LGBTQ+ community. He teases out deep thoughts and feelings of those who he is interviewing. Listen and you won’t be disappointed! This down-to-earth, emotive, and passionate podcast breaks through many of the walls black people even beyond the Queer community have guarding us.