This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, 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.

Today’s conversation is with Katherine McKittrick, who teaches in the Department of Gender Studies and is Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of Dear Science and Other Stories (2021), and Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006), as well as editing and contributing to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (2015). Recent projects include the limited-edition boxset, Trick Not Telos (2023), the limited-edition hand-made book, Twenty Dreams (2024),and an installation honoring the poet nourbeSe philip, A Smile Split by the Stars. She has a number of forthcoming projects including Yarns (2027) and the co-edited artbook, Smile (2026). In this conversation, we discuss how questions of gender and sexuality shift the field of Black Studies, the expansiveness of Black Studies insights in thinking diaspora and nation, and the relationship between study, conversation, and the imagination.