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 Darius Spearman, who teaches in the program in Black Studies at San Diego City College. He is the author of two books, Between the Color Lines: A History of African Americans on the California Frontier from 1769 through Reconstruction (2015) and Legacy of Survival: The Dynamics of the Black Family (2025), as well as two edited volumes under the title Reclaiming Our Stories (2020 and 2021). In this conversation, we discuss the place of region and historical experience in the study of Black life, the critical relationship between ethnic studies and Black Studies, and how commitment to community shifts the meaning of pedagogy and the classroom.

This is Ashley Newby 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 Leroy F. Moore, Jr., founder of The Krip-Hop Institute and doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles. Moore is an award-winning writer and political organizer, and in this conversation we discuss the nature of activist work, the place of disability in Black Studies, and the history of expressive cultural work of Black disabled artists and musicians.

This is Ashley Newby 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 Lee Hawkins, a journalist with The Wall Street Journal and author of the 2025 book I Am Nobody's Slave: How Uncovering My Family's History Set Me Free. In this conversation, we discuss the meaning of personal histories, journalistic work, and the persistence of trauma across time and generation.