The Past and Future of Black Studies

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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 Saida Grundy, who teaches in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology at Boston University. In addition to a number of scholarly and public facing publications, she is the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man (2022). Across this conversation, we discuss the relation between sociological research and Black Studies work, the political significance of the study of Black life, and the complex intersection of movement work and research.

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