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.