Today’s conversation is with Laurian Bowles, who teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Davidson College. Along with a number of scholarly articles, she is the author of Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness, and Modernity in Accra (2025), which follows women head porters in Ghana to examine how women navigate precarity with creativity and care, offering a fresh analytic on racial capitalism, sexual autonomy and urban futurity in Africa. In this conversation, we explore the impact of Black Studies on ethnographic practices, Black study in a digital age, and the critical tension between Black Studies practices and institutions of higher education.