Today’s conversation is with Leigh Raiford, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at University of California, Berkeley. In addition to a number of critical essays in edited collections and journals, she is co-editor of Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture (2017) and the author of both Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2013) and When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the political and cultural origins of the field, the place of art in the history of Black study, and the analytical and imaginative dimensions of Black Studies.