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 André Brock, Jr., who teaches in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology. His scholarly work includes published articles on racial representations in videogames, Black women and weblogs, whiteness, blackness, and digital technoculture, as well as groundbreaking research on Black Twitter in his book Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020). His article “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation” challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field preserved “a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else” and sparked a conversation that continues, as Twitter, in particular, continues to evolve.

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 Stephanie Shonekan, who is Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at University of Maryland, where she is also affiliate faculty in the Department of African American and Africana Studies. She is the author of a number of critical essays on music and the Black Studies tradition, with particular focus on the relationship between expressive culture and identity, and is the author of Soul, Country, and the USA: Race and Identity in American Music Culture (2015), Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s Sorrow Tears and Blood (2025), and Race and the American Story, co-authored with Adam Seagrave in 2024. In this conversation, we discuss the place of musicological research in the field, the importance of transnational studies, and the challenges for Black Studies in higher-ed’s contemporary cultural and political moment.

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 Kojo Damptey, a musician and scholar who is completing doctoral studies in the School of Social Work at McMaster University. His musical work engages with trans-Atlantic sound connections and political meaning, which draws from his academic research in Afrocentrism, indigenous African systems of knowledge, and decolonial theoretical frameworks. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between study and musical practice, the political meaning of sound, and the significance of art for cultural and social liberation work.