This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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, graduate 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 Amanda Boston, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on Black Studies approaches to urban studies, questions of neoliberalism and economics, and the impact of structural racism on housing in historically Black communities.She is completing her first book on gentrification’s racial operations and the making and unmaking of Black communities in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York, and she has published related works in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes in sociology and urban history. In this conversation, we discuss multidisciplinary approaches to the study of Black urban life, the relationship between social scientific methodologies and the traditions of Black Studies, and the impact of Black Studies research on Black communities and struggles for racial justice.