I’m talking the talk and walking the walk this week by channeling an episode on channeling. I explore two questions that have become central to how I think about channeling, knowledge, and purpose: What do I desire to know more about? And what desires to be known through me?

Along the way, I discuss my experience as an academic advisor and helping students identify their intellectual passions, intuition as method, and moments when research reaches back.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Teaser: Wanna Channel?

00:32 Finding Grounding in the Flow

02:28 What Is Channeling? 2 Questions

11:37 What Is Your Medium

15:49 Intuition as Method

19:46 How to Vonnect with Me

REFERENCE

Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories, Duke University Press, 2021.

Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, Duke University Press, 2007.

Episode 1: Where Do You Know From?

Episode 4: Listener Question: How to Make a Writing Practice (or Any Practice) Spiritual

This week, I’m thinking about self-determination: one of the most important concepts in Black political, intellectual, and spiritual life!

Starting from a moment of personal reflection on feeling caught in an ebb rather than a flow, I explore what it means to determine the potentiality of your own being according to your own sense of things. Moving between Black intellectual history and my own life, I trace how self-determination has taken different forms across Black thought, from struggles for community control over schools to Black nationalist visions of independent nations.

Thinking with the histories of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the Republic of New Afrika, and Black Power era organizing, I reflect on why self-determination has never meant just one thing and why every attempt to live a self-determined life is necessarily messy, unfinished, and full of trial and error.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Teaser

00:27 Grounding in the Ebb and Flow of Life

04:07 - What is Self-Determination?

07:01 - Two Different Takes on Self-Determination in 1968: The Republic of New Afrika and Ocean Hill-Brownsville

19:01 - Self-Determination as a Lived Practice

30:05 - Self-Determination as Trial and Error

References:

Getachew, Adom. Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

For a good read on the religion of Black Power, I would recommend: Corbman, Marjorie. Divine Rage: The Religious and Political Dimensions of Black Power. New York: NYU Press, 2025.

For more on Ocean Hill-Brownsville, I recommend listening to School Colors, a podcast about race, education, and the struggle for community control in Brooklyn during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis:

https://www.schoolcolorspodcast.com/brooklyn

This week, I’m reflecting on graduation, wanting to be a good ancestor, and a question that has been sitting heavily with me lately: How do you cope when ancestors disappoint us?

Starting from my own experience walking across the graduation stage and thinking about the intellectual ancestors who made my work possible, I move into a conversation about what happens when the people who shaped us also disappoint us. What do we do when an ancestor says something isolating, harmful, or contradictory to the liberatory futures we hoped to find when we went looking for and thinking with them? How do we sit with disappointment without reducing entire movements to individual lifetimes or demanding ideological perfection from people who were also trying to survive?

Chapters:

00:00 Teaser: Ancestral Disappointment

00:15 Grounding in Graduation & Feeling Different

05:39 How to Not Be Pissed Off at Your Ancestors

15:04: Coping with Ancestral Disappointment: Two Frameworks

References Mentioned:

Cooper, Anna Julia. A Voice from the South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Onaci, Edward. Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Sorett, Josef. Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

For my note on the myth of charismatic leaders making and breaking religious movements, see: Richardson, James T. 2021. “The Myth of the Omnipotent Leader: The Social Construction of a Misleading Account of Leadership in New Religious Movements.” Nova Religio 24 (4), 11–25.

This week on Grounded with Dr. Iman, I’m thinking about writer’s block, perfectionism, AI, and one of the questions that most transformed my intellectual and spiritual life: What counts as knowledge?

Starting from my experience revising my first accepted journal article, I reflect on why mistakes in other people’s work have unexpectedly become grounding for me in a moment obsessed with perfection and polished performance. From there, I move into Black feminist epistemologies and alternative modes of knowing, thinking with Patricia Hill Collins, Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Kara Keeling, Safiya Bukhari, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

Together, we think about intuition, dreams, lived experience, gut feelings, whisper networks, and “what your mama said” as forms of knowledge that challenge dominant ideas about expertise, legitimacy, and truth.

Chapters

00:00 Grounding in Other People’s Mistakes & Processing Feedback

06:14 What Counts as Knowledge?

09:55 Who’s Knowledgeable?

19:50 Alternative Modes of Knowing to Rely On

29:18 Closing: I’m Graduating

References Mentioned:

Bukhari, Safiya. The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and Fighting for Those Left Behind. New York: Feminist Press, 2010.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. "Prophecy in the Present Tense: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee Pilgrimage, and Dreams Coming True." Meridians 12, no. 2 (2014): 142-152.

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press, 2020.

Keeling, Kara. The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

This week, I’m joined by cultural critic, researcher, and creator Tahirah (@sincerelytahiry) for a conversation on what counts as knowledge, burnout, and why Black women are often expected to be everything for everyone.

We talk about Tahirah’s own spiritual and intellectual journey into this work. The conversation is grounded in her recently published, gorgeously written, and deeply vulnerable piece, “A Dying Star,” and explores what using the sun as a metaphor for Black women’s lived experiences reveals about care, labor, and exhaustion.

Our convo moves between questions at the heart of religious studies, Black feminist thought, and Islamic intellectual traditions: Are feelings a form of knowledge? What does it mean to trust your intuition? And who gets to decide what is considered “real” knowledge?

Follow the brilliant Tahirah on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack @sincerelytahirah and read "A Dying Star" here!

Chapters

00:00 Opening & Introducing Tahirah

00:28 Where Are You Finding Grounding Right Now?

07:07 From Pre-Law to Purpose (Where it Started)

16:00 Trusting Your Intuition and Inner Voice?

26:30 “Identity Politics” or Real Knowledge? Who Gets Dismissed

39:10 The Inspiration Behind “A Dying Star”

42:54 Why Are Black Women Expected to Be the Sun for Everyone Else?

Why do we feel spiritually stuck… even when life is going well?

In this episode, I open up about something I didn’t expect to be encountering post-PhD: feeling spiritually understimulated.

No books or reading, just a check-in on what happens when stillness can lead to feeling disconnected, unfocused, and even bored sometimes.

Things I am thinking about…

1. Why do we associate spiritual growth with struggle and suffering?
2. How can routines be a means of reconnecting?
3. Why boredom and stillness might actually be necessary for growth?

Chapters

00:00 Grounding Question: Why Do We Think Spiritual Growth Has to Be Stressful?

00:30 Opening

01:11 Feeling Spiritually Understimulated

“Why ‘Start With Yourself’ Is a Myth”

What if the idea that success and wealth “start with yourself” is actually a myth?

This week, I'm bringing a religious studies lens to the self-help industry and break down the buzz and backlash around Emma Grede’s Start With Yourself. I use it as a case study to think about how myths work and how the American Dream continues to sell individual success as the solution to structural problems.

I argue that Grede’s message reflects a gendered and racialized version of success often marketed to Black women and women of color, what I think of as the millennial-coded myth of the pick-me.

From there, I turn to Black thought and the Black Nationalist Movement, specifically the Republic of New Afrika, to explore alternative visions of success beyond capitalism and self-making. I close by thinking at the intersections of the spiritual and the intellectual as I try to define what success looks like in this new career chapter I am presently in.

Chapters

00:00 Opening

00:40 Grounding in My Own Version of Success

02:30 How Myth Functions

06:28 Emma Grede & the Myth of the Pick Me

15:06 A Vision of Success Beyond Capitalism

References

Kees W. Bolle, “Myth: An Overview,” Encyclopedia of Religion (2005)

Imari Obadele, Foundations of the Black Nation (1975)

There’s so much talk about the divine feminine out there. So what’s divine about being femme?✨

This week, we turn to Audre Lorde and Ashley Coleman Taylor to get a sense of what is divine about the Black femme through a Black queer and religious studies lens.

We talk about A LOT.

What’s the difference between popular culture takes and social media discourse on the divine feminine and Lorde and Coleman’s theorizing about the Black femme as divine? A lot. Most of the time, the girls are not talking about the same thing. And we get into how a lot of talk about the divine feminine defines itself over and against the Black femme embodiment like that of the rap girls (Sexyy Red, Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, etc.).

I explore how Lorde and Coleman Taylor’s work offer a beautiful and capacious understanding of the divine femme! You’ll have to listen for that! And how this definition also opens up a third option for how people answer questions about being Muslim and queerness.

Chapters

00:00 Opening

00:40 Grounded in the Baddie Routine

03:34 Grounding Question: What Is Divine About the Black Femme

05:51 Who Is the Black Femme

14:02 Divine: A relentless commitment to becoming on your own terms

References

Coleman Taylor, Ashley. "Religio-erotic Experience and Transoceanic Becoming at the Shoreline in Audre Lorde’s Zami." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 91, no. 3 (2023): 680–697.