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 Bianca Beauchemin, who teaches in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at York University. Her work seeks to disrupt the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, exploring how embodiment, labor, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance, and alternative sexualities and genders re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation. In this conversation, we explore the particularities of Black Studies in a Canadian context, the place of gender and sexuality studies in work of Black study, and the complexity of thinking Canadian blackness.

This is Ashley Newby 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, 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 Marlee S. Bunch, an interdisciplinary educator, scholar, and author whose work centers oral histories of Black educators, African American educational history, and culturally responsive teaching and leadership. She is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow and currently serves as a Senior Research Associate with the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity & Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Dr. Bunch has over a decade of experience teaching across secondary and postsecondary contexts and has held leadership roles in curriculum development, educator preparation, and community-based educational initiatives. In partnership with the University of Illinois and the Illinois State Board of Education, she also created two state-approved micro-credentials—one based on The Magnitude of Us and the other on Unlearning the Hush, designed to support educators’ culturally responsive practice through sustained, reflective learning.

Dr. Bunch is the author of The Magnitude of Us (Teachers College Press), which received the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, the Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award, and the National Council of Teachers of English David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research, Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era (University of Illinois Press), and Leveraging AI for Human-Centered Learning: Culturally Responsive and Social-Emotional Classroom Practice in Grades 6-12, co-authored with Brittany R. Collins (Routledge).

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 Ashon Crawley, who teaches in the Departments of Religious Studies and of African American Studies at University of Virginia. Along with his numerous scholarly essays and books Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (2016) and The Lonely Letters (2020), he is a widely exhibited and hosted multimedia artist. In this conversation, we explore the aesthetic and epistemological resonance of religious practice in Black study, the pleasures of adventurous multidisciplinary research, and the open horizons of pedagogical practice in the Black Studies tradition.