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.

Michael Simanga is an activist writer, multi-disciplinary artist and educator and came of age during the Civil Rights/Black Power Movement as a student organizer and poet in his hometown of Detroit. He was active in the Congress of African People, the African Liberation Support Committee, the National Black Assembly, the anti-apartheid movement, the labor movement and the independent schools movement. As a cultural worker he has focused on building and supporting community based cultural institutions and has spent his adult life as an advocate of art and culture as an instrument of social change and development. He is the former Executive Director of the National Black Arts Festival; former director of Fulton County Arts and Culture and the Southwest Arts Center. Professor Simanga earned an undergraduate degree in History from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta and a Ph.D. in African American Studies from the Union Institute and University of Cincinnati.

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 Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, who teaches in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at Rutgers University, Newark. Along with numerous scholarly and public facing articles, Laylah is currently co-organizing To Collect and Collate: Keepers of Black Photography, a convening on Black photography archives to be held at NYU Accra in March 2026. Her exhibition, Ground of Memory is on view at Express Newark, Rutgers University - Newark until January 30, 2026 and she is working on a book of first person essays on Black photographers. In this conversation, we discuss curatorial work, photography, and the centrality of aesthetic questions in the Black Studies imagination and intellectual tradition.

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 Rahman A. Culver, an educator and activist who works to support measurable, lasting social change. Culver earned his B.A. in Afro-American Studies from University of Maryland in 2001, working to found and serving as director of the Saturday Freedom School program. He is certified in secondary and special education, holding a Master's degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. Culver has worked as an educator in the Montgomery County and Prince George's County public school systems.