This podcast episode features Dr. Derrick Brooms, an associate professor in sociology at the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Brooms was the featured speaker of the Ohio Consortium of Men and Masculinities in Higher Education conference, which was held at BGSU in Fall 2018. He discusses his research on how to better support black male students on college campuses.

Transcript:

Jolie Sheffer:                          Welcome to the BG Ideas Podcast, a collaboration between The Institute for the Study of Culture & Society and the School of Media & Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, an Associate Professor of English and American Culture Studies and the Director of ICS.

Jolie Sheffer:                          In partnership with the Center for Women and Gender Equity and the Violence Prevention Center, ICS co-sponsored the Ohio Consortium for Men in Masculinities in Higher Education Annual Conference on September 14, 2018. The Conference featured workshops on mentoring, queer masculinties and violence prevention with a very special keynote address by Dr. Derrick Brooms.

Jolie Sheffer:                          Today, we are joined by Dr. Brooms, an Associate Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate in Africana Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Brooms earned his PhD in Sociology from Loyola University of Chicago and his research focuses on how to better support black male students on college campuses.

Jolie Sheffer:                          Some of the topics he explores include campus climate, mentoring and student support initiatives.

Jolie Sheffer:                          I'm very pleased to welcome Dr. Derrick Brooms to the program as the first speaker of ICS's 2018-2019 speaker series. Thanks for joining me, Derrick.

Dr. Brooms:                           Thank you for having me.

Jolie Sheffer:                          We're thrilled to have you here to discuss the important research you've been working on. Can you start us off by telling a little bit about what you're currently working on?

Dr. Brooms:                           Right now, I'm continuing to work on research that looks at black male experiences in both secondary and higher education. I also have work that looks at black and Latino males and, in particular, their engagement in leadership on campus. Then across both of those projects, I'm really very much interested in sense of self, identity development and the ways in which identity, race, gender and other social identities matter to students' experiences.

Dr. Brooms:                           I'm also looking at a project where people make sense memeing, and share about the killing of black men. Just looking at people from the range of Trayvon Martin to the more recent Freddie Gray and others. Just more recently we've had Botham Jean who was shot and killed in his home.

Dr. Brooms:                           Part of it is to invite black men to make sense of the ways in which they experience racism, profiling, stereotyping and killing.

Jolie Sheffer:                          Well, and it sounds like this project is like much of your other work, which is really foregrounding the knowledge that people of color have of their own lives and bringing that into academic discourse.

Jolie Sheffer:                          Can you talk a little more, especially sociology, historically, doesn't have the greatest reputation for foregrounding the first person experiences and has often treated people of color as objects of study. So could you talk about how your work fits into challenging that history of sociology?

Dr. Brooms:                           As you mentioned, there is this approach in sociology about the being objective. Ways in which the individual, that experiential knowledge, has in some ways been marginalized