This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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 Ashanté Reese, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. In addition to a number of scholarly and popular articles, she is the author of Black Food Geographies:Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. (2019) and the co-editor with Hanna Garth of Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice (2020). In this conversation, we discuss the place of ethnographic research in Black Studies, the relationship between teaching, scholarship, and racialized space in disciplinary and non-disciplinary places, and the politics of community work as a form of Black study and practice.