This is Ashley Newby 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 between me and John E. Drabinski, my department colleague in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at the University of Maryland. As co-hosts of The Black Studies Podcast, we wanted to close out the first calendar year of the project with a reflection on the series thus far, sharing our key takeaways and the insights we've gained through the first seventy discussions of the past and future of the field. In this conversation, we discuss what for us has been both expected and unexpected in the project, what new horizons podcast episodes have opened up for us, and what new critical questions are guiding our evolving portraits of the field.