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 Ashley Smith-Purviance, who teaches in the Department of African American and African Studies at Ohio State University. Her work is focused on Black girlhood, memory, and the relationship between ethnography, self-authorship, and lived experience. She is the author of the forthcoming book titled, (Un)Schooling Black Girls: Navigating Suburbia, Anti-Black-Girl Violence, and Mechanisms of School Survival and has produced the digital humanities project The Rolling Archives of Black Girlhood, a digital scrapbook that amplifies the voices of Black women and girls by uncovering the spaces and experiences that shape them. In this discussion, we explore the relation between gender and ethnographic research, childhood and its place in the Black Studies imagination, and how Black study expands the archive of Black life.