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 Christin Washington, a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at University of Maryland. Her interests lie at the intersection of Caribbean studies, the cultural labor of Black women’s religious practices, digital studies, and immersive forms of scholarship and and expressive work. In this conversation, we discuss the place of love and imagination in Black Studies, design as intellectual work, and digital studies as play, immersion, and meaning-making.