This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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 Christina Carney, who teaches in the Department of Black Studies at University of Missouri. Along with a number of scholarly essays in key journals, she is author of Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego, published by University of California Press in 2025. In this conversation, we discuss the transformative role of gender and class in Black Studies discourse, the importance of Black California for thinking about African American life, and the imperatives for Black Studies to take sexual economies seriously when theorizing the structure of Black life.