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 Eola Dance and Jennie K. Williams, co-founders and directors of the Kinfolkology project, which explores the complex intersection of data, memory, and descendent communities in the history of enslavement. Eola Dance is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Howard University and Jennie K. Williams is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia. In this conversation, we explore the meaning of data for history, how memory of the enslaved is both inside and outside data, and what obligations curators of slavery’s data have to descendent communities.