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 J. Kameron Carter, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at University of California, Irvine. He has written numerous scholarly articles in race and religion and is the author of two books: Race: A Theological Account from 2008 and The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song from 2023. With Sarah Jane Cervenak, he is the co-editor of the series “Black Outdoors” on Duke University Press. In this conversation, we discuss the place of religion and religious studies in the Black Studies tradition, how Black study treats community and ordinary life as sites of knowing and being, and how a commitment to the everyday opens up new horizons for the field of Black Studies.