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.T. Roane, who teaches in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. In addition to numerous scholarly and public facing pieces, he is the author of Dark Agora: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place, published by New York University Press in 2023. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between historical writing, research, and Black Studies sensibilities, community work and study, and the place of ecological thinking in the history and future of the field.