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 Juanita Stephen, who teaches in the Department of Interdisciplinary and Critical Studies at University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario. Her research is guided by feminist theory and its methodologies, draws on the insights of care practice and community work, and is focused on questions of gender, families, and children in a Black Studies frame. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between Black study and care, how childhood and care networks inform theory and writing, and how the past and future of Black Studies engages with community life and its everyday practices.