This is Ashley Newby 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 discussion is with Kellie Carter Jackson, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. In addition to a number of scholarly and popular essays, she is the author of Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (2020) and We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (2024). As well, she has co-hosted two podcasts: This Day in Esoteric Political History and You Get a Podcast! Across this conversation, we discuss the meaning of violence and non-violence in Black Studies politics, archival and public facing research, and the place of Black women's history in the past and future of the field.