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 conversation is with LaToya Brackett, an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. She researches and publishes on questions of intercultural communication, diasporic identity and meaning, and popular cultural studies. In addition to her appointment as assistant professor, she is a member of the Race and Pedagogy Institute at UPS. This conversation explores how Black Studies shifts the meaning of academic social space, intellectual space, and transforms our sense of classroom pedagogy.