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 Layla Brown, who teaches in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology and Africana Studies at Northeastern University. Along with scholarly and popular venue essays and critical articles, she was the co-host with Charisse Burden-Stelly of The Last Dope Intellectual podcast and is currently working with Burden-Stelly on a video podcasted series with Black Liberation Media. In this conversation, we discuss the differences between and intersections of transnational study and pan-Africanism, anthropological research in a Black Studies context, and the relationship between the production of ideas and the work of liberation struggle.