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 Nick Mitchell, who teaches in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research explores the political economy of the university and its intersection with questions of austerity, race, gender, and the founding of Black Studies. In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between critical politics and institutionalization, intellectual work and the radicalization of educational space, and the future of the university in a Black Studies horizon..