In this episode, B. López interviews the award-winning scholar Eric Darnell Pritchard about his book Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and The Politics of Literacy. They also talk about Dr. Pritchard’s past and future scholarship, and about how to survive and thrive in academic spaces that are too often unkind, especially for queer students of color.

Fashion was one of the ways that I was insisting upon my own selfhood, right? And what I got from my mom and her sisters and my uncles and cousins was, you know, that this could be an instrument. This could be something that I could use as a way to own myself, right? To belong to myself. -Eric Darnell Pritchard

You don’t have to earn the right to serenity. Right? You don’t have to earn the right to be able to take a full breath. You don’t have to earn the right to have a moment of quiet or just something that acknowledges the fact that you’re human. Right? That’s not something that graduate students have to earn. You’re earning a degree. You’re not earning the right to be human, and a whole person in the classroom. That doesn’t have to be earned. -Eric Darnell Pritchard

For a transcript of the episode, click here.

Music in this episode is “RSPN” by Blank & Kytt (CC 3.0) and “Bass and Drum” by OLC.