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 Scot Brown, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. A working musician and public commentator on Black culture and politics, he is the author of a number of popular and scholarly works including the 2005 book Fighting for Us, published by New York University Press. In this conversation, we explore the meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry, the relationship between cultural production and Black life, and the meaning of music and musical practice in the Black intellectual tradition.