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 Serie McDougal, who teaches in the Department of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of Research Methods in Africana Studies, which was published in 2014. In this conversation, we discuss questions of method and discipline in Black Studies, psychological and sociological aspects of research into Black life, and the ebb and flow of the field’s popularity and visibility.