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 Shaida Akbarian, who teaches in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, where she also earned her PhD in African American and African Studies. In this conversation, we discuss the complex meanings of Black Studies as an intellectual tradition, a political disposition, and the various impasses and hesitations that lie at the heart of the relation between those two aspects of the field.