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 Sonja Lanehart, who teaches in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona where her scholarship focuses on sociolinguistics and language variation, language and education in African American communities, language and identity, and African American education from Black Feminist, Intersectionality, and Critical Race Theory perspectives. In addition to a number of important articles on African American linguistic practices, she is the author and editor of a number of books including Sista, Speak!: Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy, Language in African American Communities, and editor of The Oxford Handbook of African American Language. In this conversation, we discuss the horizons of linguistic research in a Black Studies frame, the place of gender and sexuality in understanding African American linguistic practices, and how to think about teaching in politically fraught times.