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 Sophia Jahadhmy and Sofia Meadows-Muriel, doctoral candidates in the Department of Africana Studies at Cornell University. Sophia Jahadhmy is a second-year PhD candidate and her current interests include thinking cohabitation, biopolitics of the plantation, oceanic stories and histories, and alternative modes of citizenship, autochthony, and Being on the Swahili Seas. In particular, she reads Édouard Glissant to examine the possibilities for identifying, Relating, and constructing communal Self and Other on the Indian Ocean plantation and its aftermath in order to think affirmative futures for cohabitating difference on Africa's easternmost coast. Sofia Meadows-Muriel is also a second-year PhD student, whose research examines how the political philosophy of the Black Power Movement and Pan-African anti-colonial struggles became formative influences on the praxis and intellectual production of black Puerto Rican movement makers.