In this episode, we explore intimacy, sexual agency, and sexual positivity for Black women in western societies. Because of its private and personal nature, and also due to its complex entanglement with morality, biology, and the unique historical arc of dark-skinned peoples in the Americas, Black sexuality can be fraught and difficult to navigate, and often distinctly so for women of color. 

In an attempt to explore the ways in which Black women can unlearn misinformation and equip themselves with the necessary tools to cultivate understanding of their sexuality and to develop healthy relationships with their bodies, hosts Andrea Baldwin and Trichia Cadette speak with Dr. Leslie Roberston Foncette, a bilingual psychotherapist and mental health consultant, and Janice Leonard, a Licensed Professional Counselor and Sex Therapist.

Love can be romantic, platonic, familial, even collegial. It is often unconditional, but where Black love resides it is always political. In this episode, we discuss the spectrum of love's manifestation across Black relationships. Loving oneself or others while Black is an act of rebellion for those whose bodies are racially marked and held outside of society, and at times deemed unloveable. 

Hosts Andrea Baldwin and Trichia Cadette invite Gerlyn Murrell and Kimberly Williams into conversation about the spectrum of Black love. Gerlyn Murrell is a doctoral candidate in the department of Sociology at Virginia Tech. Kimberly Williams is a University of Florida Graduate candidate in English.

In this episode we address the topic of Black women’s birth equity, birth justice and maternal health.  This topic is extremely timely with the recently leaked 1st draft of the Supreme court’s ruling which purports to overturn the 40 plus year precedent in Roe Vs. Wade which makes abortion in the US legal.  Even with Roe still law of the land Black women are more likely than women of all other races to experience reproductive inequities.  They are more likely to seek abortion services,  they are more likely to die during and as a consequence of child birth, they are more likely to have their children taken away by the state and much much more. Today we will be discussing the long standing historical reasons for these inequities, what birthing equity practitioners are doing in our communities to address these inequities and talk about what the future holds for Black women in a projected post-Roe United states.

For this conversation, host Andrea Baldwin is joined by Dr. Natalie Cook and Zuleka Woods. Dr. Cook is an Assistant Professor of Public Health at Virginia Tech, she is a critical educator, transformative evaluator and researcher, as well as a culturally-affirming full-spectrum doula. Dr Cook co-facilitated a week-long module in Making All Black Lives Matter (MABLM) course that I co-taught with Dr. Shannon Bell in the spring semester 2022. The MABLM course has been informing a special series of the standpoints podcast, for which this episode is one.  This series is made possible in part by a  collaborative grant funded by the University Libraries at Virginia Tech.

A big part of loving our blackness is our attention to healing not only for ourselves but for our communities.  As Black people we recognize how living in an anti-black world we consistently experience trauma and loss.  Any yet because we are consistently attending to the immediacy of our physical and financial needs and the needs of others we struggle to identify and address the traumas we experience. In this episode we will be addressing black healing, why is talking about Black healing important, what does this healing look like, understanding that Black folks are not a monolith,  and what are some healing practices Black folks can engage in and be mindful of as a community?

Hosts Andrea Baldwin and Trichia Cadette are joined in conversation by Kimberly Williams and Dr. Portia Moore. Dr. Moore is the Department Head and Assistant Professor of Museum Studies at the University of Florida in the School of Art and Art History. Kimberly is a University of Florida Graduate candidate in English.

In September of 2020, Standpoints hosts Trichia Cadette and Andrea Baldwin spoke with Nana Brantuo and Jaimee Swift about love among and between black women during times of crises. 

Nana Brantuo is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park, an educator, researcher, and writer who has  published work in The Hill, PBS Newshour, Black Perspectives, Black Women Radicals, OkayAfrica, Brittle Paper, and AYO Magazine.

Jaimee Swift (she/her) is the executive director, founder, and creator of Black Women Radicals, a Black feminist advocacy organization dedicated to uplifting Black women and gender non-conforming and non-binary people’s radical activism in Africa and in the African Diaspora. She is a Ph.D candidate at Howard University in the Department of Political Science, where her research focuses on Black LGBT feminists resistance and organizing against state, structural, and symbolic violence in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. 

The conversation was recorded remotely during a Zoom meeting.  

In this episode Andrea Baldwin and Trichia Cadette talk with Dr. Anthony Kwame Harrison and Ocqua Gerlyn Murrell about creating and publishing a collection of student essays on Black Feminism as a course objective, and about making Black Feminist interventions in academic, activist, and entrepreneurial spaces.