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 two of the founding members of the newly launched Department of African Diaspora Studies at Grinnell College: Makeba Lavan and Stephanie Jones. Professor Lavan teaches in the English department at Grinnell with a special interest in afrofuturist literature and culture. Professor Jones teaches in the Education Studies department with a focus on the relation between race, curriculum, and trauma in Black students. In this conversation we discuss their journeys into an abiding concern with Black life, what sustains that concern, and how multiple disciplinary approaches to Black Studies expand and deepen the field.