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 Taelore Marsh, Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archives Archivist to the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In this conversation, we discuss the significance of archival construction, Black feminist methodologies for that construction, and how a commitment to the whole person changes the memory and history structure of an archive.