This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a 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 Takiyah Harper-Shipman, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Along with scholarly essays and critical pieces, she is the author of Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa (2019) and her second monograph, Unruly Fertility: Race, Development, and Decolonial Reproductive Politics, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. In this conversation, we discuss the place of political economy in the field of Black Studies, transnational and comparative study, and the urgent political questions in the study of Black life in the twenty-first century.