In the fourth and final episode of season one, host Shelley Lee sits down with Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and outgoing Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. Their conversation ranges across the definition and defense of the humanities, the concept of “value clarification” as the distinct work of humanistic inquiry, and the challenges posed by AI and shrinking attention spans to the conditions necessary for deep thinking. They also take up Amanda’s forthcoming book on rumination, the politics of viewpoint diversity, and the interconnected fates of the humanities, the university, and democracy. Gregory Kimbrell, Communications Manager at the Cogut Institute and producer of “The Confluence,” joins Shelley for the episode introduction and outro.

This episode steps outside the academy to explore how Ethnic Studies is changing public understandings of race in America, particularly in museums and other spaces of public engagement. Hosts Shelley Lee and Gina Pérez speak with Renee Romano and Gaila Sims about the practice of public humanities: how scholars and curators of African American history bring academic knowledge into community spaces, the ethics of care that guide their work, and the transformative potential of building historical memory collaboratively, from the ground up.

Gen X scholars entered the academy about two decades after the struggle for Ethnic Studies resulted in the institutionalization of the first programs, but this didn’t necessarily make their work easy. Hosts Shelley Lee and Gina Pérez speak with Pawan Dhingra (Amherst College), Meredith Gadsby (Oberlin College), and Pablo Mitchell (Oberlin College) about coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s, beginning their careers in the early 2000s, fighting to sustain programs amid culture wars and budget cuts, and what it means to do Ethnic Studies from within — producing scholarship, building solidarity, and working with vigilance, care, and joy.

In our inaugural episode, we speak with two giants of Ethnic Studies and social movement scholarship: Robin D.G. Kelley (University of California, Los Angeles) and George Lipsitz (University of California, Santa Barbara). Together, they’ve shaped how we understand the intersections of race, culture, resistance, and solidarity for nearly four decades. In this wide-ranging conversation, we explore the origins and evolution of Ethnic Studies, its role in preparing citizens for our diverse democracy, and how scholarly work connects to organizing and social movements.