This is Ashley Newby 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 Valerie Grim, who teaches in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. As a scholar, Grim researches and publishes in the area of twentieth and twenty-first centuries African American rural history. She has conducted research and provided lectures in North America, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Currently, she has completed Between Paternalism and Self-Determination: Rural African American Life in a Yazoo-Mississippi Delta Community, 1910-1970 (revision in process for publication). She has completed a book (also under revision) on the Brooks Farm Community, formerly known as the Brooks Farm plantation located in Sunflower and Leflore Counties in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. Her current book projects - Between Forty Acres and a Class Action: Black Farmers’ Protest against the United States Government, 1995-2010s and Black Land Grant Universities and African American Rural Development, 1990 to the present - focus on the needs of African Americans in rural America and efforts to help them achieve full democratic participation and engagement with federal farm and rural development policies and programs. She also is co-authoring a volume on Rural Students in Higher Education. Grim has edited several journal special issue volumes, including Agency Reduction in the Experiences and Realities of Africana People (International Journal of Africana Studies, 2018); Spirit, Mind, and Body: Research and Engagement in an African American and African Diaspora Studies Graduate Course (Black Diaspora Review, 2011); The Experiences of Rural Women, Children, and Families of Color in U.S. and Global Communities (Rural Women, Families, and Children of Color, 2009); and American Rural and Farm Women (Agricultural History, 1990). 

In this conversation, we discuss the meaning of rural histories for thinking gender and race, how Black Studies impacts the study and writing of history, and how Black study forms classrooms, community work, and the historical imagination.