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 Jaz Riley, Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at University of Illinois. In this conversation, we discuss the ongoing challenge of community for Black Studies research, the critical intervention made by emerging questions of gender for the field, and the politics of Black study in the contemporary university.