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, graduate 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 Joanna Cardenas, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores the nexus of critical carceral studies, disability studies, and Black feminist thought, with an emphasis on the intersection of race, class, gender, and space. Through a close spatial analysis of California prisons, her research focuses on how systems of confinement inform understandings of gender, race, and ableism. She also studies how the carceral state of South Central Los Angeles impacts Black and Latinx women, with a focus on surveillance and other policing practices. With a deep engagement in community-based research, she also helps interrogate the experimentation of new surveillance and policing technologies in Skid Row, the Figueroa corridor, and Los Angeles more broadly. Joanna’s research has been supported by the Greater Good Science Center, the Black Studies Collaboratory, the Center for Race and Gender, Berkeley Law, and Berkeley’s Haas Scholars Program. Beyond academia, Joanna is also actively involved in litigation challenging staff misconduct across California state prisons. In this conversation, we discuss the place of carceral studies in the study of Black life, how urban studies and questions of gender impact Black Studies inquiry, and how community work expands the classroom and intellectual life.

This is Ashley Newby 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 Justin Leroy, who teaches in the Department of History at Duke University. He specializes in nineteenth-century African American history, with particular interests in intellectual history, slavery, abolition, and the history of capitalism. His first book, The Lowest Freedom, recovers an unexamined tradition in nineteenth-century Black thought that located the failures of emancipation not simply in political exclusion and racial violence, but in wide-ranging forms of economic dispossession that continued to define Black life in freedom. His current research focuses on carceral studies, and he is working on a history of race and policing in nineteenth-century North America. He also has longstanding interests in comparative Black/Indigenous and Black/Asian American histories.

This is Ashley Newby 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 Kaiama L. Glover, professor of Black Studies and French at Yale University. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, as well as of numerous essays, articles, and chapters concerning race, gender, and representation in the francophone world. She is currently at work on a biography titled “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life" (forthcoming with Liveright/Norton) and a series of essays, “‘Blackness’ in French.” Professor Glover is the prize-winning translator of several works of Haitian prose fiction and francophone non-fiction. She is also the founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis and the founding co-director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography. She has been a contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the co-host of the podcast WRITING HOME | American Voices from the Caribbean. Professor Glover's scholarly, translation, and digital humanities work has been generously supported by fellowships at the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.