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 Shanice Robinson-Blacknell, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at San Francisco State University. Shanice’s research and teaching revolve around pedagogy, activism, and the relationship between academic work and community intervention and collaboration. In this conversation, we discuss the meaning of education and pedagogy in Black Studies classrooms, the meaning of community for the past and future of the field, and the distinctiveness of Black ways of making and deploying critical knowledge.