A Black Radical Roundtable: What is Black Studies?
This roundtable seeks to provide a range of perspectives on the contours of black studies as an intellectual project. Do we understand black studies as theory? Praxis? Critique? Demand? An object of knowledge and/or method of knowledge production? The roundtable will begin by asking each participant to engage with the question “what is black studies?” using whatever approach to the question is most generative for them. Participants might offer insights about their own training including, the questions, debates, historical moments, topics, thinkers, and political contexts and struggles that influenced their entry into the field. They might engage how their central research questions have changed over the course of their intellectual development, or focus on the debates that seem to animate the field today. They might reflect upon how black studies shapes other disciplines (history, anthropology, sociology, literary and cultural studies) and conceptual frameworks (performance, geography/space, music, agency, resistance, subjection, migration, immigration, etc.). The initial response could be framed through the influence of a single text, question, or topic, or it could map out a broad set of questions and issues that shape your analysis of the field. In some ways, the dissonance and convergences between the approaches to the question will be part of the conversation about black studies as an intellectual project.
This event will be followed by a Reception and an Open House.
Travel grants are available to Faculty or graduate students wanting to attend this event.
Priority funding will be given for attending Consortium events.
Please go to the travel grants page for submission details.
Note: The application must be received before the event has taken place; no retroactive applications will be approved.
