Charlene Carruthers - Department of Black Studies, Northwestern University

This is John Drabinski 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 Charlene Carruthers, who is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern University. She is a writer, filmmaker, and community organizer who is exploring questions of race, place, neighborhood, and urban space in her doctoral work. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of geography and urban studies for Black Studies research, the racial politics of cityscapes and neighborhood configuration, and the place of study and intellectual work in Black liberation struggle.