Alix Chapman - Department of African American Studies, Emory University

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 Alix Chapman, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Emory University. His research and teaching interests include Black Queer Studies, Black Feminism, and anthropology and is the author of Raising the Bottom: Bounce Music and Black Queer Performance in Post-Katrina New Orleans (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between activism and intellectual life, sexuality and blackness, and the place of ethnographic methods in Black Studies.