andré carrington - Department of English, University of California, Riverside

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 andré carrington, who teaches in the Department of English at University of California, Riverside. He has published extensively on literature and the speculative arts and is the author of two books, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (2016) and Audiofuturism: Science Fiction Radio Drama and the Black Fantastic Imagination (2026), as well as editor of The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories (2025). In this conversation, we discuss the expansiveness of the Black Studies imagination, the place of popular and graphic arts in Black study, and the terms of thinking and teaching Black life in times of political crisis.