Courtney Patterson-Faye - Department of Sociology, Wesleyan 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 Courtney Patterson-Faye, who teaches in the Department of Sociology at Wesleyan University. In addition to essays on Black feminist theory, fat studies, and sexuality and cultural studies, she is the author of The Body Contract: Black Women, Culture, and the Impossibilities of Fatness, forthcoming on NYU Press. In this conversation, we discuss the expansiveness of Black study, the relevance of Black Fat Studies for the field, and how Black Studies makes critical interventions inside disciplines.