Jarvis Givens - Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard 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 Jarvis Givens, who teaches in the Departments of African and African American Studies and School of Education at Harvard University. Along with a number of essays in popular and academic venues, he is co-editor of "We Dare Say Love": Supporting Achievement in the Educational Life of Black Boys (2018) and author of Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (2021), School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness (2023), American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation (2025), and I'll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the place of education and education writing in African American history, the culture and politics of Black study, and the imperative for Black Studies to impact community educational spaces.