Kevin Rigby, Jr. - Department of African American Studies, University of Illinois

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 Kevin Rigby, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of African American Studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research is concerned with the complex effects and affects of afropessimist theory for thinking through issues of history, culture, and politics, specifically focused on the structure and meaning of Black protest. In this conversation, we explore the place of pessimist theory in Black study, political mobilization and community work, and how Black Studies shapes research and the classroom.