Kyra Gaunt - Department of Music and Theater, State University of New York, Albany

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 Kyra Gaunt, who teaches in the Department of Music and Theater at State University of New York, Albany. She has published extensively on race and gender in both academic and popular venues, and is the author of the groundbreaking work The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip Hop (2007). In this conversation, we explore the significance of musical study in the field of Black Studies, the relationship between vernacular cultural practices and world- and idea-making, and how a focus on the experiences of Black girls and women shifts our understanding of the meaning of Black study.