Laylah Amatullah Barrayn - Department of Arts, Culture, and Media, Rutgers University, Newark

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 Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, who teaches in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at Rutgers University, Newark. Along with numerous scholarly and public facing articles, Laylah is currently co-organizing To Collect and Collate: Keepers of Black Photography, a convening on Black photography archives to be held at NYU Accra in March 2026. Her exhibition, Ground of Memory is on view at Express Newark, Rutgers University - Newark until January 30, 2026 and she is working on a book of first person essays on Black photographers. In this conversation, we discuss curatorial work, photography, and the centrality of aesthetic questions in the Black Studies imagination and intellectual tradition.