Leigh Raiford - Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, University of California, Berkeley

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 Leigh Raiford, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at University of California, Berkeley. In addition to a number of critical essays in edited collections and journals, she is co-editor of Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture (2017) and the author of both Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2013) and When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World (2026). In this conversation, we discuss the political and cultural origins of the field, the place of art in the history of Black study, and the analytical and imaginative dimensions of Black Studies.