Maya Doig-Acuña - 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 Maya Doig-Acuña, doctoral candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her work is invested in history and memory studies, with a particular focus on Afro-Latinx culture and identity that emphasizes diasporic movement and structures of kinship. To that end, she is currently completing her doctoral dissertation under the title We are Her Beloved Descendants: Alternate Archives of Afro-Panamanian Memory, Diaspora, and Kinship. In this conversation, we discuss the expansive reach of Black Studies, how Black study informs multidisciplinary approaches to the past, and how Black Studies sensibilities shape critical discourse around memory studies and historical research.