Blackness and Belonging

In the first episode of the Black Studies Podcast, we are joined by Dr. Debra Thompson and Tari Ajadi to discuss creative and collaborative work on Blackness, belonging and the search for promising and fantastic futures.

Dr. Debra Thompson is the Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University and a leading scholar of the comparative politics of race. Deb's teaching and research interests focus on the relationships among race, the state, and inequality in democratic societies. She has taught at the University of Oregon, Northwestern University, Ohio University, and held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship with the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard.

Tari Ajadi is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Dalhousie University and a Black Studies Pre-doctoral fellow at Queen’s University. A British-Nigerian immigrant to Canada, Tari aims to produce research that supports and engages with Black communities across the country. He is a co-founder of the Nova Scotia Policing Policy Working Group, a member of the Board of Directors of the Health Association of African Canadians, as well as a Board Member with the East Coast Prison Justice Society.

Topics discussed in this wonderfully generous, caring, and thoughtful conversation include:

• Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census
• The Two Pandemics of Anti-Black Racism and COVID-19
• Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era
• Black Life and Livingness
• Black Studies and the University
• Autoethnography and Socially Engaged Research

Transcript

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