This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored 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, late doctoral 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 Austin Lee, a postdoctoral scholar at the Boston University Society of Fellows specializing in the study of extended kin networks, communal mothering practices, and the nuances of Black families, sexuality, and gender. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has received support from various organizations, including the National Science Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration. Her overarching research agenda utilizes qualitative research methods to highlight the interdependent relationship between antiblackness and norms related to sexuality and gender, such as the essentiality of the nuclear family structure, gender conformity, and compulsory heterosexuality. In this conversation, we explore the place of gender and sexuality in Black Studies, how research draws on and returns to Black communities, and how mixed-methods research charts new paths in the field.