Zana Sanders - 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 Zana Sanders, a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the intersections of visual culture, contemporary Black Art, media, and technology with an emphasis on representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality. She is particularly interested in how Black artists and cultural producers use visual technologies in their image-making practices to shape political consciousness and cultural memory, document, and reimagine Black social life. In this conversation, we explore the link between histories of struggle and Black Studies practice, the encoding of blackness in popular and visual culture, and the past and future of community work as constitutive of the field.