Sam Tecle - Department of Sociology, Toronto Metropolitan 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 Sam Tecle, who teaches in the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research engages with Black and diaspora studies, Urban studies, and sociology of education with particular focus on the analysis of diverse experiences, trajectories and expressions of Blackness grounded in particular histories of racialization, colonialism, community formation and resistance. In this conversation, we discuss the early formative history of Black Studies in Canada, the roots of Black study epistemologies in everyday practice, and the complexity of diverse stories of blackness for the Black Studies imagination.