Aisha Durham - Department of Communication, University of South Florida

The Black Studies Podcast

This is Ashley Newby 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 Aisha Durham, Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her research explores the relationship between media representations and everyday life in the "post" era using auto/ethnography, performance writing, and Black feminist intersectional approaches refined in hip hop feminism. She engages these methods in her two edited books and NCA award-winning monograph Home with Hip Hop Feminism: Performances in Communication and Culture. She has edited journal special issues about local Florida and transnational culture and her research has been featured in Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, the Journal of Autoethnography, and Communication, Culture, and Critique. Durham is a former Fulbright-Hays Faculty Fellow (Brazil), The National Museum of African American History and Culture advisory board member for their hip hop anthology, and an Ellis-Bochner Autoethnography and Personal Narrative Research award recipient. She has also written public scholarship for news and entertainment outlets, such as Tampa Bay Times, NPR, and Haaretz.