Armond Towns - Department of Africana Studies, Williams College

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 Armond Towns, who teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at Williams College. Along with numerous scholarly pieces, he is the author of On Black Media Philosophy (2022) and is currently at work on a new book that takes a Black Studies approach to questions of artificial intelligence and cognate emergent forms of computational work tentatively titled The Artificial Life of Intelligence: The Liberal Arts and AI. In this conversation, we discuss political history and theory, media studies and Black study, and the place of the Black radical tradition in the field of Black Studies.

What is The Black Studies Podcast?

The Black Studies Podcast is 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.