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 Anthony Smith and Geo Maher, both of whom work as coordinators with the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement for Abolition and Reconstruction School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Anthony Smith is an organizer and educator based in West Philly whose work addresses police violence with direct action, political education, and mutual aid. Geo Maher is an organizer with roots in liberation struggle across the Americas and is the author of a number of books, including most recently A World Without Police (2021) and Anticolonial Eruptions (2022). Both Smith and Maher were contributing editors to the Abolition School’s publication Abolition and Reconstruction: An Emergent Guide to Collective Study (2024) with Common Notions Press. In this conversation, we discuss the place of study in political organizing, strategy and education in the formation of political consciousness, and future of liberation struggle.