Welcome to Africana Studies
The Department of Africana Studies at the University of New Mexico is an interdisciplinary major degree-granting department, which provides students with a broad understanding of the political, social, and historic linkages between peoples of Africa and other African-descended people in the Southwest, the rest of the United States, and throughout the Black Diaspora in Mexico, Latin America, Europe, and the Caribbean. Black diasporic methodologies are essential to unpacking the role that the Black Diaspora plays in global cultural, revolutionary, and technological advances. Global South Studies, Afrofuturism and Afropessimism, Transgender Studies, Transnational Intersectional Feminisms are but a few of the remarkably broad range of academic and research interests and social justice imperatives that Africana Studies applies that are central to the overarching research mission of the University of New Mexico.
OUR MOTTO
LIFTING AS WE CLIMB
OUR MISSION
Giving students of all races, ethnicities, and backgrounds a full understanding of the global linkages between peoples of Africa and other African descended people in the Southwest, the contiguous United States and throughout the Black diaspora.
Spotlight on:
Black Studies as Praxis: Confronting Anti-Blackness across Campuses, Classrooms, Texts, and Community Archives
Africana Studies Faculty Dr. Tryphenia Peele-Eady, Dr. Andrea Mays, and Dr. Thayza Matos, as well as VP Dr. Assata Zeria presented at the 50th Annual National Council of Black Studies (NCBS) Conference in Baltimore over spring break.
They presented a panel titled “Black Studies as Praxis: Confronting Anti-Blackness across Campuses, Classrooms, Texts, and Community Archives.”
The panel positioned Black Studies as praxis—an intellectual and political commitment that bridges scholarship, pedagogy, archival work, and community engagement. Through their presentations, the scholars examined how anti-Blackness operates across institutional and cultural spaces, including higher education, K–12 classrooms, textual production, and community archives. They also explored how Black Studies can be mobilized as a critical framework for naming, challenging, and transforming these conditions.
Their work highlights the department’s leadership in national and interdisciplinary conversations about the role and importance of Black Studies in today’s political landscape, reaffirming a core principle of the field: that Black Studies has never been just an academic pursuit, but rather a project rooted in the ongoing fight for knowledge, power, and liberation.
