Angela Katrina Lewis-Maddox, "Disrupting Political Science: Black Women Reimagining the Discipline" (SUNY Press, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, this is Lily Goren with the New Books Network, the New Books and Political Science podcast. Today I'm joined by Angela K. Lewis-Maddox, who is the editor of Disrupting Political Science, Black Women Reimagining the Discipline. As a political scientist, I found this book incredibly valuable and important to think about not only the discipline, but our understanding and knowledge of politics and political science.

This book was published by SUNY Press in 2025, and I'd like to introduce Angela K. Lewis-Maddox to the New Books in Political Science podcast and ask her to tell us a little bit about herself. Hello, Angela.

Hi, thank you for inviting me and for talking about Kibbutz today. My name is Angela K. Lewis-Maddox. I am a Birmingham, Alabama native. I went to the University of Alabama for my undergrad degree and Tennessee for my graduate degree.

I am the second black woman to receive the Ph.D. in political science from the University of Tennessee. One of the first one actually is also in the book and we're claims and we've been claims for over 25 years.

I have been a professor for 25 years after completing my degree. UAD, the institution I'm currently at, I'm a professor there. I started as an assistant professor, got tenure, went to the dark side temporarily, became an administrator, and

I stepped back into being a professor and now back on the dark side, I'm an assistant dean at UAB. And this book came to me, I guess, in a season of redefining myself as a political science professor. I talk about my trajectory in the career in my chapter in the book, and I'm sure we will get more in detail about that later. But

Yeah, that's me. I've been here for 25 years. I've made the circuit of all of the political science conferences over the past 25 years, but I found my conference home with the Southern Political Science Association. I'll be program chair next year and vice president-elect of the Southern Political Science Association. Cool. Thanks so much for joining me today. This book, you say, you know, sort of came after

out of some of your experiences yourself, but also thinking about how it is that Black individuals within political science, but specifically Black women in political science, exist and also don't exist within the discipline. Can you talk a little bit about how you came up with the idea for this book? Sure.

Well, it began probably as part of my career trajectory. I got into higher ed years and years ago with the intention of always being on the dark side, meaning being a higher ed administrator. So my career trajectory was, of course, assistant professor, associate, full professor, and then go into administration. I was trained in my department,

by my former department chair. I was the program director of our undergraduate program, kind of trained to take on the chair's job and then, of course, move on. And suddenly, of course, with a change of administrations, you know, new presidents bring new provosts, new provosts bring new deans, new deans bring new department chairs, and then everything changes about how your university does business. And so

The first thing that happened was I went up for full professor and the new dean and new faculty that came into our institution deemed my case not worthy of being promoted.

And I have to give some, I guess, details about it. Our practice had been, if there were not enough full professors in your department, the dean would appoint full professors from other departments to review your case. And that was what happened in my case. There was only one full professor in my department who knew my work.

The dean appointed two other professors who were not political scientists, so had no idea really how to look at my work. They weren't familiar with me. And so I had a committee, a departmental committee of people who were not political scientists, not familiar with me or my work. And basically, I was turned down for promotion.

I appealed it and I got the promotion, but there was some, I guess, backlash, whiplash as a result because of the appeal. No one likes for anyone to overturn a leadership decision, of course. And so that kind of started this spiraling of unraveling what I thought was going to be my career. Later, the department chair who I had worked with for years, who may be a program director, resigned abruptly.

And of course, that changed my career again, because this was the person who saw the potential and my ability to be an administrator, who trained me, who was confident in my ability. And then that person was no longer in charge. We went through a period in the department where we had interims. I became interim eventually after one internal search and

And I applied for the permanent position. To make a long story short, I did not receive that permanent position. And the argument was I needed to have more national statute. And the situation was, how could I do that within a six-month period? You can't gain national visibility over a six-month period. That's something people spend their entire careers working on.

And so to make a long story short, I did not become the permanent chair of the department. And from my perspective, I felt like my whole career, everything I had worked for just kind of fell through the cracks. And it took me a moment.

to gather myself and realize, okay, Angela, this is not going to happen. What do you do now? Because this was not what you planned on doing, just being a full professor. Not that anything is wrong with being a full professor, but if you had started your career in a place where you thought you were going to be in administration and that kind of, you know, there's this roadblock in front of you for you

in front of you for whatever reason, then you have to regroup, rethink. And so that was a period that I used to regroup and rethink. And that happened around 2019, 2020. COVID came. COVID gave me more time to regroup, rethink, and just pause. But

Something happened before COVID came. And I want to say this year may have been 2018 where I, along with other Black political scientists, did what we call at the Southern Political Science Association a conference within a conference.

And that is where you have this small subset of scholars that create their own mini conference within the larger Southern Political Science Association conference. So we did that. And out of that mini conference or conference within a conference, there was a panel where Black women scholars were there and they talked about their experiences in higher ed and in political science.

Now, we left that conference kind of thinking, oh, maybe we should do a project on this. It's, you know, just talking about our stories and our experiences. Then all of the stuff happened with me with the administrative job and then COVID hit.

I didn't quite remember that whole conference within a conference during COVID, obviously, because I had the personal dilemma of not receiving the administrative job and also COVID coming. Later in 2020, there was a group of Black women in higher education that started a writing group during COVID, and it was a way to build community for us

All of us had to do the same thing. We were writers, we were scholars, we were researchers, and it was a part of our job. And this was a group of Black women from assistant professors, associate professors, full professors, where we started gathering in May of 2020 to do nothing but write. We would write, we would take a break, and we would talk about what we wrote, what we had going on, how we're taking care of ourselves. In that group, I was introduced to Black feminist work.

And it wasn't, I guess, a typical introduction to it because it was an introduction to black feminists by black women scholars working on black feminism. And so I was introduced to that work. And I guess you could say reintroduced to some of the work by black female political scientists. Uh, some of the scholars, Nicole Alexander Floyd, who wrote the, uh, uh,

the preface to the book, Julia Jordan Zachary, Evelyn Simeon. I went back and I started to look at their work again. I had been exposed to it, but at this point there was just kind of a, almost an awakening. And I can't say a reawakening, but an awakening in my spirit of, well, wait a minute, Angela, you may be able to do political science your way. Why are you doing political science now?

the way you were trained to do it in this box of just writing for the sake of writing when you can write what you want to write. Because after all, I had made it to the full professor, right? So at that point, there was no more pressure to, you know, just, you know, crank out all of these papers and these books. I could actually take my time and think and really be a scholar. So I read their writing. I was in this group.

And then I was introduced to a book by a black female historian. I don't want to say her name wrong. I have to look it up. I think it's Glory Peters, but I would have to look it up just to make sure. She wrote a book about the experiences of black women historians in higher ed, in academia.

And so if you put that together with what I had experienced, kind of being stopped in my tracks, the group, the community of Black women scholars that I wrote with being reintroduced to the work of Black women political scientists, all of a sudden I came up with this idea. No one has done a work like this in political science. Right.

Angela, maybe this is what you should do. Because not only can you share the stories of other black women, but sometimes you can share your story too. And thus the idea was birth. I had no experience doing edited volumes ever.

And let me go back because I kind of I tried to do this timeline of how this all happened, but I need to go back to something that's really, really important. Julia Jordan Zachary, she is the department chair of women and gender studies at Wake Forest University.

did a book about Black women experiences during COVID. And I don't have the title right in front of me, but she did an invite for us to write our stories about how we experienced COVID. And I wrote a chapter for her in the book. And the way Julia led that project and the way she allowed us to just write

as opposed to writing within this confine of academia, writing within this box of the way political scientists did it. She allowed me to just write my chapter. Like I just literally sat down and wrote it and it was accepted. And so if you couple that experience, the way Julia led that project, she had an ethic of care. I mean, it was just the

totally different experience than my little 20 years in academia. You know, that experience with Julia and her book, the community of Black women scholars, the experience I had with being kind of stopped in my tracks, the experience I had going up for full after I thought I had followed all the rules. I did everything that was asked of me. I wrote the book. I wrote the article.

I served. I did everything that the requirement said I did. And they still said no. And I was like, well, what do I have to lose at this point? I might as well do this my time, my way. And I did. And so I sent out the call and I

And I followed a lot of the way Julia did her edited book. I really did. I mean, at the care, just the way not pressuring people for deadlines, you know, not pressuring them to write the chapter a certain way. Not, you know, I just wanted them to share experiences together.

and to talk about it the way they wanted to talk about it. And so I sent out a call, and Black Women Political Science answered the call, and thus we had the book. But let it be known, I started, the idea came in 2020, and the book didn't come out until 2025. Actually, that's not that long a trajectory. It really isn't. I've been on longer trajectories. Okay.

But yeah, that's how it came about. So there was just this culmination of all of these events personally, professionally, in community with Black women, COVID, like just all of these things came together. And I was looking for a way to redefine myself in our profession. And I guess reimagine who I was as a political scientist, who I was as a professor, as a

who I am as a white woman political scientist, who I am as a black woman professor. And, you know, I often say this to the contributors and to some of my colleagues, my friends, that I believe this is probably my most important work and probably the last one that I will, you know, do in political science because I don't think I've done any work that's more important to this world.

Well, I hope it's not your last work, but I understand what you're saying. I understand what you're saying. And what I found really interesting in the way that you pulled this volume together was also that part of what you did was, as you say about Julia Jordan Zachary, was that you asked some of the contributors to do an autoethnography.

Right. And that's what you describe having done yourself about, you know, your experience during COVID. Can you explain a little bit about what the authors who did that found as they sort of put themselves into this context of being Black women political scientists?

So some of them and I talk about this in my introduction. Some of this work was very painful for people to write because it was about their experiences. In fact there's one person that well actually at

at least two that I could think of right off the top of my head, that I wanted to contribute to the project. And for a variety of reasons, they are not in the project. But I know one for certain, it was just too painful for them to write and to remember. And so for many of us, it was therapy for us to write the stories. But at the same time, it was painful for us to remember and

and to publicly speak about the things that have happened to us. And so I want, you know, people who read the book, who pick up the book to understand that this is not typical scholarly work, although it is scholarly, but it's going to be deeply personal. And, and,

And unfortunately for some of the readers, people we've introduced the project to, it reminds them of their current experiences that although we have a span of individuals, a diversity of Black women, you know, ranging from recent, we have a recent undergraduate student that wrote a chapter. We have a recent graduate student that wrote a chapter.

And we have people all the way to full professors. So across different places in their careers, we have representation from the LGBTQ community in the book. We have people in California that contribute to chapters, Midwest, Southern. I'm just a range of scholars and all of the stories are decided. And so it makes you wonder, what are we doing as political scientists?

to not only address the experiences of people who teach and research our discipline, but also what are we doing to address even current events? And that's probably another conversation for another day. But current events make me pause and think about as political scientists, have we failed as political scientists to address the significance of

our government, our constitution, how we protect it. But again, that's probably a conversation for a minute. And I certainly understand that issue. And one of the things that you also draw a distinction about, but you sort of highlight is

is the fact that it's not just about female Black political scientists in the discipline who have these particular experiences, who, as you refer to, or as another contributor refers to as space invaders, but it's also studying the topic

Which is something that I've, you know, sort of my own experience in looking at how, you know, women as a subject matter are treated within the discipline, not considered as important to study as women.

I don't know, voting behavior. And particularly, as you note, how Black women as the subject matter in studying political science around Black women or African-Americans in general is not of the same value.

Can you talk about how part of that also shaped what you were bringing into this book? Oh my goodness, you just opened up a Pandora's box. I'm trying to figure out where exactly to start here. Okay, so let me tell you a story. And it's hard for me to answer the question without first telling you the story. So my first book, To the Right of Misunderstood, about Black Certainism. I was a recently tenured professor and the

The project derived from my dissertation. So it was a long, long process. I was supposed to write the book before I went up for tenure. I sent it off, didn't work out with some of the publishers. So it ended up being my project from associate to fuller.

So I had this, you know, work. And so even in my dissertation, the standard was not to just write about black people. White people had to be in the book too, or in the dissertation. So I had to compare black political attitudes to white political attitudes.

This was a dissertation, and we all know when we write dissertations, we do what they tell us to do. So we do great, right? So no problem. I wasn't even mature enough in the discipline and the field age-wise to understand the significance of that mandate. You fast forward when I started working on the book project. The rule was the same. Black conservative ideology had to be compared to white conservative ideology.

again, probably not mature enough in the discipline to understand why can't black people just be a subject in and of themselves? Why does black stuff have to be compared to white stuff? Like, is there not enough variety among black people? I'm about to switch my vernacular here, so. Like, for real? Why? Why? If I want to study black people, can't I just study black people? Why do I have to compare them to white people? Because, like,

Yeah, so that's a whole other conversation too. But like, really? Like, this has been the standard in political science. Studying Black people in and of themselves wasn't enough. And so I had to include this chapter about white people. Okay, okay. So yeah, when I did this book, it was not about anybody else but Black people, Black women in political science. We are enough.

Period. So there is no comparison, no talking about white women, not getting anything is wrong with white men, but yeah, Sunni. And I have to give it to Sunni, like, and between just my maturity in the discipline, um,

being able to be exposed to how other black political scientists, specifically black women political scientists, did their work. And so, yes, we are the subject. We are the content and we stand alone, period. We are enough, period. I really shouldn't have to say that. But as a discipline, I mean, come on, what are we doing?

Yeah, I'll just leave it there. But yes, that's how I got there. And we were talking about the We Don't Care movement. I got to the point where I don't care. I'm doing this my way. And so, yes, we are the subject of the book and we are worthy to be studied, period. And again, so...

I shouldn't have to say that, but as scholars, why are we not open to people approaching research and scholarship the way they want to? Why do we have a box? Because I mean, really true inquiry is inquiry, right? There is no box about research and scholarship and learning. Why are we putting what we do in a box? Why is, why is, why do we have these rules? Yeah. You know? So yes, I just got to the point where,

I'm doing this my way. I have nothing to lose. I just wanted to let you sort of talk about some of those chapters where your contributors, you know, sort of talked about the fact that they were focusing only on sort of a Black subject matter issue.

And that they were not only focusing on a black subject matter, but black female subject matter and doing it in, you know, in the skill set that we have as political scientists to sort of understand the sort of unique.

position of Black female political scientists, both as scholars, but as looking at the subject matter that they're researching. Can you talk a little bit about some of those chapters? Right. So I'm trying to think of a chapter. I've

I think the chapter by Desiree Malonis is a great one to talk about. Her work is about the rhythm of political science. And she talks about how we are rhythm disruptors, Black women, not only how we approach politics,

political science from a teaching perspective, but also from a research perspective. Just everything that we do in political science is different. So that is a great chapter. She also talks about how she approached the curriculum review at the institution that she was employed at in 2013.

trying to discover which classes should be mandatory versus which ones should be elected. And doing that from a position of being a Black woman and just the way she did was different than how other people do that.

So that was a very great chapter that talked about political science from a disciplinary perspective, being trained in political science, but bringing in something different than other people bring in. Cherise Janae Nelson's chapter also talked about that, about she used rational choice theory. And it is a great chapter, too.

to look at it from if you're like a really deeply political scientist and would love to learn about rational choice theory. She does a great job talking about that in her chapter. I'm trying to think of some other chapters that

Maybe the public administration chapter talks about that too. It starts with that conversation about Dr. Jill Biden and this whole debate about whether or not she should be called doctor and also brought it into the realm of public administration and some best practices for public administration. And I can't leave out Julia Jordan's actuary chapter about

how the discipline disciplines us and not viewing our work as worthy, as scholarly, as top notch. I mean, as we know over the past 50 or 60 or so years, there wasn't even a subfield for women, gender and politics. There wasn't even a black policies or race, ethnicity, politics subfield. And under that subfield,

scholars who study Latina politics, Latino politics, or LGBTQ politics, just the development of all of these fields and how even now the journals that specialize in these subfields of political science are not

deemed as worthy as the journals that only focus on predominantly white issues. And so we really have a very, very long way to go, but there are pieces that really, really hone in on how political science as a discipline treats those of us who don't do that traditional work. We got work to do. But

But hopefully this book will kind of open the conversation about how we approach what is good scholarship versus I'm not sure what they classify as. It's just scholarship. I don't know. But it's all worthy. It's all scholarship. It's all work. And if we are truly those who value political, scientific inquiry, scholarly inquiry, we should value all work that people do.

Absolutely. And so much of what you're talking about in terms of the sort of boiling it down to where we get at what it's like to be a Black political scientist who's female in the discipline, or if you are studying something that is revolving around race, so much of that is obviously about power, which is what we study as political scientists.

that I sometimes am perplexed, not sometimes, always perplexed by, you know, how race and gender somehow are secondary topics. And yet they're all about power. I mean, this is also what a lot of your contributors are talking about.

how, and you talk about this, obviously, how the idea of studying race is something that has been subsumed within the discipline and sort of made tertiary,

for so long that, you know, to sort of bring it forward, to pull it out and sort of say, this is as important as, you know, studying voting behavior or, you know, studying Plato's Republic that, you know, here we are. And as, as you note, the reason for this book is because it has been tertiary. It has been subsumed. The scholars that you recruited, you know,

do they study for the most part gender and race or do they study other things as well as gender and race? So I have to first kind of indict myself, which I've done several times. I have

this is my first work where I focus on gender and race. I, as I said before, I came out of graduate school trying to do everything the traditional way. I wanted to be a, you know, voting behavior scholar and I wanted to run all the models and, you know, run the stats and, you know, get published and all of those things. And so I never did gender work until

And so, no, all of us are not scholars that study gender. I would say that we are all scholars that study race, but we are not all gender scholars in the book. No. And I think I do talk about my career over time.

you know, the past 25 years and no one, I mean, maybe before this book, certainly if someone called my name, they would not say she does anything. My name would not be called. How

However, there are scholars that study gender. Evelyn Simeon is in the book. Her entire career, she studied race and gender. Nicole Alexander Floyd, the term space invaders was a term that she coined, and she studies race and gender. She spent her career doing that. Julia Jordan Zachary has spent her career studying.

studying gender and race, particularly Black women. Lakita Bonnet Bailey, she is not a gender scholar. She studies hip-hop. She talks about in her chapter how when she started doing this work, people said, well, that's not political science. It's, well, why is studying music, hip-hop, not political science? There are so many political messages in music. How could we forget

something as important as music within what we study. There are so many political messages in music, but again,

Again, a part of this book is also an indictment of political science as it does, and that we really have to pause and think about what we're doing. Either we're going to keep doing things the way we've done them, or we're going to expand and look at how we study what we study in all different ways. And I want to go back to something you said earlier about political science studying power.

But yet some of the same things that we talk about from a political perspective in politics, in government, we don't examine our discipline and how we do things. We study power from, you know, Congress, the presidency, the Supreme Court, but we're not studying power from the perspective of how do we

practice power over people and what schools they go to, what funding they receive, whether or not they get raises, whether or not they get tenure. Like, why are we not studying what we do? Because in order for us to understand what's going on in the larger society, perhaps we should think about what we're doing first. And then maybe we can understand what's happening in the larger society. Yeah.

And that is, again, one of the points that you make in the introduction about how a lot of this is not just race, but it's also caste and class positionality and how much that figures into so much of how we as political scientists read others within the discipline. And we do. And it's really sad that

We do that without, how do I say it? Taking responsibility for doing it, indicting others for doing some of the same things that we're actually doing. Like, you know, I talk about

Okay, so you take a scholar that's working on a novel area that hasn't been studied before or are approaching the area from a different perspective, just something that's new and different, doesn't publish in the top journals, publishes somewhere, and then they go up for tenure. And the argument is, well, you didn't publish in the top journals. That was a requirement for tenure. But they did work. Why does that work not count? I mean...

It's really something we have to evaluate. I mean, graduate students with school, you know, whether or not they get funding in graduate school, whether or not, you know, the whole funding crisis. I mean, I can't talk about funding without talking about where we are, you know, as a nation with, you know, research funding. But if you think about it from the perspective of, you know, you have graduate students,

whether or not they get assistantships, fellowships, whether or not they get funding to study what they're going to study, who they get chosen to work with as professors. I mean, just this whole...

set of things that impacts people's lives that we're not really thinking about and we don't even want to talk about. We don't want to address it. We don't want to acknowledge it. And before we address it, we first have to acknowledge that there's this caste system that exists in political science. You know, some work is more valued than others. And then we have to address, okay, so if that system exists, how do we deal with it?

And we have to have some really open and honest conversations about this just within our discipline in order for us to move forward. And a part of my work was also derived from the task force reports of the two Black women political surrogates

who have been presidents of the American Political Science Association. Paula McLean and Diane Penderhughes, they did task force reports about the discipline. And a large part of how I arranged the work, the volume, was based on their task force reports. Particularly, Diane Penderhughes' task force reports talked about political science in the 21st century and how do we survive as a discipline. Because

Students don't want to major in political science. They don't see it as an important topic. How do we approach the enrollment cliff if we have fewer students attending college and then even fewer majoring in political science? Will political science as a discipline survive without really being honest with ourselves about how we exist as a discipline first and foremost?

before we start tackling some of the external things to the discipline. But yeah, I failed to mention their task force reports, which were very, very important to how I organized and arranged the volume. And so I did want to ask you another question that we've sort of touched on already, but the terminology space invaders, right?

it made so much sense to me as I was reading it. But you also define it as the kind of reception, right, that particularly Black women political scientists experience because the discipline is very white. The discipline is very male still, even though it's

has a lot more women than it used to have. But, you know, the sort of Black woman political scientist is kind of, you know, like a black swan. And there just aren't very many of them, right? And so can you talk a little bit about not only the term itself, but how you and your contributors sort of came to understand it?

So the term was coined by Nicole Alexander Floyd, who wrote the foreword for the book. And she talked about it from the perspective of, you know, space invaders are these people who occupy spaces that...

were not necessarily designed for them. And so, you know, the space is like the discipline in and of itself. The invader is Black women interposing themselves there because, as you said, political science is still a white male-dominated field. And I provide some statistics in my chapter about how the field is less white male-dominated, but nevertheless still white male-dominated.

And so our existence there as political science professors, we're space invaders. We're not supposed to be in space. And so, you know, it's like having a fish out of water, right? A fish doesn't exist on sand. And so although you don't think of the fish as invading the sand, just our existence and the way we do things in political science invades the space because we cause problems.

people to question how things are done. And nonetheless, this book in and of itself, you know, causes us to rethink political science as a discipline. So, you know, and then we've experienced things. I can tell you stories for, I mean, 25 years walking into classrooms and students walking

You could see the look and shock on their face. And imagine me 25 years ago, young, black woman, teaching an introduction to American government class.

in the deep South at the University of Alabama. You know, just pause. Like if someone could just close their eyes and imagine you're at the University of Alabama teaching a political science class or you're as a student, you don't think when you sign up for the class, it's going to be a black female, not a young one anyway. I mean, I'm not as young as I was before, but just imagine. And I've, you know,

I've had students drop classes because I'm just, I'm there before they even know how I'm going to teach, know what I'm going to teach. They drop the class because how dare she think that she can teach me political science? I took AP, you know, political science. I know more than her. And so you have the invasion of space, not only from, you know, the discipline perspective, but

but also from the students who take the classes that they don't, you know, they don't expect us to be there. And then, I mean, you can even fast forward that to how I did do this one piece. It wasn't necessarily focused on women about teaching evaluations and how students evaluate women, political science professors versus me. And,

And even, you know, black men fare better than black women in those evaluations. I could tell you, I have been called stupid, dumb. You know, this is after they've sat in my class the whole semester. They've learned something, but they still use that language on an evaluation. And then you fast forward that to the person who's evaluating me and they see that and they don't understand the significance that race and gender plays in

And so there's just this, we're invaders of space and we're not supposed to be there. And again, that comes from the perspective of the discipline in itself and also the students who we teach in the discipline. And so, you know, a lot of that stuff, unfortunately, becomes internal to us as scholars, how we exist. It's just...

if you don't have, you know, a community of support, if you exist in an institution that doesn't understand the significance of you being the space invader, if you don't have a family of support, I mean, it could be really, really tough to be a political science professor. And that's, you know, women, anyone who's not a white male, and this is not a white male bastard thing because, you know, that's what the field is, but there's enough room for all of us to be present.

And in order for us to truly be a discipline of inquiry, you have to have different perspectives. That's the only way we're going to survive as a discipline is to embrace how all of us view the discipline and how we approach it.

And so my final question for you, Angela, is now that you have completed this work, which is a beautiful edited volume that really is important in so many different ways in understanding not just political science as a discipline, obviously, but to some degree, the place and space of Black women in our society. What are you working on now?

That's a good question. I am really working on promoting the book because I think it's so important. And as I said before, you know, this could very well be my last book. And with the changes in society, the changes in culture, the changes in higher ed,

Yeah, I'm working on promoting the book. I do. I thought about other projects, but I believe this one is worthy enough for people to know about it, to be exposed to, and to hopefully start a conversation about how we change as a, this. And so the short answer to that is I'm working on being an administrator on the dark side. And, uh,

trying to exist in the culture and in the times that we're in right now. It's pretty tough. And, you know, I'd like to probably end on the story of what is currently happening to me. I've taught a racial politics class for the past 25 years. And it has been the one class that

Students love. Students only usually signed up for the class if they really wanted to be there. And this spring semester, I looked at my evaluations and they were tight. So the first time in 25 years that I had bad evaluations.

And I thought, I paused, I said, well, what did I do different? So it caused me to go back and look at, you know, was there anything different about how I did the class this semester versus the past 25 years? And there was not really anything I did different. And so I kind of concluded that the time that we're lending it, the way our society devalues work differently,

on anything that's not, you know, heterosexual, white centered, male centered is, is not valued, is not worthy of being present. It's, it's really tough to exist in this environment. And so I think right now I'm just trying to navigate how to exist where we currently are.

And whether or not our discipline is going to step up to examine itself and what role we may have played and where we are. Okay. And I think that, unfortunately, is the place where we exist right now.

But as you note in the book itself as well, that both Pinderhughes and McLean have outlined a lot of ways that the discipline should be introspective and avenues that it can go down as a discipline to try to sort of broaden its foundation and influence.

the people who are participating in it as political scientists, as scholars, as students, as graduate students. Because as you say, you're not offering necessarily a guide since they did such a good job. Yeah, they did. They did a wonderful job. And I just took some of what they did and really just tried to tell the stories of the experiences of what...

what Black women go through, but certainly women in political science of all races, ethnicities go through some of the same things because of the demographics of political science just hasn't changed tremendously over time. Yes, I know. It has been a pleasure speaking with you, Angela K. Lewis-Maddox.

editor of Disrupting Political Science, Black Women Reimagining the Discipline, published by SUNY University Press in 2025. Is there a brick and mortar store with an online presence to which you would like to give a shout out? Thank you.

You know, that's a good question. I don't even know if that store carries my book, but after I mentioned them, perhaps I should tell them to carry it. There is a brick and mortar store. I believe the name of it is Mahogany Books. I want to say they're in D.C., and they have an online presence. And so now, as soon as we get off, I'm like, hey, you got to go and

And make sure you have some of my books in stock so that they can go there. And thank you for asking that question. I'm happy to, and I will put the link to Mahogany Books in the show notes as well. Thank you so much. And thank you for the invitation. I really do appreciate you taking the time to look at the book, to reach out to me. It means a lot. It's a beautiful book, and thank you for joining me today.