A Message from Home Stretch host Hannah Levin,
Dear listener:
Seven years ago, KXCI began a fruitful partnership with the University of Arizona to celebrate Black History Month.
Every February I have had the honor and pleasure of hosting professors from the College of Humanities’ Africana Studies Department for guest DJ sessions during The Home Stretch at 5 pm every Friday throughout the month.
The purpose of these sessions is to utilize the vivid beauty and unique power of music to illuminate important moments in Black history and culture.
Whether the core theme is identity, gender, food, religion, dance, film, or larger contemporary concepts such as Afrofuturism, we create space for these gifted educators to share the ways in which music intersects with their areas of academic expertise.
There is a direct correlation between your gifts of support to KXCI and our capacity to forge meaningful partnerships such as this. I cannot thank you enough for your continued support of independent radio. KXCI exists for you but also because of you and I am so grateful for your role in this beautiful equation that knits our community together.
The result has been a true gift in the form of consistently inspiring, intelligent conversations that spark to life through music’s distinct lens, refracting these topics with a warmth and accessibility that only music can provide.
You can read more about this year’s guest DJs below and follow the links to playlists and archives. Each session is available on-demand for two weeks via our streaming archive.
Hannah Levin, Host of The Home Stretch & Director of Content
February 7th, 2025, Johnny Castro
Johnny Castro is a third-year Ph.D. student in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He holds an M.A. in Creative Enterprise Cultural Leadership from Arizona State University. He is a member of the Furious Styles Crew and co-founder of the Worth The Weight event series. Johnny is a leader in the Arizona dance community as a bboy, practitioner, and event organizer/host & has witnessed unique aesthetic trends form in the Arizona dance scene. His research is rooted in the lived experiences of street dancers and examines the relationship between social media and feelings of belonging and dis-belonging as experienced by street dancers.February 14th, 2024 DeAnna Daniels
DeAnna Monique Daniels is an Assistant Professor of Africana and Religious Studies with a Ph.D. in Religion in the African American Religion concentration from Rice University in 2023.February 21st, 2025 Dr. Bryan Carter
Dr. Bryan Carter is a Professor of Africana Studies and Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of Arizona. This is Dr. Carter’s second appearance as a guest DJ on KXCI and we are delighted to welcome him back!
His fascinating research centers on how using traditional and advanced interactive and immersive technologies change the dynamic within the learning space. Carter received his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri-Columbia and has published numerous articles on his doctoral project, Virtual Harlem, an immersive representation of a portion of Harlem, NY, as it existed during the 1920s Jazz Age and Harlem Renaissance.
His current work has led to exploring the African American and expatriate experience in Paris through immersive and augmented technologies using handheld devices and wearable technologies, and Afrofuturism through his exploration of “presence” by teaching as a hologram.
February 28th, 2025, Dr. Jerome Dotson
This is Dr. Dotson’s second appearance as a guest DJ on KXCI, and we are delighted to welcome him back! Dr. Jerome Dotson is an Assistant Professor in the UA’s Africana Studies Program. A native of Atlanta, Georgia and a graduate of Morehouse College, he holds a Ph.D. in U.S. history and an M.A. in African American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching interests focus on African American history, Southern foodways, hip-hop, folklore, and politics of the body. Currently, he is working on a book-length manuscript exploring the ways eating and diet have animated Black radicalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The manuscript is tentatively titled: “No Pork on My Fork: Race, Dietary Reform, and Body Politics, 1830-1990. “No Pork on My Fork” interrogates the cultural, social, and political significance of food consumption through an interrogation of the metonymic relationship between the black body and pork from slavery through 1990s Hip Hop.
