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Grounded in theories of culturally relevant and hip-hop pedagogies, this ethnographic study of a demographically diverse "community nominated" cohort of urban public high school teachers who integrate hip-hop pedagogies into their English/language arts classrooms responds to the methodological and theoretical shortcomings of a burgeoning body of research known as "hip-hop based education" (HHBE). HHBE has argued that curriculum and pedagogy derived from hip-hop culture can be used to transmit disciplinary knowledge, improve student motivation, teach critical media literacy, and foster critical consciousness among urban students in traditional and non-traditional K-12 learning environments. However, the field's overreliance on firsthand accounts of teacher-researchers, the vast majority of whom position themselves as members of the "hip-hop generation," discounts the degrees to which teachers' cultural identity informs hip-hop based curricular interventions, pedagogical strategies, and minority students' academic and socio-cultural outcomes. I argue that the hip-hop pedagogies evidenced by non-researching "hip-hop based educators" were diverse and reflected different beliefs about hip-hop, pedagogy, and the politics of education. Three primary findings emerge from 280 hours of classroom participant-observations and ethnographic interviews (January-June 2010): (1) teachers psychologically and discursively construct and perform individual hip-hop cultural identities through "necessary and impossible" politics of difference, (2) teachers' respective curricular approaches to hip-hop as literary texts are closely linked to their respective hip-hop cultural identities, and (3) hip-hop pedagogues employed hip-hop methodologies and literacies that reoriented conceptions of self and other, teacher-student relations, and notions of knowledge around "pedagogies of hip-hop." Study findings are salient to the fields of hip-hop studies, critical multicultural teacher education, and English/language arts education as they provide robust portraits of the instructional and relational nuances, as well as cultural-political implications of HHBE for a largely White, middle-class prospective teacher workforce and an increasingly diverse hip-hop nation. / Urban Education

This dissertation investigates aesthetics of African design and decoration in the work of major contemporary artists of African descent who address heritage, history, and life experience. My project focuses on the work of three representative contemporary artists, African American artists Kehinde Wiley and Nick Cave, and Ghanaian artist El Anatsui. Their work represents practices and tendencies among a much broader group of painters and sculptors who employ elaborate textures and designs to express drama and emotion throughout the Black Atlantic world. I argue that extensive patterning, embellishment, and ornamentation are employed by many contemporary artists of African descent as a strategy for reinterpreting the art historical canon and addressing critical social issues, such as war, devastation of the earth's environment, and lack of essential resources for survival in many parts of the world. Many artworks also present historical revisions that reflect the experience of Black peoples who were brought to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade, lived under colonial rule, or witnessed aspects of post-colonial struggle. The disorderliness of intersecting designs could also symbolize gaps in memory and traumas that will not heal. They reflect the manner in which Black Atlantic peoples have pieced together ancestral histories from a patchwork of sources. Polyrhythmic decoration enables their work to act as vessels of experience, allowing viewers to bring together multiple histories and social references. / Art History

The aim of this arts-based research study was to experience, analyze, and gain insight into songs written by adolescents who have had adverse childhood experiences and who identify with Hip Hop culture. This study investigated the aesthetic components of eleven songs including their musical elements, the compositional techniques, the affective-intuitive qualities, and the interaction between the music and the lyrics. An arts-based research design, rooted in the ethos of Hip Hop, was employed to gain a holistic understanding of the songs. My artistic encounters and subsequent analyses of the songs revealed the complex inner struggles and developmental challenges for adolescents who have experienced extreme trauma. Three groupings of songs emerged: Songs that Protect Vulnerability, Songs of Abandonment, and Songs of Faith and Love. Each category reflects a different stage of developmental growth for the songwriters. Employing Fowler's (1981/1995) stages of faith development, a music-centered developmental model of therapeutic songwriting with adolescents is proposed in this study. This model consists of three therapeutic songwriting stages: Imitation, Developing Self-Reflection, and Developing Self-Love. The implications for this study include developing an arts-based method of song analysis for students and professionals, developing a music-centered therapeutic songwriting assessment, developing a perspective for music therapy practice and research rooted in the ethos of Hip Hop, and developing longitudinal arts-based research studies that track the life of songs across various stages of developmental growth. / Music Therapy

The art and act of Rapping is a form of scientific research that takes place, in part, through introspection and sociocultural reflection. The Umfundisi Rap Technique and the theory of Ubuntu Rap are undergirded by the notion that to Rap is to research and reflect. That is, the act and art of Rapping involves, if not requires, the interrogation of one’s own physical and/or social circumstances and reveals one’s worldview through the conscious and subconscious signaling of their psychosocial location. To locate a text is to recognize the predispositions and philosophical objectives of an author and interpret such language, attitude, and direction based on their proximity to/distance from an Afrocentric psychology. However, what if there were a way to quantifiably measure location? What might such signposts and signals actually look like and how exactly might such “signposts” (or “words”) relate to underlying attitudes and directions? Moreover, could the expression of Ma’at itself, or maybe some kind of psychosocial well-being, be measured? If it were possible to measure a person’s psychosocial attitude and direction, might that also mean that there could be a way to gauge what kinds of cultural notions an author’s location is nearest to? The early MCs that held initial reverence and significance within their communities were those who could move the crowd with displays of rhetorical dexterity and celebrations of community. Rap’s current condition where a substantial proportion, if not an overwhelming majority, of the contemporary Rap lyrics and aesthetics that receive the largest amounts of social and financial elevation endorse hegemonic social philosophies of xenophobia, patriarchal violence, and other forms of psychological & physical subjugation has, for the most part, largely been agreed upon by most who have sought to examine Rap through an Afrocentric lens. Analyzing the conversation of thoughts particularly between the works of Tricia Rose, Joan Morgan, M.K. Asante, Jr., Jeff Chang, S. Craig Watkins, and Byron Hurt reveals two exceptionally noteworthy “crossover” events that brought forth the end of the era of Rap in which its overall orientation was primarily dictated by (and through) Afrikan agency amidst capitalist influences and duplicitous assurances of money, power, and assimilation from patriarchal Eurocentristic corporate structures at the cost of the Afrikan cultural communal spirit. The theory of Ubuntu Rap serves to emphasize the need for a very specific form of Afrocentric creative expression that addresses a very specific crisis. There is an intellectual and spiritual yearning, both conscious and subconscious, throughout the Afrikan diaspora for a framework of communication that is wholeheartedly and emphatically grounded in community, harmony, and sustainability. Ultimately, that is this project’s purpose and functional aspect: what routes can Rappers draw to navigate their way across the map of language & human speech toward a kind of maa kheru, or “trueness of voice”, designation? Such yearnings were the underlying driving force behind this project's intentions to imagine Ubuntu Rap as a particular canon/sub-genre of Rap grounded in Afrikan cultural ethical notions of community, harmony, and sustainability and to construct an Afrocentric research project that envisions the Umfundisi Rap Technique as a valid and practical method for the production of Ubuntu Rap. / Africology and African American Studies

This dissertation examines the historical race and class tensions across the United States, and particularly focuses on Appalachia as a potential place of resistance against racial and class injustice. Arguing for a thick cross-racial solidarity movement, I examine the history of Black oppression from slavery to current modes of oppression such as mass incarceration and colorblind constitutionalism. The presence of anti-Black racism and under acknowledgement of whiteness hinders any form of cross-racial solidarity. To combat this, I ask, are the genres of hip hop, bluegrass, and country able to provide a reckoning of the continual racial oppression of Black people and an acknowledgement of whiteness, in Appalachia and the U.S.? I examine the historical progression of bluegrass and country, and hip hop, through the history of the banjo and music industry. The banjo, an African instrument, links Appalachia with histories of both Black expression and racial oppression. From here, I argue that the history of the music industry provides a further understanding of racial injustice that is parallel to the instances of institutional racial injustice in the U.S. This history provides evidence that Black artists used their music to enable social movements and resistance against systemic racial injustice in the U.S. Throughout several chapters, I analyze the many untold, forgotten, and hidden histories of Black racial violence that exists in the U.S. and Appalachia, and how music operates as a tool of resistance that can enable Black liberation against racial injustice. Through an examination of racial injustice in my hometown of Martinsville, Virginia, and using music as a tool, I suggest that, a thick cross-racial solidarity can exist with a recognition of historical racial injustice against Blacks, both locally and nationally, an acknowledgment of whiteness, an anti-racist framework for community activism, and a centering of Black voice, narrative, and Black liberation. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation examines the historical race and class tensions across the United States, and particularly focuses on Appalachia as a potential place of resistance against racial and class injustice. Arguing for a thick cross-racial solidarity movement, I examine the history of Black oppression from slavery to current modes of oppression such as mass incarceration and colorblind constitutionalism. The presence of anti-Black racism and under acknowledgement of whiteness hinders any form of cross-racial solidarity. To combat this, I ask, are the genres of hip hop, bluegrass, and country able to provide a reckoning of the continual racial oppression of Black people and an acknowledgement of whiteness, in Appalachia and the U.S.? I examine the historical progression of bluegrass and country, and hip hop, through the history of the banjo and music industry. The banjo, an African instrument, links Appalachia with histories of both Black expression and racial oppression. From here, I argue that the history of the music industry provides a further understanding of racial injustice that is parallel to the instances of institutional racial injustice in the U.S. This history provides evidence that Black artists used their music to enable social movements and resistance against systemic racial injustice in the U.S. Throughout several chapters, I analyze the many untold, forgotten, and hidden histories of Black racial violence that exists in the U.S. and Appalachia, and how music operates as a tool of resistance that can enable Black liberation against racial injustice. Through an examination of racial injustice in my hometown of Martinsville, Virginia, and using music as a tool, I suggest that, a thick cross-racial solidarity can exist with a recognition of historical racial injustice against Blacks, both locally and nationally, an acknowledgment of whiteness, an anti-racist framework for community activism, and a centering of Black voice, narrative, and Black liberation.

The United States has many problems currently, the most persistent of which is the issue of race, and the problem of Mass Incarceration. This thesis addresses what Mass Incarceration is, as well as developing a theoretical understanding of how to overcome Mass Incarceration through the music of Kendrick Lamar and The Black Lives Matter Movement. This thesis presents the questions: What is the era of Mass Incarceration? How does Kendrick Lamar's music inform the problems of Mass Incarceration? How does The Back Lives Matter Movement use this information to create a solidarity movement against the oppression of African Americans? What does this mean going forward? Creating a synthesis of Mass Incarceration, the music of Kendrick Lamar, and The Black Lives Matter Movement, that overlaps and propels an intersection of culture and activism that inform one another. This all leads to the main takeaway of the thesis, that attempts to provide an interpretive understanding that pop culture, social media, and activism have created a different civil sphere, a Black public sphere that informs and educates through different avenues. All in all this thesis shows that music, social movements, and policy are all interconnected, and the music of Kendrick Lamar and the activism of The Black Lives Matter Movement provide a catalyst for change in the era of Mass Incarceration. / Master of Arts

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between white consumption of politically conscious rap music and the political beliefs of white rap music consumers. The guiding research questions included an exploration of why whites with little prior concern about racism consume rap music with politically conscious antiracist messages; if whites who consume this music believe the messages spoken are an accurate depiction of reality; and if a relationship exists between consumption of politically conscious rap music and an individual's political beliefs. Through interviews of white fans at politically conscious rap shows it was found that many individuals do not understand the music they are consuming is political in intent. Individuals highlighted themes that they could identify with, namely the need for unity and love, while ignoring others, such as the need to fight against injustice and racism. While independently individuals may have liberal political beliefs and consume politically conscious rap music, there appears to be no indication that consumption of rap music alters political beliefs. / Master of Science

An individual's identity development involves the intersection of several factors, including race, class, gender, and sexuality. Historically, enslaved women's identities were sexually, culturally, and politically framed on the plantations through the lens of white male hegemony. The double jeopardy of being African American and female in a white patriarchal society has generated a legacy of struggle to resist the images constructed such as Matriarch, Aunt Jemima/Mammy, Sapphire, and Jezebel to name a few. The resistance legacy of African American women like Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church-Terrell, has expanded into the musical sphere of popular culture. Blues artists such as Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, and Bessie Smith expressed their resistance to oppression and repression aesthetically. Through musical expression, African American women performers have formulated a space where they can protest the hegemonic paradigms of sexual and racial inferiority. In contemporary popular culture this musical space is in Hip Hop. Contemporary African American women rap artists are continuing the struggle to overcome the characterizations and undertake the monumental task of demystifying the racist and sexist ideologies framing their identity. This thesis examines the ways that African American women convey the challenges they face both within the Hip Hop micro-culture and as African American women struggling in a white patriarchal macroculture. In addition, African American women rap artists' employment of rap music as a medium to develop their own identities, whether negative or positive by "Black feminist" or "womanist'' standards is also explored. This study includes a survey of student attitudes toward these issues.