The research and project The Chronik Disorder project consists of an exegesis and screenplay. The exegesis discusses research into the film genre, three-act structure, mythic structure and archetypes. The research then informed thematic ideas, character creation and a method for plotting the screenplay and developing the characters. Chronik Disorder is an Australian story, set in contemporary Melbourne, about adolescents and rites of passage. The story explores teenagers and the hip-hop subculture, gangs, graffiti and drug experimentation. The story deals with other issues such as vocational challenges; the breakdown of the nuclear family; father-and-son relationships; and Vietnam veterans and how the war affected them emotionally and impacted on their relationships with their sons. Synopsis of Screenplay Harley, 17, a hooker in an under-eighteen's rugby union team, dreams of playing with the under-nineteen's Australian Wallabies. Harley's alcoholic father, Kev, takes out his pain caused by his experiences in Vietnam on Harley, who escapes by hanging out with graffitibased gang Chronik Disorder. When his friend Damian dies, Harley blames himself, ruins his rugby career, and escapes by hanging out with his gang, committing crimes and taking drugs.

Wayde Comptons poetry collection Performance Bond is a union of hip-hop aesthetics and visual poetry to create a space for Vancouvers black community. Although the majority of the poems in Performance Bond are lyric, visual poems have a significant and varied presence in the book. Compton creates his visual poetry by including such materials as photographs and signs, concrete poetry and pseudo-concrete poetry, graffiti, a simulated newspaper facsimile of an original Vancouver Daily Province article, voodoo symbols, and typed characters that do not necessarily form words. Despite a contemporary population of over two million people, the greater Vancouver area of today does not have a centralized black community similar to that found in other North American cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angles, Toronto, or Halifax. To reconcile the absence of a centralized black community in Vancouver, Compton turns to sampling black culture from across the world (with an obvious concentration on the United States) in order to develop and represent his own black identity. The similarities between visual poetry and hip-hop culture, particularly their emphasis on spatial representation, facilitate Comptons continuing project to create a place for the black community in Vancouver.

Wayde Comptons poetry collection Performance Bond is a union of hip-hop aesthetics and visual poetry to create a space for Vancouvers black community. Although the majority of the poems in Performance Bond are lyric, visual poems have a significant and varied presence in the book. Compton creates his visual poetry by including such materials as photographs and signs, concrete poetry and pseudo-concrete poetry, graffiti, a simulated newspaper facsimile of an original Vancouver Daily Province article, voodoo symbols, and typed characters that do not necessarily form words. Despite a contemporary population of over two million people, the greater Vancouver area of today does not have a centralized black community similar to that found in other North American cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angles, Toronto, or Halifax. To reconcile the absence of a centralized black community in Vancouver, Compton turns to sampling black culture from across the world (with an obvious concentration on the United States) in order to develop and represent his own black identity. The similarities between visual poetry and hip-hop culture, particularly their emphasis on spatial representation, facilitate Comptons continuing project to create a place for the black community in Vancouver.

Applied ethnomusicology emerged as a sub-discipline within the larger field of ethnomusicology in the late 1980s. The approach has gained considerable attention in recent years, evidenced by the publication of the first book-length treatment of the subject in 2010 and numerous scholarly papers and roundtables devoted to the topic at the 2011 SEM conference. I review of the literature in order to trace general trends and shifts in frame and approach in order to establish a context for critically reflecting on the role of activist scholarship in ethnomusicology today. Drawing from the literature on applied ethnomusicology, cultural rights projects in Brazil, and personal experiences working with black women hip-hop activists in Recife, I suggest that activist approaches allow greater possibilities for progressive social change, facilitating dialogue and critical reflection in ways that applied approaches do not. I propose that we must re-think activist scholarship in ethnomusicology, and in Brazil more specifically, seriously considering the possibilities and limitations of music making for establishing sustained community activism that incorporates dialogic pedagogy. / text

In this study we will explore impact exposure to brands references in music videos may have on the development of consumers’ brand knowledge. We assert that an understanding of this relationship is a function of both executional elements of the message and the intervening effects of select individual-difference factors. This dissertation applies social cognitive theories, the cultivation hypothesis, attribution theory and the elaboration likelihood model to develop the set of hypotheses. This dissertation seeks to provide initial evidence regarding the key factors brand managers and music executives must be aware of when implementing music video brand placements. A conceptual model of music video brand placement is presented and evaluated utilizing qualitative and quantitative techniques. The qualitative methodology employs real music fans as informants and music videos as stimuli in developing an understanding of the relationship consumers have with music as well as their reactions to music videos. The quantitative methodology uses an original music video as the stimulus, real music fans as respondents and a real-time on-line survey to measure the relationship among the variables. Study findings support the ability of music videos to impact extra-musical consumption and provide early evidence regarding factors important to understanding consumers’ responses to music video brand placements.

This thesis looks to expand on the ways in which urban design can influence and foster the development of street culture. Gentrification has resulted in the deterioration of many cities that were well known for their rich and vibrant street culture. In particular, Harlem, New York City has experienced decay in its tradition of having a strong and lively street presence. With its busiest street lined with numerous vacant lots, W 125th St in Harlem is the ideal testing ground for a project that breathes life into a dying street culture. Museums have the ability to spark urban regeneration and vitality. Taking cues from examples of successful museums, this project breaks free of the building envelope to create spaces that encourage and promote street culture activities. With a program that is heavily based in street and popular culture, a new cultural center provides support for this urban regeneration project.

The relationship between authors and readers has been heavily studied in western literatures since the shift between the spoken-subject lost its privileged position to the written author. The struggle for who determines truth has formed a specific dialect that requires either the author or the reader to be silent. Since the acceptance of literary theories like the “death of the author” and “author-function,” we continue to map these concepts on to similar relationships and discourses. Hip-hop culture defies this dialect, instead, based around the concept of the cipher, hip-hop insists on a constant inclusive discourse. Based in African-American traditions of call-and-response, hip-hop is always looking for voices to speak to each other and push the conversation further. In my thesis, I open up an exploration of the role of an author in hip-hop. Paying specific attention to the rapper, I flesh out the ways western ideas of reading conflate and disrupt the structures of a cipher in hip-hop. Imposing an “author-function” on rappers, displaces the call-and-response relationship that hip-hop thrives on. While hip-hop becomes more prevalent in popular culture, rappers have to learn to navigate within and outside of the immediate hip-hop community. As a case study, I examine the career trajectory of Jay Z. Sean Carter employs the site of enunciation that Jay Z creates to transcend and transform his experiences into a platform for creative expressions as well as lucrative business ventures. Finally, this thesis serves as an initial inquiry into future research plans to explore rappers as nepantler@s and listeners as “digital griots.” Both of these designations represents important rhetorical spaces that allow hip-hop culture to continue to work within a cipher and promote inclusivity. These future plans build towards creating a possible model for more productive collaboration, education, and activism.

This dissertation considers the evolution of Rap music and Hip Hop culture from the perspective of two spatial modalities. It first introduces theoretical concepts of geographic scale and the inscription of socio-spatial values in order to examine Rap and Hip Hop's geo-cultural expansions from their primary enclaves of urban black America. The dynamics between race, social space, and youth are assessed both individually and in tandem as crucial elements in the expression and practices of Hip Hop. The dissertation challenges and extends research in the prevailing Rap "canon" by analysing the processes and structuring logics through which Rap has been integrated into the commercial system of localized music scenes and transnational music and media industries. It identifies the myriad forces that have either facilitated or constrained Rap's expansion at various moments in its history. The dissertation also focuses on the emergence of a pronounced spatial discourse in Rap music and Hip Hop. It isolates the articulation of spatial issues and an increasingly urgent emphasis on sites of significance and the homeplace of "the 'hood" as a significant but characteristic element of the genre. The ancillary Hip Hop media, including radio, music videos, Rap press, and the cinematic "'Hood" genre, are examined as important factors in the reproduction of spatial sensibilities in Hip Hop culture.

Anthropologists have frequently used music in general and popular music in particular as a means to gain a perspective into everyday realities of young Africans lives. Attempting to place myself amongst this range of researchers, I use the position of Rwandan hip-hop as a point of departure to examine how young men in Kigali relate to and shape their realities in terms of politics, freedom of expression, and the creation of space and opportunities in the Rwandan society. My study is based on two and a half months of fieldwork in Kigali during the period between August and October of 2013. The empirical material upon which my arguments rely consists of interviews with young hip-hop Rwandans located in Kigali, who were almost exclusively male. It is also drawn from classical anthropological methods of participant observations and daily partaking in the lives of my informants. My analytical understanding of this material is mainly based upon notions of agency and structure, and contextualized within contemporary Africanist scholars’ research on modern music and youth. By looking at the historical context of Rwanda, the current state of youth in Kigali, and the contemporary atmosphere of politics and hip-hop music, I seek to understand the contradictive role of music as an arena for youth to express themselves. Through the stories of young hip-hop men, I describe and communicate their perceptions of constrains related to historical and socio-political sensitivities, feelings of fear connected to outspokenness, and alternative means to voice their opinions. I illustrate how these young men use innovative strategies and metaphorical language as a way to negotiate with some of these constrains as well as to influence each other and embody senses of oppositional opinions and collective empowerment. I also examine how national politics and governmental initiatives have increasingly become intertwined with the music and how it is trying to take advantage of its attractiveness as a youth medium. Ultimately, I discuss how the impact of Rwandan hip-hop can be seen as double-ended, serving the interests of both governmental policies and the youth who in different ways are trying to liberate themselves from political constrains, and how this affect the empowering potential of the music.

In this study we will explore impact exposure to brands references in music videos may have on the development of consumers’ brand knowledge. We assert that an understanding of this relationship is a function of both executional elements of the message and the intervening effects of select individual-difference factors. This dissertation applies social cognitive theories, the cultivation hypothesis, attribution theory and the elaboration likelihood model to develop the set of hypotheses. This dissertation seeks to provide initial evidence regarding the key factors brand managers and music executives must be aware of when implementing music video brand placements. A conceptual model of music video brand placement is presented and evaluated utilizing qualitative and quantitative techniques. The qualitative methodology employs real music fans as informants and music videos as stimuli in developing an understanding of the relationship consumers have with music as well as their reactions to music videos. The quantitative methodology uses an original music video as the stimulus, real music fans as respondents and a real-time on-line survey to measure the relationship among the variables. Study findings support the ability of music videos to impact extra-musical consumption and provide early evidence regarding factors important to understanding consumers’ responses to music video brand placements.