“Hip-Hop Is Like Breathing”: How College Students Apply Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Principles to Campus Life

• In Event: Roundtable Session 78
  In Roundtable Session: Perspectives on College Student Learning

Abstract

The paper presents results from a qualitative portraiture study that explored how college students who are active participants/creators of hip-hop culture embody its aesthetics and principles on college campuses. Specifically, the results of this study concern (a) the integrated knowledge and expressions of hip-hop and (b) the identity frameworks in hip-hop. The results illustrate how students apply these ideas to their majors on campus and the ways they navigae racialized challenges. From these finings, this paper presents a generative framework for understanding how hip-hop exists in college students’ lives. As a whole, this framework looks beyond the moral panics that often surround hip-hop to give campus personnel a coherent way to understand hip-hop on campus and in students’ lives.

Author

• Emery Marc Petchauer, Oakland University