Hip-Hop as a Global Passport: Understanding How Youth in Urban Areas Construct Identities as Global Citizens

• In Event: Roundtable Session 100
  In Roundtable Session: Remaking Hip-Hop-Based Education: From a Source for Social Reproduction to a Pedagogy of Liberation

Abstract

This examines the intersection of hip-hop, global citizenship education and digital literacies in an effort to increase our understanding of how urban youth make sense of the concept of global
citizens. Though the past two decades have witnessed increased scholarly and educational interest in how hip-hop, digital literacies and global citizenship are shaping young people’s lives and educational experiences, there have been few efforts to bring these emergent bodies of literature together. This qualitative study analyzes the online interactions between two classrooms, (one based in the United States and the other in Australia) which engage youth in examining socially conscious global hip-hop and digital technology.

In this study, I draw on literatures on global citizenship, digital literacies, and hip-hop to examine how each of these phenomena intersection in and shape the lives of urban youth and their
engagement with social issues in their communities and beyond. I define each of these core concepts and describe, in brief, their impact in the lives of urban youth, as well as how these ideas intersect with students notions of social justice.

This research is a principled assemblage of different methodologies which will include phenomenology, textual analysis, multimodal analysis, critical participatory research, participatory ethnography, and thematic content analysis of the literature to explore how
students from two locations (United States and Australia) enrolled in an online Global Hip-hop class construct ideas about global citizenship as they engage in producing and reading digital hip-hop texts.

The primary data for this study included series of interviews, as well as digital texts and artifacts that students create in the Hip-hop for Social Justice course. The products allowed me to identify how students make sense of global citizenship, their experiences with hip-hop, how they think it relates to global citizenship, how they use digital technology and how they relate it to both hip-hop and global citizenship.

This study provided insight on how students in urban areas can use hip-hop to make connections to global issues, digital literacies, and concepts of social justice. This research project hopes to show that the fields of global citizenship education, digital literacies, and hip-hop have a dynamically interwoven relationship that can have a positive impact on urban youth’s academic experiences.

It is my contention that hip-hop and digital literacies offers an organic way for studying how youth in urban settings understand their lived experiences in a world that has become increasing transnational due to digital technologies. This study hopes to provide more understanding into how youth in urban areas learn to navigate their relationship with evolving phenomenon and create meaning from their interactions in it. This study attempts to illuminate ways parents,
educators, and policy makers can help facilitate urban youth as they negotiate with the tensions and contradictions that lie within the intersection of this evolving phenomenon. Lastly, the lessons learned from this study will hopefully be of benefit to scholars in the fields of education, cultural studies, cybercultural studies, anthropology, global studies, and ethnomusicography.

Author

• Akesha Horton, Michigan State University