The Self-Location of Somali Immigrant Youth Through Discourse and Agency

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Promoting Youths’ Awareness and Agency Through Hip-Hop-Based Education: A Symposium

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this study is to explicate how Somali female youth engage, transform, and redefine perceptions of hip hop as a cultural practice in order to accommodate their goals of affecting social change and the politics of identity. We describe how cultural practices of hip hop such as spoken word and rap, become tools of cultural mediation through which the teenage women realize and manifest agency. The analysis reveals the complexity of youth identity work couched in ambivalence, multiplicity, and resistance. Ultimately, this empirical study extends the field of critical hip hop research by centering the experience of Somali women through a black feminist lens.
Perspective(s)
As co-researchers we use a critical sociocultural lens to investigate the crossroads of race, gender, ethnicity, language and religion. We situate Somali immigrant youth in the context of transnationalism; navigating the consequences of globalization that have impacted their lives as children of refugees. The study exists at the intersections of hip hop based education, hip hop feminism, black feminism, and postcolonial theory.
Modes of inquiry
We use critical discourse analysis (CDA) as an analytical tool to make generative meaning of data born from a self study. CDA helps to situate our analysis within a discursive realm, paying particular attention to how the youth constructed reality by adopting a hip hop feminist discourse.
Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
The study was conducted over months at an urban community-based organization during an after-school program. As co-facilitators engaged in self-study, we were the participants of our own research. The primary data comes from the performances and writings of the youth in the program. Our ethnographic methods of data collection consisted of reflective journal entries, video recordings, audio recordings, and artifacts, such as lesson plans and youth poetry.
Substantiated conclusions
The findings of the study reveal the complexities of Somali youth grappling with self-location against the backdrop of racialized and gendered societal positioning. Our findings describe how youth resist prescriptive social locations by demonstrating agency couched in and reified by hip hop cultural practices. Specifically, the women in our program moved hip hop feminist discourse from a position of marginality to one of centrality through their performance of hip hop culture. This particular display of agency demonstrated the potential of discourse to shift and reform identity amidst oppressive societal limitations such as patriarchy.
Scholarly significance of the study
The study contributes to the small amount of scholarship addressing the experience of Somali immigrant youth through the lens of hip hop based education. As hip hop culture continues to expand globally, the experience of youth who are attempting to reconcile the consequences of transnational migration provides a powerful lens through which youth voice and dispositions can be centered in attempting to make meaning of the ways in which hip hop both limits and generates forms of agency and transformation.

Authors

• Brian Lozenski, Metropolitan State University

• Chelda Smith, Georgia Southern University