Promoting Social Justice, Critical Citizenship, and Activism Through Hip-Hop Culture

• In Event: Neoliberalism’s Paradoxical Doxa: “New Imperialism”

Abstract

This paper seeks to redress the underexploration of Hip Hop and civic engagement in social science literature (Seif, 2010). Much discourse around Hip Hop and civic engagement has reduced Hip Hop at the level of media/cultural analysis – positioning youth as passive recipients of corporatist rap discourse. Researchers here combined the citizenship notions of CIRCLE (Levinson, 2010) with the social justice notions of the SJYD model (Ginwright, 2002) to make the claim that Hip Hop culture can catalyze civic engagement in complex ways. This paper hopes to aid the extant literature by unearthing the ways Hip Hop accesses and/or restricts civic engagement; and to guide youth, schoolteachers, and administrators in building socially just schools and a wider egalitarian society.

Authors

• Debangshu Roychoudhury, City College of New York - CUNY

• Lauren M. Gardner, The Graduate Center at the CUNY

• Bradley J. Porfilio, California State University - East Bay