Remixing Making: Developing a Hip-Hop Makerspace for Social Justice and Democratic Engagement

• In Event: Youth Identity Making and Transgressing Spaces

Abstract

The context for this study is in an after school “maker program” for middle and high school students titled “Making Remixed”. This makerspace focused on the creation of the various modes of hip hop expression, and on developing a “knowledge of self” and particular ways these understandings might be politically mobilized through creation and presentation for the wider community.
This paper examines how hip hop culture’s aesthetic forms and their practitioners can embody democratic practices in the context of a maker or project-based learning environments. I investigate how generating hip hop art might facilitate democratic and civic engagement toward social justice and how students engage hip hop culture as a means for agency, identity development, and definition of self.

Author

• Michael B Dando, St Cloud State University