Blackout Poetic Transcription: A Hip-Hop-Centric Critical Race Research Method for Qualitative Research

• In Event: Remixing Response-ability: An Interactive Session Exploring Accountability and Praxis in Hip-Hop-Based Education and Research

Abstract

In 2023, Hip-Hop will celebrate its 50-year history as global popular Black culture, and according Petchauer (2015), will be in its’ second wave of academic scholarship about the sonic, kinesthetic, linguistic, visual and expressive possibilities for Hip-Hop to solve problems about racial equity in American education. Within this milieu are thousands of Hip-Hop studies courses offered at postsecondary institutions around the world; several of which are curating Hip-Hop archives (e.g., Harvard University, UMass Boston, UCLA, Cornell University). In addition, within the last decade, there were over 17,000 dissertations published globally in ProQuest that mention “Hip-Hop” in either the title or the abstract; one of these being my doctoral research about Hip-Hop educational leadership and spoken word poetry within the racial opportunity gap discourse (Author, 2019). Given Hip-Hop’s evolution within academic spaces, I wanted to learn about Black and Brown educational leaders who embody Hip-Hop in their praxis; specifically, the emcees, or “rhythmic speakers who move crowds” (i.e., spoken word artist, poets, rappers). Therefore, I conducted a Hip-Hopography of ten spoken word poets and rappers, “the squad”, who serve as community-partners in urban high schools across the U.S.
For context, Hip-Hopography is an approach to the study of Hip-Hop culture that combines the methods of ethnography, biography, and social and oral history (Eure & Spady, 1991; Petchauer, 2009). I interpreted Petchauer’s (2015) framework for doing Hip-Hop-centric research as a critical race methodology (Bernal, 2002; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) that includes several aesthetics: 1) sampling – sourcing methods from multiple methodologies; 2) layering – analyzing data within and across levels; 3) flow – organizing the data; 4) rupture – categorizing the data; 5) affect- identifying data that moves the researcher, emotionally; and 6) performance and embodiment – a Hip-Hop inspired community-based presentation of findings. As a critical race methodology (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), I invoked Hip-Hopography as an approach to decolonize traditional qualitative methods that favor White ways of knowing, and through its analytical framework, developed Blackout Poetic Transcription (BPT).
BPT is inspired by “blackout poetry” - which is created when a poet takes a marker (usually a black marker) to already established text and redacts words until a poem is formed, and poetic transcription in narrative analysis – which transforms qualitative data in to “research poems” (Davis, 2019; Dill, 2015; Glesne, 1997). I transcribed their interviews into “data poems”, which I sourced for emic data for language to answer my overarching research question, “what is Hip-Hop educational leadership?”, which became, “Educational Emcees” – educational leaders who embody Hip-Hop pedagogy and use rhythmic spoken words to inspire “love” as an anti-racist learning and engagement condition for Black and Brown students enrolled in American public education. Ultimately, instantiating Educational Emcees, or “Ed Emcees” within the academy of higher education, through critical race methods in qualitative research, not only expands what is known about Hip-Hop within the context of educational leadership, but also enhances methodological possibilities for Hip-Hop in production and consumption of knowledge.

Author

• Tony Keith, Tony Keith Jr LLC