Cultivating Disruption: A Research Methodology for Working Through Spoken Word Poetry With Global Girls

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

Abstract

This project engages girls of color from disparate global communities to form transnational activist networks through Hip-Hop based education and social justice pedagogy (Vanner 2019). A close analysis of their cultural production offers methodological insight on the ways girls from the Global South are positioned as vulnerable while girls of color in the Global North are equally vulnerable yet situated as saviors (Bent 2013). My research uses data gathered from workshops centered on a practice of spoken word poetry and performance to explore the socio-political experiences that connect and distinguish global girls. A Hip-Hop feminist lens centers responsibility and accountability in analysis and nuances the relationship between the researcher and the communities that are researched which is of particular importance when Black and Brown girls are involved (Brown 2009; Durham et. al 2013; Peoples 2008; Richardson 2007). Implementing cultivated disruption as a research method can provide a fresh way to hold artist-scholars accountable for the power dynamics that scribe these interactions, especially when working with global girls.
Theories of Hip-Hop feminism, Afrofuturism, and quantum mechanics are sutured together to explore the implications for transnational relationships between girls of color and researchers fostered by a practice of spoken word poetry and performance (brown 2017; Durham 2014; Nelson 2002; Pough et. al 2007). How can artist-scholars implement praxes to nurture accountability to the communities they work within and simultaneously create conditions for educational responsibility? To frame how the girls engage with each other through their creative work, I employ what Hip-hop scholar Aisha Durham (2014) calls “the Three R’s: recall, re-member, and represent” (125) to examine how girls’ subjectivities are interconnected with master narratives circulated about them. Because spoken word poetry and performance necessarily invoke what Agosto Boal calls “train[ing] for real action,” the girls’ poetic performances are staged as a call to action and as an opportunity to “try out solutions” to the problems we have inherited and also collude with (1979, p. 122). As such, cultivated disruption outlines clear steps to engage with the creative artwork from girls in each global community and for the artist-scholar through a combination of spoken word and performance praxis to “create a forum for negotiating the tensions between safety and risk” and examine strategies for confronting such friction (Weinstein & West 2012, p. 289).
More than 500 girls, hundreds of poems and performances make up the rich qualitative data for this study. In order to organize and explore this creative data, I designed Cultivated Disruption; a four step research cipher that provides built in accountability checks, creative prompts, and tools for analysis based on the process of composing and performing a spoken word poem. This project raises questions about the ways social mobility, identity, and activism are conceptualized and enacted in the lives of girls of color who resist dominant discourse which simultaneously “target” and “protect” girls (Butler 2014, 112). Building on Hip-Hop feminist principles, cultivated disruption provides a means to explore the porous boundaries that exist between girls in disparate global communities.

Author

• Crystal Leigh Endsley Taylor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice