Punished for Dreaming: The Album

• In Event: Loving Wholeness Together, With Grief: A Listening Session With Liner Notes

Abstract

This performance/presentation is about Punished for Dreaming: The Album, a sonic body of scholarship connecting Bettina Love’s book Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How we Heal (2023) to the auditory experience of a hip-hop album.* The objective/purpose of this session is to engage participants in a collaborative process called the epistemology of listening around this album. In practice, the epistemology of listening is a sacred, communal, and political act of trust developed between researcher and participants (co-researchers). As both ethical imperative and research methodology, the epistemology of listening has been used in previous public-facing scholarly and artistic projects (AuthorY 2019; 2020; 2021). Session attendees will be guided through theoretical and methodological frameworks used to develop this scholarship/album, and experience a listening session of album tracks.

This session emerges from theoretical and strategic frameworks around southern hip-hop – its aesthetics, soundings, and pedagogies. With the exception of journalistic efforts like Pero Dagbovie’s (2006) Old School Black Historians and the Hip Hop Generation, Roni Sarig’s (2007) Third Coast, Ben Westhoff’s (2011) Dirty South, Bettina Love’s (2012) Hip Hop’s Li’l Sistas Speak, Kiese Laymon’s (2013) Long Division, and Bradley’s (2021) Chronicling Stankonia, there are few academic, artistic or creative projects that engage in the articulation of a post-Civil Rights Black South (Carson, 2017; 2020; AuthorY, 2019; 2020; 2021).

The significance of this presentation lies in the experience. Attendees will walk away from this experience with a better notion of creative process to develop a creative project: collaborating with other artists, producers and engineers that reflects the messaging of a scholarly work – in this case, Dr. Love’s book.

The materials for this project include the creativity and freedom dreaming among artists completing this project. As a sonic body of scholarship connected to Love’s Punished for Dreaming, the arguments in the book are also materials for this project. Locating herself as a child of the 1980’s, Love explores how her youth was shaped by a public school divided into two worlds where opportunity blossomed for one group and the carceral state loomed for the other. These divisions were a product of four decades of reform after A Nation at Risk that implemented and then taught to standardized tests; allowed private interests to infiltrate the educational system through charter schools, No Child Left Behind, and vouchers; merged the War on Drugs with the war on Black children; and increased racial, ethnic, and class stratification in schools and districts. Through her story and stories of her peers, she makes the case for educational reparations by reckoning with the impact of 40 years of racist public school policy on a generation of Black lives and beyond. These scholarly arguments inform the artistic content of this album, which attendees will experience through the epistemology of listening in this session.

[*Dr. Love is a collaborator on this album but not a session presenter. Therefore, naming her/her book does not compromise this proposal’s blind review.]

Author

• Stevie D. Johnson, The Ohio State University