Creating and Curating Resources as an Artistic Practice

• In Event: Community, Creativity, Curiosity: An Interactive Demonstration and Workshop Exploring Participatory, Arts-Based Methods Across Diverse Contexts

Abstract

“Behind the Beats” is a podcast set up in collaboration with 6 members of a youth-led hip hop collective (ages 17- 21 years) in New Delhi, India that focuses on the practices of local hip hop artists in their city. This project emerged from a critical ethnographic study (Madison, 2005) designed to understand the collective literacy practices in youth-led coalitions, and how these develop over time and in relation to the digital and physical spaces that youth participate in. Working with two youth-led hip hop collectives (12 participants), situated outside of adult run education spaces in New Delhi, the study foregrounds youth perspectives and the ways of knowing they bring into these spaces.
The project draws on critical feminist (Mohanty, 1997; Moya, 2002; Delgado-Bernal, 2018; Ghiso, 2015), indigenous (Todd, 2016; Cadena, 2015), and decolonial theories and practices (Mignolo, 2009; Quijano, 2007), to center respect, responsibility, interrelatedness, ways of knowing, and synergy in the work with research participants (Tachine & Nicolazzo, 2022). Leaning into critical ethnography’s call to engage with individuals and communities with reflexivity and reciprocity (Fitzpatrick & May, 2022), the study engaged in knowledge sharing and community building processes (Smith, 2012). Employing methods that passed the ethnographic authority to the participants (e.g., Fine, 2016; Mitchell et al., 2017), this project was responsive to youth’s desire to curate and co-create knowledge.
As media creators, the youth were invested in creating a long-term project that could be legible and valuable to audiences outside of the conventional academic settings. Building on their creative media practices and knowledge of production and dissemination on social media, we set up the “Behind the Beats” podcast: the youth participants identify potential interviewees and connect with them, design creatives, create multiple formats (audio clips, memes, reels, and full interviews), and share these across multiple social media platforms. We collaboratively develop questions and the podcast’s format. Through interviews with an intergenerational community of hip hop practitioners based in the city, this serialized podcast focuses on the five elements of hip hop- MCing, DJing, breakdancing, graffiti, and knowledge (Emdin & Adjapong, 2018) and the uptake of these practices by local hip hop artists and in conversation with the wider field of global hip hop (Mitchell, 2001; Dattatreyan, 2020). This podcast project is building a resource for aspiring youth artists based in the city and for the wider hip hop community while also historicising the emergence of hip hop in Delhi. The epistemological and methodological orientations of this project highlight the potential of collaboration, interdependence, and community in creating powerful spaces that are built on shared commitments. By drawing on participants’ commitments and creative practices, this demonstration calls attention to ways in which researchers can move towards building long-term reciprocal commitments to their sites and participants.

Author

• Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania