Let Me Ride: Hip-Hop as a Poetics of Fugitive Refusal in Education

• In Event: Hip Hop, Identity, and Black Educational Futures

Abstract

This study emerges from the underground, the overlooked and often-dismissed spaces Black youth carve out to breathe, create, and imagine. Drawing on critical qualitative inquiry, this research centers the formation of the Modern Day Poets and Composers (MPC) club, a hip-hop club established by Black male students at a predominantly White Jesuit school. Anchored in the conceptual frameworks of fugitivity and hip-hop, this study explores what possibilities emerge when hip-hop is centered in education as fugitive praxis. Findings reveal how hip-hop, as a poetics of fugitive refusal, disrupts anti-Black institutional logics and gestures toward liberatory educational practice rooted in cultural affirmation, self-determination, and (be)ing. Implications of this study call for an examination of the very soul of schooling itself.

Author

• Jeremy Divinity, N/A