Hip-hop – what's in it for the academy? Self-understanding, pedagogy and aesthetical learning processes in everyday cultural Praxis

Abstract

Since hip-hop first appeared in New York over 35 years ago, it has been associated with social activism and education. Accordingly, it is not surprising that academic institutions in universities and K-12 schools are interested in hip-hop. In this article, we will highlight the ‘hip-hop academisation’ and map out a new direction in a dialog between hip-hop and the academic world. By investigating the relation between hip-hop and pedagogy through interviews with prominent members of the hip-hop community in New York City as well as an analysis of ‘universal’, collective, and aesthetic learning processes in a local, Swedish youth-based hip-hop collective, we intend to open up a theoretical discourse on hip-hop and emancipatory pedagogy. Our empirical data are collected through ethnographical methods.

Keywords:

• hip-hop
• education
• academisation
• learning processes

Notes on contributors

Johan Söderman is Associate Professor in Music Education at Malmö University and Reader in Music Education at Lund University, Sweden. He has conducted research concerned with hip hop culture and has published articles, books, and chapters in the field of music education, cultural studies, and education. Between 2009 and 2011, he was a visiting scholar at the Department of Music and Music Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, USA. His research interests are the Scandinavian educational tradition called ‘folkbildning’, academisation processes of youth music, and social mobilisation/marginalisation in post-industrial society.

Ove Sernhede is professor at the Centre for Urban Studies as well as at the Department of Education, Communication and Learning, Gothenborg University. He has been involved in research on different aspects of youth culture and music, urban studies, Afro-American culture, psychoanalysis, and social pedagogics – all these themes are explored within a frame of theories on Late Modernity and the decline of the Welfare State and Post-fordism. His most resent research is related to youth, culture, and patterns of segregation and social exclusion in the divided metropolitan cites of contemporay Sweden.

Notes

1 Academic scholars whom are engaged with hip-hop culture in their research and teaching.

2 Pioneers who were active in hip-hop culture during the 1980s and who are now considered forefathers of the culture.

3 In English, a suburb is any residential area near to, or within commuting distance of, a large city, and in one sense, it constitutes a separate residential community with some political autonomy, similar to inner-city neighbourhoods, and usually a lower population density. In the USA, in particular, suburbs tend to be generally wealthier areas. In Sweden, a suburb is a place that is normally associated mainly with areas on the edge of large towns and cities with high poverty levels that segregate and separate immigrant-dense housing areas from the rest of the city. These areas are reminiscent of what the French sociologist Wacquant (2009) describes as territorially stigmatised.