Danish Musicology Online is looking for contributions to a special issue that centers around a topic close to the hearts of many in the EHHSN. See the Call-for-Papers for details.
Join us for the 4th Meeting of the European Hiphop Studies Network (EHHSN)!
The fourth meeting of the European Hiphop Studies Network is organized in collaboration with La Place: Centre for Hip-Hop Culture, and La Philharmonie de Paris. The two-day, bilingual English and French Network meeting will lead into a two-day French-language conference on the creation, legitimization, and patrimonialization of hip-hop cultures (28-29 January 2022). Both the Network meeting and conference complement the museum exhibition “Hip-Hop 360” at La Philharmonie, centred on the history of hip-hop and its arrival in France. As such, we welcome all participants to plan their stay in Paris from 26 to 29 January 2022 to take full advantage of the conferences, the museum exhibit, and a series of hip-hop events in the city.
Content and Issues
Over the past few decades, as hip-hop culture has grown in popular influence and impact, it has increasingly been taken up as both a subject of study and a point of interest in educational and cultural institutions worldwide. Its acceptance into the academic and official realms has led to a popular discourse suggesting that hip-hop culture has been ‘legitimized’ – for better and for worse.
This process of institutionalization and ‘legitimization’ is complex and deeply ambivalent. In her appearance before the student-organized seminar ‘La Plume et le bitume’ at France’s prestigious École normale supérieure (ENS), rapper Casey preempted any temptation to see the academic seminar as a means of legitimizing rap:
“Rap – even if it’s good that an association at the ENS takes an interest in it, that today, we can hold a seminar on it – rap doesn’t need to be legitimized by elite academic institutions (grandes écoles). It is an important culture without the ENS, or a chair at Harvard or Oxford taking an interest in it.”
Casey hints at what hip-hop scholar Murray Forman has described as, “the dual (and at times dueling) purpose of building academic knowledge while building hip-hop cultural knowledge.” Indeed, knowledge has often been cited as the fifth element of hip-hop.
Taking inspiration from French rapper Booba’s 2004 album Panthéon, which elaborates links between reverence, national pride, cultural legitimacy, and the famed mausoleum reserved for “great men,” the meeting seeks to explore the role of institutions in hip-hop’s legitimization. We invite reflections (including academic papers, workshops, artistic contributions, or other alternative formats) on the relationship between pathways to knowledge rooted in the cultural and artistic practices of hip-hop, and those that stem from institutional efforts to transmit hip-hop’s history and aesthetics. In other words, what are the roles that hip-hop researchers, practitioners, and activists can undertake to advance hip-hop’s work of knowledge and liberation? What might be the challenges or potentials of collaborations between hip-hop practitioners and the commodified knowledge trade of museums, universities, and conservatories? We invite submissions which may consider, but are by no means limited to, these questions.
Submissions and Selection Process
To be considered for the Network meeting, please submit the following documents by email to ehhsnparis@gmail.com by midnight CEST, Friday, 1 October 2021:
Please submit all documents as an attachment. All proposals and all videos, as far as possible, will be anonymized before being forwarded to the organization committee. We will inform all applicants about the final decision by Monday, 1 November 2021. A select number of bursaries will be available for accepted presenters.
We accept proposals in either English or French languages. If presenting in French, we ask you to prepare a short accompanying abstract or slides in English. We also invite master’s and doctoral students as well as early career researchers to present their work-in-progress. We especially welcome papers that engage with less-academically-visible work from artists and practitioners from a wider variety of backgrounds.
Organizing Committee (in alphabetical order):
For further information please see (in alphabetical order):
Regional Representative Natalia Koutsougera has produced two documentaries on breaking in Greece. If you are interested them, please contact her via n.koutsougera@yahoo.com .
Born to Break (2011) is a co-production of Natalia Koutsougera and Fotini Stefani. The ethnographic documentary focuses on themeanings of being a “breaker”, on the emotions and perceptions of b-boys (breaker boys) and b-girls (breaker girls)about the self and their competitive dance, through a brief tour into the contemporary breakdance scene of Attica and the narratives of the diverse individuals and groups who express themselves in this dance form. Along with the subjectivities and the collectivities of the dancers, the documentary captures the public and private spaces that they occupy in the city of Athens: squares, buildings, dance schools and various training places, as well as dance competitions, “battles” and festivals. It also highlights issues of migration and gender and critically explores the sentiments of “respect” and authenticity which are based on the oral history of hip hop culture. Special ethnographic attention is also given to the body semiotics, body affect and dance techniques, such as special dance moves, gestures, facial expressions and dress codes of the dancers – as well as to their language, codes and verbal expressions – to graphically illustrate the key elements of breakdance culture in Greece. The documentary’s duration is 35 minutes.
The Girls are Here (2015) is an ethnographic documentary produced and directed by Natalia Koutsougera. The film explores ways transnational hip hop, street and urban dance styles are appropriated, embodied and performed by female hip hop and street dancers in contemporary Greece. The documentary captures the everyday lives of two young girls in Athens who fuse hip hop (breakdance, hip hop party dance, popping) with urban/street dance styles (waacking, voguing, house dance). Through their all-styles’ choreographies and battling spirits they manage to build queer and defiant spheres and imaginaries of alternative girls’ performance inside and outside hip hop. Moments of their friendship and their relationship with male hip hop dancers and members of their crews are graphically portrayed and narrated. The camera follows them through different activities ranging from teaching, practicing, travelling to preparing and participating in hip hop competitions, shows and events. Above all, the film unravels aspects and perceptions of their femininity and gender identity in a male-dominated and competitive hip hop dance scene and probes the role that hip hop and street dance plays in the production of sisterhood, female spirituality and team spirit. The film’s duration is 45 minutes.
Hiphop has become a worldwide cultural phenomenon and has impacted a large international community.
Talking Back: Hip Hop Through Research and Practice is grounded in feminist and critical theorist Bell Hook’s idea of “Talking Back”. This three day event will open up a space to learn more about the five pillars of Hiphop (Knowledge, Graffiti, break dance, Djing, Emceeing) and will allow artists and researchers to sit down and discuss their practice and reflect on their research. The hope is that each session will explore the importance of Hiphop and its cultural, social, political and economic value in some capacity. Talking Back opens up online dialogical spaces for people to come together, learn, share, question, reflect, dream and gather different perspectives to current research streams in the field.
The event will be of interest to people hoping to engage in culturally relevant discussions and also students and artists looking for networking opportunities, and anyone seeking to learn more about Hip Hop culture.
The three-day event will include conversations with Dr Alex Mason (University of Sheffield), Otis Mensah, Frieda Frost, Robert Hylton, Dan (Lyrix Organix), Love SSega (UK), Axel Gossiaux (BE), Marius Mates (RO/UK), Adil “Dj KhanFu” Khan (UK), Robin Bodéüs (BE), David Diallo (FR), Dr Monique Charles, Street Factory, and Jade Ward. Each morning there will be a short sharing of a performance that will kick-off the day. This may include a film or a dance workshop. The symposium is free and open to the public.
The registration for non-presenting participants are now open for the 18th Rhythm Production and Perception Workshop. This time, a fully online workshop hosted by the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion at the University of Oslo.
The RPPW will feature a host of talks and posters (in dedicated poster-zoom-rooms) on the production and perception of rhythm. The workshop is slanted towards very technical studies of rhythm as a perceptual phenomenon, but there are also some talks and posters that specifically address musical rhythm.
Website for the workshop, with registration here: https://www.uio.no/ritmo/english/news-and-events/events/conferences/2021/RPPW/index.html
Deejaying; emceeing; breaking; graffiti: these are commonly considered hip hop’s four
core elements. While hip hop contains multiple elements beyond its core, many hip
hop artists, activists and fans worldwide understand and recognize a ‘fifth element’
as knowledge. This naming practice shows us how hip hop communities understand
the importance of the history, values and artistry of the culture beyond their own
temporal-spatial borders. With roots in the Universal Zulu Nation in the 1970s
(Chang 2005), hip hop’s fifth element includes aims of self-realization (‘knowledge of
self’), empowerment and information about the history of the genre as well as its key
practitioners (Gosa 2015; Alim, Haupt, Williams 2018).
The fifth element is somewhat elusive in terms of definition and systematic study
because of its multimodal nature: knowledge manifests itself through live performances
and cultural texts ripe for academic study, such as recordings, films, music videos and
social media. Rappers often refer to metaphors of education, such as KRS-One as ‘The
Teacha’, ‘backpack rappers’ and ‘schooling’ someone, in addition to emphasizing the
importance of sharing hip hop histories and social messages. Knowledge also appears
in educational practices, such as artist–scholar knowledge exchanges, (critical) hip hop
pedagogy, and the very field of hip hop studies (Chetty and Turner 2018; Turner 2017;
Emdin 2010; Lamont Hill 2009; Love 2019; Petchauer 2011; Söderman 2011; Snell and
Söderman 2014). Rollefson demands that knowledge in hip hop must ‘be accessed
through local knowledge and practice’ (2017: 233).
Until now, full recognition of the fifth element has faced two challenges. First,
academic studies of the flows of hip hop knowledge are either absent or reserved
for a small number of those working in education departments. Second, practitioners
outside the academy often view hip hop scholarship and other institutionalized
knowledge practices (often justifiably) with a certain level of scepticism. This
Special Issue of Global Hip Hop Studies thus addresses questions about the role
of knowledge in global hip hop culture: how is it mediated across other elements,
social groups and cultural borders? How is knowledge passed on from one hip
hop generation to another? What is the role of hip hop knowledge in educational
institutions around the globe and how can it be used for the benefit of artists and the
community? What can we as researchers, activists and artists learn from knowledge
practices in global hip hop culture?
We invite contributions from a variety of disciplines, including musicology, pedagogy,
cultural studies, ethnomusicology, visual studies, media studies, history, sociology and
other relevant fields. We are particularly keen to bring artists and scholars together
to co-produce new methods for hip hop education while welcoming a wide range
of perspectives and definitions around the intentionally broad concept of hip hop’s
fifth element.
Topics
Submissions may consider, but are not limited to, the following topics:
Types and scope of written and visual texts
Submission
To be considered for this Special Issue of Global Hip Hop Studies, please submit the following via this Google Form by 1 September 2021:
Acceptance
If your abstract is accepted, we will expect to receive the full article or statement
uploaded via Intellect’s online submission portal by 1 August 2022. For a journalspecific
style guide, please visit Intellect’s website. This Special Issue has an extended
research term to provide sufficient time for those who would like to pursue funding for
their projects.
Editors (in alphabetic order)
Darren Chetty, University College London, UK
Sina A. Nitzsche, Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Germany
Justin A. Williams, University of Bristol, UK
We are excited to inform you about our upcoming Hip Hop & Higher Education online conference on the 15th July 2021, which is free and will take place on Zoom from 9am-6pm (BST).
This conference will celebrate Hip Hop’s creativity, criticality and communality, interrogate its marginalisation in UK universities, and explore the merits and dangers of incorporating it into formal sites of higher education. In accordance with the five pillars of Hip Hop, the conference will incorporate MCing, graffiti art, breakdancing, DJing and knowledge production in the form of presentations, performances and workshops. Featuring a combination of researchers, educators, artists, activists and members of the Hip Hop community, this promises to be a rich and rewarding experience for anyone interested in Hip Hop and/or education regardless of background or discipline.
Presentation topics include:
The link to sign up to attend is here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/hip-hop-higher-education-conference-tickets-143569497231
Platform: Zoom (a link will be sent to those who sign up nearer the time)
Cost: Free
If you have any questions about this event please contact alex.mason@sheffield.ac.uk.
Hope to see you there!
Alex, Otis, Parise and Stuart
Amir Abdullah (aka DJ Amir) is the owner and founder of 180 Proof Records and a 20 plus year music industry veteran. Amir is also part of hip-hop history as a record label owner, sample excavator, music historian, compilation curator and DJ—acknowledged as a pioneer alongside his childhood heroes like J Dilla, Common, Lord Finesse, and Pete Rock to name a few.
To this end, Amir presents a three-part lecture series about the legacy and impact of hip-hop, jazz, and race to include:
Each lecture is designed to educate the uninitiated, and elucidate the informed and curious.
Availability: Mondays 2-4 pm (June-December 2021).
Length of lecture: 1-hour ½
If you are interested in booking Amir Abdullah for your lecture, seminar or event, please email him at amir@180-proof.com or call him at +49 151 5335 8533.
Race is among the most significant social categories that informs and organises understandings of music. Although there is an abundance of music research that deals with BIPOC minorities and, at least implicitly, also with race, few studies explicitly address how processes of for example racialisation, essentialisation, appropriation and exclusion in music and music research can effectively be categorised as racist. However, recently there has been an increasing interest also in the issue of racism in the field of music and music scholarship and this international online symposium seeks to bring together researchers across disciplines to discuss music and racism particularly as it relates to Europe.
In emphasising racism, rather than the notion of race, we want to encourage scholars to address the real-world consequences of the articulations of race in music and music scholarship. As we do not wish to merely contribute to narratives of victimization, we seek primarily research that identifies institutional and structural forms of oppression and discrimination. Furthermore, acknowledging scholarship as an active part of civil society, we also seek real-world approaches to dismantling racist structures. As such, the symposium will also include a panel discussion organised in collaboration with Music Finland with participants that represent different aspects of the music industries. The panel will be moderated by Professor Anthony Kwame Harrison.
We welcome papers from scholars in any field of research and we also invite presentations in other than traditional academic paper form by practitioners in any style of music who want to contribute to this discussion. Possible topics include, but are not limited to the following:
Keynote speakers
Kira Thurman, University of Michigan Luis-Manuel Garcia, University of Birmingham
Submissions
Please send an abstract of max 250 words without references and a biography of 50 word plus contact details all in same word or pdf file to kim.ramstedt@gmail.com. Deadline for paper submissions 4 June 2021.
Registration and Fees
Registration will be open from June until September 2021. Details about payment methods will be sent out to registered participants. Fee for waged participants 35 EUR Fee for unwaged participants 15 EUR
Organisers
The symposium is organised by Research Association Suoni and the Kone Foundation funded research project ”Music researchers in society: Advancing social justice through activist music research” in collaboration with CEMFOR — Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism at Uppsala University, IASPM-Norden (International Association for the Study of Popular Music) and Music Finland.
Symposium Coordinators
Kim Ramstedt (Suoni) and Jasmine Kelekay (CEMFOR) Contact: kim.ramstedt[at]gmail.com More information: www.suoni.fi/etusivu/music-and-racism-in-europe
Join Trinity for the first, totally online, international hiphop festival! For the 15th year of the Trinity International Hiphop Festival, all events will be streamed online on April 9-11 2021.
Highlights include:
Register for FREE at https://trinityhiphopfest.afterparty.live/register
