Pop Conference 2025

Since the 1994 publication of Tricia Rose’s seminal Black Noise: Rap Music and Black
Culture in Contemporary America, hip hop studies has rooted and grown in U.S.
universities, its rhizomes linking varied humanistic methods and critical ethnic studies.
Yet the institutional embrace of hip hop in the 21st century has often diverged from hip
hop studies’ academically radical beginnings; to riff off Sara Ahmed, hip hop’s
incorporation into traditional humanities departments lets them sound and look a little
less white without necessarily challenging the anti-Blackness upon which they are
founded. How might hip hop studies scholars center praxis, broadly defined, as a
corrective to the institutional cooptation of hip hop in U.S. higher education? How do
performance, ethnography, creative work, teaching, and engaged scholarly projects, for
example, suggest alternative ways of knowing that begin from a point of embodied
collaboration, and what could this mean for creating and sustaining solidarities with and
across the communities in/about/for whom we work?

Participants in this roundtable occupy multiple shifting and interconnected points along
a spectrum of hip hop praxis that includes performance, community engagement, public
facing scholarship, teaching and research. Drawing on our experiences as professors,
rappers, teachers, writers, and ethnographers, we consider how praxis and
collaboration allow alternative and potentially subversive modes of knowledge
production even as institutions continue to harness hip hop in the service of vacuous
“DEI” initiatives. As we explore issues of power that complicate praxis-oriented work, we
consider the following questions: From international research relationships to
engagements with local U.S. communities, how do hip hop scholars identify community
needs and address them meaningfully and without centering ourselves? How do hip
hop practitioners—many of us in novel roles within our respective institutions—respond
to the shifting terrain of what life means for hip hop artists who lack any kind of
institutional protection? And within the institution, what are the strategies for remaining
rooted in community while keeping pace with the sonic and music industry-related
changes happening in the rap world? What role does embodied knowledge play for hip
hop scholars positioned differently vis-a-vis performance? How can prioritizing
embodied knowledge, collaboration, and community spur meaningful, material
institutional change?