Call for Papers

The Hip Hop and Higher Education online conference is a one-day event, funded by the British Association for American Studies (BAAS), that will take place on Thursday 15^th July 2021. Through this conference, we seek to do three things:

• Provide a space for people to exhibit and enjoy the critical, creative and communal elements of Hip Hop
• Interrogate Hip Hop’s exclusion from higher education, linking it to intersecting systems of oppression and discrimination which underpin the university and wider society
• Explore the merits and possible dangers of incorporating Hip Hop into formal sites of higher education

In order to reflect and honour the dynamism of Hip Hop, music and performance will feature throughout the day. In that vein, we not only invite artists, academics (early careers/established) and members of the Hip Hop community to submit proposals for papers, but also group presentations, performances, videos, virtual exhibitions, discussion groups and creative workshops.

Deadline and instructions for abstract submissions:

Please email a 300-word abstract clearly outlining your proposal, as well as a brief 100-word bio to alex.mason@sheffield.ac.uk by the 5th December 2020

Possible topics pertaining to Hip Hop and higher education include (but are not limited to):

• Activism and protest
• Appropriation, Commodification and/or Neoliberalism
• Community Engagement
• Decolonising the Curriculum
• Home and Belonging
• History, Collective Memory and the Archive
• Krip Hop
• Identity (e.g. racial, class, gender, sexual, religious)
• Intersecting Systems of Oppression
• Liberational Pedagogy / Teaching Practice
• Mental Health
• Performance
• Philosophy
• Poetry, Literature and Lyricism
• Politics
• Space and Place (e.g. City, Region, Nation)
• Technology

We look forward to hearing from you!

Dr Alex Mason (Arts & Humanities Knowledge Exchange Project Manager, University of Sheffield)

Dr Stuart Green (Senior Lecturer in Spanish, Leeds University)

Otis Mensah (Independent Artist and Educator)