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Hip-Hop Culture in College Students’ Lives

Elements, Embodiment, and Higher Edutainment

By Emery Petchauer

Published October 3rd 2011 by Routledge – 130 pages

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Description

College campuses have become rich sites of hip-hop culture and knowledge production. Despite the attention that campus personnel and researchers have paid to student life, the field of higher education has often misunderstood the ways that hip-hop culture exists in college students’ lives. Based upon in-depth interviews, observations of underground hip-hop spaces, and the author’s own active roles in hop-hop communities, this book provides a rich portrait of how college students who create hip-hop—both male and female, and of multiple ethnicities—embody its principles and aesthetics on campuses across the United States. The book looks beyond rap music, school curricula, and urban adolescents to make the empirical argument that hip-hop has a deep cultural logic, habits of mind, and worldview components that students apply to teaching, learning, and living on campus.

Hip-Hop Culture in College Students’ Lives provides critical insights for researchers and campus personnel working with college students, while pushing cultural observers to rethink the basic ways that people live hip-hop.

Reviews

"Hip-Hop Culture in College Students’ Lives encourages new critical thought and analysis among educators, campus personnel and researchers regarding the value of hip-hop culture in enhancing college students’ learning and development. Unveiled through an artistic approach to inquiry, a portrait is presented of how students who create hip-hop integrate its ideology, aesthetics and practices into their college lives."

—Journal of College Student Development

"Petchauer’s work not only validates the spaces created by students on all of our campuses, but should in fact challenge faculty, staff, and administrators to find new and creative ways to engage students. This is a fascinating study which should hopefully provide a more sophisticated understanding of how students make meaning on campus."

—From the foreword by Walter M. Kimbrough, Ph.D., President of Philander Smith College

"This book is a passionate, timely, and deep-rooted analysis of hip-hop culture’s value to higher education. Petchauer’s prescriptions for integrating hip-hop into pedagogical practice are practical, culturally astute, and ultimately revolutionary."

—Joseph Schloss, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Black and Latino Studies, Baruch College

"This book is an important intervention in contemporary debates on hip-hop and education. Petchauer shows us how campuses have been radically transformed through hip-hop in ways often invisible to educators and administrators alike, and he has begun a new and fruitful discussion for the field of hip-hop studies as well as education more broadly. This is a vital and necessary book."

—Greg Dimitriadis, Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy, University at Buffalo, SUNY

Contents

  1. Introduction: Hip-Hop, College Students, and Campus Life
  2. Entering the Cipher: Methods, Approaches, and Sketches of the Settings
  3. Welcome to the Underground: Hip-Hop Places and Spaces Around Campus
  4. "Hip-Hop is Like Breathing:" Aesthetics, Applications, and Conflicts on Campus
  5. "I Look at Hip-Hop as a Philosophy:" Edutainment, Sampling, and Classroom Practices
  6. Knowing What’s up and Learning What You’re not Supposed to: The Parameters of Critical Consciousness in Black, White, and Brown
  7. Lessons from the Underground: A Model for Understanding Hip-Hop in Students’ Lives

Author Bio

Emery Petchauer is Assistant Professor of Education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the nation's first historically Black university. A former high school teacher, his research focuses on the cultural dimensions of teaching and learning in urban schools and universities as well as teacher development and licensure. He is a regular contributor to The Academy Speaks blog for Diverse Issues in Higher Education and a former Visiting Scholar in Residence at New York University. In addition to these academic pursuits, Dr. Petchauer has over a decade of experience organizing hip-hop and urban arts spaces across the United States. He is one of the central organizers for The Gathering, the longest-running all-ages hip-hop culture night in Philadelphia.

Name: Hip-Hop Culture in College Students’ Lives: Elements, Embodiment, and Higher Edutainment (Paperback) – Routledge 
Description: By Emery Petchauer. College campuses have become rich sites of hip-hop culture and knowledge production. Despite the attention that campus personnel and researchers have paid to student life, the field of higher education has often misunderstood the ways that hip-hop...
Categories: Higher Education, Rap & Hip-Hop, Sociology of Education