CO-CHAIR of "Hiphop Justice": Hiphop Literacies Conference 2017 (John Jay College) |
Click here or image above for the conference website that I designed |
The second Post-Reconstruction, achieved most significantly by the campaigns of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, arguably witnessed the birth of Hiphop. Hiphop, however, was always more than a mere reaction to or resistance against the global oppressions of Reagonomics and Thatcherism when these regimes unleashed the IMF, World Bank, global warming, and a host of calculated attacks on Brown and Black peoples worldwide. Hiphop was a radical (re)vision and (re)valuing of life and cultural survivance. This year’s Hiphop literacies conference urges us to see the writing on the wall: we are now entering the Third Post-Reconstruction. Let’s take Papoose’s argument seriously when he lays down his freestyle with Remy Ma at Funk Flex’s Freestyle #027: “just yesterday, we was Obama-ed up, now we all stuck with Ronald McDonald Trump.”
This year’s Hiphop literacies conference therefore compels us to ask: what is Hiphop’s ongoing (re)vision and (re)valuing of Black life and culture in the Third Post-Reconstruction? How do Brown and Black peoples who are threatened by Trump’s walls get ready to respond to and resist through Hiphop culture? How does Hiphop stand with Standing Rock and stand against colonization set in motion centuries ago? What are the heteropatriarchal scripts that Hiphoppas will now rewrite? How will we sustain, maintain, and thrive as a legacy of our cultural survivance?
The purpose of the Hiphop Literacies conference is to bring together scholars, educators, activists, students, artists, and community members to dialogue on pressing social problems. This year our working conference theme is Hiphop Justice (Hiphop in the 3rd Reconstruction). Participants of the Hiphop Literacies Conference join a community of those concerned with African American/Black, Brown and urban literacies who are interested in challenging the sociopolitical arrangement of the relations between institutions, languages, identities, and power through engagement with local narratives of inequality and lived experience in order to critique a global system of oppression. Literacies scholars who foreground the lives of Hiphop generation youth see Hiphop as providing a framework to ground work in classrooms and communities in democratic ideals.
The 2017 Hiphop Literacies Conference is organized by Drs. Crystal Endsley, Elaine Richardson, and Carmen Kynard. The conference will be hosted by John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. We want to keep the momentum rolling forward from previous conference themes where we have examined the intersections of Hiphop, critical education/literacies, the current BlackLivesMatter movement, activism-artistry, social stratification, globalization, popular culture and technology.
The Program Zine |
This is the first zine that I ever created. From that point forward, I have made every alphabetic syllabus for every class that I have taught also in the format of a zine.