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Researching Hip Hop History, Culture, and Politics

Instructor: Ira Revels
ir33@cornell.edu
607. 255. 1569

Workshop Description

"Researching Hip Hop History, Culture, and Politics" is an information fluency workshop series designed to complement the Freshman Writing Seminar. Information fluency focuses on developing a deeper understanding of a topic and graduated, increasingly skilled use of technology and resources to support research in it. Our aim will be to explore resources on hip hop's ideological perspectives and the research practices that will help you become successful writers of papers. We will also investigate the books, articles, visual and audio media that provide insight into the sociopolitical issues at the core of hip hop including but not limited to racism, the ghetto, sexism, intellectual property, and misogyny.

During the past decade hip Hop has emerged as a central theme in the study of urban youth culture. Blamed often for its derogatory and violent content, hip hop has become a cultural movement spreading beyond the borders of its Bronx, New York beginnings to the international community. In some instances, Rap, hip hop's mantra, has enabled renowned scholars such as Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson to speak to their audiences in new voices as they present their perspectives on race, music, and the social underclass. Most recently, its mass appeal has helped shape the critical and scholarly writings of academics such as Dyson, Tricia Rose, and Kevin Powell among others.

Recent scholarly discourse on hip hop's history, culture, politics, graffiti art, and fashion provides a wealth of material for students to explore this cultural phenomenon. Therefore, this workshop series proposes to analyze those arguments while helping you to develop your own. In it we will examine scholarly writings and popular magazines, among other media about hip hop to determine the best sources for framing your arguments and written commentary.

The evolution of your research topics will also concern us as we consider the lyrics, music, graffiti art, and fashion but also other means in which to make associations between it, research, and writing at the university level. Though our primary emphasis will be on developing your own research process, much of our class time and most of the supplementary readings will focus on the subject matter. In addition, we will explore those topics supportive of your assignments in the Freshman Writing Seminars.

In addition to the readings, we will regularly listen to the music and view assorted film clips and music videos. For each workshop meeting, students will turn in an in-class exercise designed to help you develop your research skills. This workshop will be taught in a computer classroom and at select locations on campus, so students should be familiar with basic Web-browser and e-mail functions.

Objectives >> return to top

By the end of this workshop series students will:

Workshop 1

• Recognize the need to find information to fill the gaps in his/her knowledge. (Intellectual outcome)
• Write a research topic idea as a question. (Skill outcome)
• Identify the main concepts or keywords in a research question. (Intellectual outcome)
• Choose Boolean operators in order to narrow, broaden, or focus a research topic idea. (Attitudinal outcome)

Workshop 2

• Identify different sources provided in books, magazines, journals, and newspapers for gathering background information. (Intellectual outcome)
• Select appropriate sources for gathering background information. (Attitudinal outcome)
• Perform searches using the library catalog and periodical indexes. (Skill outcome)

Workshop 3

• Distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources of information. (Intellectual outcome)
• Compare popular versus scholarly information sources. (Intellectual outcome)
• Apply search skills to locating additional information as needed. (Intellectual outcome)
• Organize content to support the purposes of his/her product (essay, bibliography, etc.) (Intellectual outcome)

Workshop 4

• Recall sources that are useful to locating background information about a research topic. (Intellectual outcome)
• Develop topic in essay or other format, communicates cogently, and prepares an annotated bibliography using the designated citation style appropriately. (Skill outcome)

Workshop 5

• Communicate what plagiarism is and does not plagiarize. (Skill outcome)
• Apply appropriate documentation style for citing sources properly. (Intellectual outcome)