Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CIPHER (CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation (Le Conseil International pour Hip Hop et Recherche / The International Council for Hip Hop Studies)) Reporting period: 2021-02-01 to 2022-07-31 Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation is the world’s first global hip hop knowledge mapping project. It is investigating the international spread of hip hop culture and its attendant musical, lyrical, artistic, and performative forms and building new infrastructure, methods, and theory for the interdisciplinary field of hip hop studies. It addresses the central question: why has this highly localized and authenticizing African American music translated so widely to far-flung communities and contexts around the globe? Through this specific question the project attempts to understand the foundational and broadly transferable question: how are globalization and localization related? To answer these questions CIPHER posits the Hip Hop Interpellation thesis, that hip hop spreads not as a copy of an African American original, but, through its performance of knowledge, emerges as an always already constituent part of local knowledge and practice.CIPHER’s digital/ethnographic methodology tests this thesis, tracking how "gems of hip hop knowledge"—slogans, anthems, icons, and memes—are simultaneously produced by people and produce people. This research clears the conceptual impasse of structural “cultural imperialism” vs. agentic “cultural appropriation” debates and instrumentalizes the methodological distance between ethnographic specificity and big data generality. It does so by creating a feedback loop between digital humanities methods and ethnographic fieldwork techniques. The result will be an iterative map of Hip Hop Interpellation/Interpolation created by stakeholders that is transformational of our understanding of culture and/as cultural production and transferable to pressing questions about immigration, cultural identity, belonging, globalization, and l’exception culturelle. Indeed, CIPHER looks to answer understand why hip hop has proven so attractive to marginalized communities around the world and use that understanding to build a more just and equitable world through community engaged citizen science, media literacy, cultural outputs, scientific reports, and, ultimately, concrete policy recommendations.CIPHER's first primary research objective is to pilot a new semantic digital/ethnographic web methodology that tracks and networks these smallest units of hip hop knowledge--these "gems"--across space and time, creating a user-friendly web application for researchers and hip hop communities alike. Its second primary research objective is to codify the emergent discipline of global hip hop studies through conference participation, conference production, scholarly and popular articles, chapters, books, and web publications as well as artistic outputs and audio-visual productions. Learn more at: https://www.ucc.ie/en/cipher/Get involved at: https://globalcipher.org/ and @globalcipher Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far CIPHER launched the first-of-its-kind journal, Global Hip Hop Studies and has thus far put three full issues into production, comprising 14 articles, 8 book reviews, 7 media and event reviews and a handful of special content ranging from hip hop visual analyses to artist-centered interviews and archival pieces. Forthcoming are the special issues: “Where you’re @: Hip Hop and the Internet,” “The Hip Hop Atlas,” a very important double issue on hip hop dance in the Olympics, and a double issue “Knowledge Reigns Supreme: The Fifth Element in Hip Hop Culture.” The journal has been a high profile success for the CIPHER project, featuring the work of established and early career scholars alike, and creating a space for rigorous scholarship and community-responsive knowledge production.Visit: https://www.intellectbooks.com/global-hip-hop-studies for more informationThe CIPHER Team has presented at numerous conferences, including the third annual European Hip Hop Studies Network (Rotterdam, 2020), Society for Ethnomusicology (Ottawa, 2020), and Transcultural Hip Hop (Bern, 2021). CIPHER also hosted the fourth annual EHHSN meeting, PANTHEON (Paris 2022) as an online conference in conjunction with La Place Centre Culturelle Hip Hop and La Philharmonie de Paris – two world-leading arts organizations. Out of these conference proceedings, the CIPHER Team has written a collaborative article on “The Cipher Method” of analyzing “local gems” of hip hop knowledge and has submitted that for publication this spring (2022). MSCA Fellows, Dr. Steven Gamble, Dr. James McNally, and Dr. Janne Rantala, have joined CIPHER, augmenting the ERC research team which has thus far included Dr. Warrick Moses, Dr. Jason Ng, Dr. Gustavo Souza Marques, and PhD arts researcher, Ophelia McCabe who performs under the name: 0phelia.The most remarkable—and unforeseen—achievement of the CIPHER project to date has been the national television broadcast of the community-engaged hip hop arts and knowledge project, “Ubuntu: Local is Global.” In lieu of fieldwork travel during the pandemic, the project emerged as a collaboration with local youth arts NGOs, The Kabin Studio and Cork Migrant Centre, to explore the "glocal" diversity of hip hop knowledge through performance, linking underresourced youth from Cork’s North Side with migrant youth from Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. National broadcaster RTÉ documented the discussion and rehearsal sessions and broadcast an edited version of the final live public performance, which included original rapping, spoken word, hip hop music and DJing, visual arts, and hip hop dance that explored the theme of Ubuntu—a Zulu word meaning “humanity”—or more specifically: “I am because we are.”Watch it at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEV_IgorLaY&ab_channel=IrishUniversitiesAssociation Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far) Thus far, the infrastructural advances have been particularly noteworthy, including the world's first global hip hop studies journal and the bi-lingual European Hip Hop Studies Network conference. While the digital mapping side of the project is still in development, the methodological and theoretical gains of the "gems" concept that is so central to that computational design has proven particularly innovative--a point we make in our collaborative article (under review), "Networking Hip Hop Knowledges: The CIPHER Method." Finally, in our community-engaged partnerships with local NGOs, we have made unexpected advances in arts practice research--the result of bringing on a PhD student researcher who is also an established hip hop artist, Ophelia McCabe. Her work was integral in developing the media literacy via arts practice UBUNTU project with area youth. We intend to further develop this arts-practice approach for learning about and developing "gems of hip hop knowledge" as it has proven a sustainable and effective way of partnering with the NGOs and local stakeholders who are such important first points of contact with hip hop communities around the world. Cipher project logo
