Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CIPHER (CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation (Le Conseil International pour Hip Hop et Recherche / The International Council for Hip Hop Studies))
Reporting period: 2024-02-01 to 2024-07-31
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 is the 3rdAI Hip Hop Research Engine (https://globalcipher.org/3rdai/(opens in new window)) created by hip hop communities for hip hop communities. This search tool with translation and AI-assisted features will prove 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's ongoing work looks to help us 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.
Learn more and get involved at: https://globalcipher.org/(opens in new window)
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 is the 3rdAI Hip Hop Research Engine (https://globalcipher.org/3rdai/(opens in new window)) created by hip hop communities for hip hop communities. This search tool with translation and AI-assisted features will prove 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's ongoing work looks to help us 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.
Learn more and get involved at: https://globalcipher.org/(opens in new window)
CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation has completed its global mapping of hip hop knowledge flows through 1.) ethnographic research, 2.) data analytics techniques, and 3.) arts practice methods and has played a significant role in fostering the emergent discipline of hip hop studies. Its theory of "hip hop interpellation"--that hip hop spreads through its performance of personal knowledge and experience, emerging as an always already constituent part of local knowledge and practice--has created a new standard in hip hop studies. This generative call and response dynamic has provided a grounding thesis to track and network diverse data sets in otherwise disparate global contexts, from New York to Cork, Bangkok, Cape Town, Belo Horizonte, and beyond. Similarly, the project's "gem centered" "CIPHER method"--that tracks, translates, and networks these intertexts and archetypes across the global hip hop nation--will provide researchers with a "hiphopographic" methodological template for research into this global polyculture that is easily replicated in disparate contexts across the planet (see Rollefson, et al, Ethnomusicology 2023). This coupling of theory and method is integrated into the first-of-its-kind 3rdAI Hip Hop Research Engine ( https://globalcipher.org/3rdai/ ), which launched in May 2024 and is the recipient of an ERC Proof of Concept Award Seal of Excellence for further development and commercialization to fund CIPHER's community-engaged work in perpetuity.
The most remarkable—and unforeseen—achievement of the CIPHER project to date remains 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(opens in new window)
CIPHER has set a new standard for hip hop studies through theory and methods -- and with its focus on community engagement, arts practice research, networking, conferencing, media engagement, its public-facing website (https://globalcipher.org/(opens in new window)) and publications--including its field-leading Diamond OA journal, Global Hip Hop Studies (https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/ghhs(opens in new window)).
The most remarkable—and unforeseen—achievement of the CIPHER project to date remains 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(opens in new window)
CIPHER has set a new standard for hip hop studies through theory and methods -- and with its focus on community engagement, arts practice research, networking, conferencing, media engagement, its public-facing website (https://globalcipher.org/(opens in new window)) and publications--including its field-leading Diamond OA journal, Global Hip Hop Studies (https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/ghhs(opens in new window)).
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.