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))
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2021-02-01 al 2022-07-31
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
Visit: https://www.intellectbooks.com/global-hip-hop-studies for more information
The 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