Hip Hop Ecologies
A Workshop at the University of Konstanz (June 26-28, 2019)
Hip hop is one of the globally most successful forms of cultural
production today. Since its emergence in the African American and Latino
neighborhoods of 1970s New York City, it has spread around the world and
exerted a considerable impact not only on pop culture, but on societal
debates around race, class, public safety, nationality, gender, and a
range of other issues. The rapidly expanding field of hip hop studies
has examined its artistic development and cultural significance from a
variety of angles. What has remained almost entirely absent from
scholarly debate is the relationship between hip hop and the environment.
As a predominantly urban phenomenon, hip hop does not pursue an
environ-mentalist agenda in any narrow sense. Its focus is on social
rather than natural life, on the city rather than the country.
Nevertheless, an environmental perspective on hip hop promises to enrich
our understanding of the ways in which popular cultural forms shape and
are shaped by environmental concerns. Such an approach can direct our
attention to important dimensions of hip hop that have remained marginal
to public and scholarly debate. Conversely, hip hop offers
unconventional vistas that challenge narrow conceptions the environment
and of the academic field of Environmental Studies.
The workshop wants to provide a form for critical discussion and
open-ended exploration of these issues. Contributions might draw on
various elements of hip hop culture in any local or national setting to
address the following aspects or others:
• depictions and negotiations of nature in hip hop
• environmental approaches to (urban) space in hip hop
• hip hop and urban ecology
• rural hip hop and its environmental dimensions
• material environments of hip hop production and reception
• environmentally aware or embedded hip hop cultures
• hip hop in/and environmental activism
• environmental framings in debates around hip hop
• hip hop and the posthuman
• hip hop and the natural sciences
While the workshop will be held in English, contributions on
non-anglophone hip hop are expressly invited. If you would like to
participate, please send a 250-word proposal and a short biographical
note as pdf files to the organizer by September 30, 2019.
A leading peer-reviewed journal of Environmental Studies has expressed
interest in publishing the results of the workshop as a special issue.
Submissions are invited from both workshop participants and outside
contributors; the deadline will be in the fall of 2020. There will be
travel bursaries for workshop participants who submit an essay for the
special issue. Feel free to inquire if you are interested in this option.
Organizer:
Prof. Dr. Timo Müller
American Studies
University of Konstanz
timo.mueller@uni-konstanz.de