Higher Education, and the Limits of Critical Consciousness

This qualitative portraiture study explores the different ways that college students deeply involved in hip-hop at two universities (i.e., hip-hop col-legians) made their personal experiences in hip-hop relevant to their educa-tional pursuits. The results of this study illustrate how students applied their experiences with the critical discourses of hip-hop music and the questioning discourse of hip-hop more generally to their perspectives of university edu-cation and their specific academic pursuits. This article also details the lim-its of these critical perspectives by illustrating how a subsample of hip-hop turntablists did not mobilize the critical and political perspectives that other participants embraced. Overall, this article focuses on the different ways that young adults from various ethnic backgrounds make a cultural artifact cre-ated primarily by Black communities relevant to their educational lives