Research Overview Hip Hop as Methodology: Ways of Knowing

To listen to hip hop is to enter a world of complexity and contradiction. —Imani Perry (2004, p. 1) Over the past five years I have directed and developed, in collaboration with my Interactive Media and Performance (IMP) Labs ’ research team, artists, teachers, elders, community partners, and youth, a number of community hip hop arts-based projects in Saskatchewan. These community-based programs have been shaped by the following research questions: What role does hip hop play in narrating settler/colonialism on the prairies or in the north? What happens to stories when they are (re)told through a contem-porary oral practice and mediated by the discourses associated with hip-hop cul-ture on a global scale? How does hip hop challenge contemporary Canada to think about “Aboriginal ” politics and colonial-ism in the present and the future, rather than framing them as only relevant to the past? How does Indigenous hip hop com-plicate the spirit of a liberal pluralist soci-ety such as Canada?1 Four years and nine Hip Hop projects later,2 these questions, although still relevant and necessary, no longer capture how I have come to understand and theorize hip hop as a methodology, or as a conceptual model for researching and articulating ways of knowing (Covach, 2010). Transitioning away from the conventional approach to theorizing community-based arts projects as a discourse of intervention (e.g., by tar-geting “at risk ” youth), I argue the Hip Hop Projects facilitate a recognizable sense o