Dusty & Digital: Hip Hop & Critical Media Literacy

Join two DJs/librarians as we explore the intersection of hip hop culture, media literacy instruction, and library programming. Sociologists and musicologists have long embraced the strongest cultural force of the last four decades; media literacy educators, however, are seemingly only beginning to integrate hip hop into their programming. After establishing a baseline understanding, we will demonstrate our praxis with the most appropriate classroom technology - two turntables, a mixer, records, and a sampling drum machine. As we have learned, incorporating hip hop into media literacy programming presents both challenges and opportunities. It is one of the few areas of popular culture that routinely addresses issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, authority, credibility, and authenticity. Furthermore, researching source material, reconfiguring it, and synthesizing it with other media into something new is the original hip hop production model. Inasmuch, hip hop pedagogy is a powerful tool to employ when taking a critical view of the nuance inherent to issues of authorship, academic and artistic integrity, copyright, and plagiarism. Participants will be able to articulate the similarities between the practices and conventions inherent to hip hop music and other media production practices. Participants will also be able to frame a discussion of media literacy using hip hop music production’s political economy as a framework. Attendees will leave inspired to incorporate hip hop pedagogy into their praxis via proven programming from our academic and public libraries