Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Cultural production is an important aspect of stratification as individuals use cultural symbols and signals to routinize groupings. These groupings create boundaries and in-group behaviors and are the roots of othering. How cultural codes are produced is the focus of this work. There exists a dialectic response due to the exploitation of African American music by non-whites through out U.S. history. The response of the Black musical community has been to produce new codes - exclusive to the community - which are soon routinized by the dominant group. I use participant observations over five years at a professional recording studio in Los Angeles, California, coupled with interviews of workers and owners (artists and producers) of the Hip-Hop genre Gangsta Rap to show that the response to the expropriation of black music by non-blacks results in the conscious production of codes to signal political resistance, and that these codes also function as community cohesion. I further show that receivers of these codes who are not in-group members react to the associations of the codes, and not their organic meanings; and this response is how cultural boundaries are made.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Rap has been shown to influence a variety of psychological attitudes, but even as it circulates political messages scholars have yet to test whether exposure to hip-hop videos actually influences political attitudes. I do so in this work.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In Kimbrough v. United States, the latest in a string of recent landmark decisions that, in effect, have made the United States Sentencing Commission’s Guidelines non-binding, the Supreme Court upheld a trial court judge’s decision to address the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder by reducing Derrick Kimbrough’s crack-related sentence by four and a half years. This paper argues that the rap music industry, whose defining story now revolves almost solely around a mythical merger of street crime and white collar crime, articulates in cultural form what the Sentencing Commission, legal activists, and now the Supreme Court suggest legalistically: that despite crack’s decline as a profitable commodity, it fundamentally symbolizes the anger, pain, loss, and systemic unfairness at the heart of America’s current sentencing crises.

Publication Type: Panelist Abstract
Abstract: My research will explore black female displays of physical and sexual freedom as well as their ongoing dialogue with male rappers’ sexual discourse and the contradictory nature of sexual politics in rap music. Black women rappers’ public displays of physical and sexual freedom often challenge male notions of female sexuality and pleasure. Yet, in their response to male sexual discourse, lies contradictory modes of resistance in female rappers’ work. The papers argues that they support and critique male rappers’ sexual discourse in a number of ways. The papers also examines how, in this age of advanced technology and a hyper-sexed society, black women’s bodies in the public sphere influence young womanhood development.

Publication Type: Panelist Abstract
Abstract: This paper will explore the kinship between Rap and traditional Negro Spirituals as social activist musical genres. Exploring their historical evolutions, conducting lyrical and musical structural analyses, and examining each genre’s musical ambassadors, will illustrate why these genres were able to transcend national borders to propel global revolutionary movements. While extending past cultural and national barriers, both genres experienced the ramifications of transcendence in music, causing their messages to shift and become diluted in some instances. After experiencing these modifications, this paper will discuss whether these musical forms are still formidable tools in forging global social change.