HIP HOP: CULTURE, MEMORY, IDENTITY & EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE
Tracing the ancestral, social, political, musical, and corporeal continuum of Hip Hop culture and dance.
Monday, October 5, 2026 at 6:00AM PST (9:00AM EST)

This six-week mini-course explores Hip Hop as a cultural practice, embodied archive, philosophical system, and global phenomenon. Through critical readings, films, discussion, and reflective writing, students will examine Hip Hop’s roots within African American and AfroCaribbean cultural continuums while engaging questions of identity, belonging, representation, power, authenticity, spirituality, gender, globalization, and cultural memory.

The course positions Hip Hop not merely as entertainment, but as a living cultural technology developed through struggle, innovation, improvisation, resistance, survival, and communal expression. Students will investigate Hip Hop dance, music, language, fashion, ritual, battle culture, and aesthetics through historical, theoretical, anthropological, and embodied frameworks.

Meeting once weekly via Zoom, the course combines lecture, discussion, movement, visual analysis, and critical writing to deepen students’ understanding of Hip Hop as both culture and embodied knowledge.

Week 1: What Makes That Hip Hop? Language, Identity, Ideology & Emergence
Week 2: Afro-Caribbean Roots of Hip Hop Rhythm, Ritual, Spirituality & Diasporic Memory
Week 3: Gang Culture, Power & Transformation Violence, Survival, Fashion & Community Organization
Week 4: Authentic/Vernacular Jazz Continuum Embodied Retentions, Groove & Cultural Memory
Week 5: Hip Hop Dance Forms, Theory & Globalization Foundation, Gender, Technique & Cultural Translation
Week 6: What I've Learned About Hip Hop Culture & Dance Reflection, Synthesis & Critical Thought

LINK TO COURSE SYLLABUS
LINK TO SIGN UP