Hip Hop as a Healing Practice

The Diversity Committee at Georgia Highlands College and the Cultural Awareness & Resource Center at Kennesaw State University seek to explore and capitalize on the ways students, faculty, and artist from culturally, ethnically, and socio-economically diverse backgrounds engage hip-hop, art, music, and culture. In so doing, we hope to gain a better understanding of how hip hop is used to support their efforts to sustain personal well-being while in pursuit of educational and career goals, in particular, as well as promote issues of social justice, in general.

 

 Within the last two decades, the emergence of art, in various forms (including music, performance, visual art), has become an alternative method for teaching and learning in various education contexts. There has also been an emphasis on how these alternative methods have assisted our local and global communities understand each other and heal. There has been a focus on the emergence of delinquency and negligence as it relates to the treatment of under-represented populations in society. Recently, the focus in newsprint and social media has centered on the miscarriages of justice. With that, the notion of and need for healing has also emerged and begs to be attended to. Conversations that center on the diagnosis of the social dis-ease and explicate the root causes of the tragedies and injustices are necessary and fundamental. Little attention, however, is focused on how we should go about healing from these different types of trauma we experience. To the point, there should be more conversations regarding the healing practices and sensibilities already in use and the those necessary to move forward with the healing process.

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Through the “Hip Hop As A Healing Practice: Art, Music + Culture” Symposium, we intend to create an atmosphere that invokes the spirits, tell the stories, create and share the knowledge(s), and sharpen the intelligences that stimulate critical analysis of the ways/patterns that hip-hop, art, music and culture assist in the processes of healing, enhancing learning, improving practice and pedagogy, and fighting for educational and social justice.