CHID 275: Music and Social Movements
Instructor and office hours
- Dr. Georgia M. Roberts, American and Ethnic Studies (UWB) and CHID (UWS)
- gmr2@uw.edu
- This course is 100% online and asynchronous -- see below for course structure information
Course Description
This class explores the history, music, and social movements that preceded and inspired hip-hop culture. We’ll consider the commercialization and globalization of hip hop even as we place it as the always-local, neighborhood-based response to many of the ongoing effects of globalization, including forced migration, gentrification, racial profiling, and mass incarceration. Two overarching questions will animate our work together; 1) how have artists, journalists, and scholars shaped our understanding of the history of hip-hop culture, and 2) what, if anything, can we generalize about hip-hop’s political imagination?
Learning Objectives
By the end of the course, participants should be able to:
-
-
- Demonstrate understanding of the social, political, and material conditions of the time that preceded hip-hop culture late 1960s to mid 1970s.
- Learn the specific ways figures in the Black Power movement influenced early hip-hop artists
- Consider primary artistic elements and key concepts related to hip hop.
- Engage with the topic and themes of the course in a variety of forms including formal and informal online discussions, academic research, the close reading of texts, writing about music and visual culture, etc.
- Consider the relationship between culture, power and the construction of knowledge.
-
Each week you will be assigned a selection of readings and either a documentary film or other media (podcast, etc.) To ensure that we are working through blocks of material at the same time, modules will open ten days in advance and close on Saturday at midnight of the current week. You are always free to work ahead by using the information on the syllabus. In general, it's a good idea to complete readings and films by Monday or Tuesday, as you will be expected to either submit an initial discussion post or start a quiz by Wednesday. Links to films are on the syllabus and readings are organized on Canvas by week under “files.”