Show & Prove 2018 Hip Hop Studies Conference

December 7-9, 2018 | Riverside, CA
Keywords:  hustling, response/ability

CALL FOR PAPERS/ PANELS/ PERFORMANCES/ WORkSHOPS

**PROPOSALS ARE CLOSED**

The UC Riverside Department of Dance in conjunction with the UC Consortium for Black Studies in California invite proposals to be part of the 4th Biennial Show & Prove Hip Hop Studies Conference (S&P 2018) to be held at the Culver Center of the Arts in Riverside, CA on December 7th – 9th. This is a call for papers, panels, performances, round tables, workshops, and other contributions that speak to the keywords.

On their own, the 2018 conference keywords have multiple meanings. Hustling in Hip Hop parlance typically invokes work in the underground economy. Yet hustling can also refer to any means of making money to survive (legal or not), pushing to create and exhaust all available opportunities, and the consequences of such activity.  Broadly, hustling speaks to the various means folks use to acquire power otherwise denied, particularly economic power. Response/ability is a purposeful hybrid illuminating multiple dimensions: responsibility as duty, response as reaction, and ability as capacity. In more overt political terms response/ability refers to activism in its various forms, and the Hip Hop community’s collective capacity and duty to respond to injustice in substantive ways in these precarious times.

They also activate each other in opposing and complementary ways. For example, hustling can seem purely selfish relative to response/ability, which centers care for others. Yet, as anything can be a hustle (a means to an end), hustling can also be a kind of refusal of the status quo set by civil society, while responsibility might capitulate to civil society’s ethically suspect terms. Both keywords address the power to contend directly with given conditions, jointly speaking to the necessity for communities to do for themselves.

S&P 2018 is a conference series that gathers people committed to building Hip Hop Studies as a field with intentions to listen generously, offer substantive critique, and exchange ideas. Questions to consider might include but are not limited to:

  • What are the limits of a survival ethic?

  • How does Hip Hop feminism remix our understanding of misogyny, homophobia, & transphobia?

  • Is white supremacy a hustle?, and how does Hip Hop culture respond to it?

  • How have folks employed Hip Hop’s elements to challenge ableism?

  • When Hip Hop elements distinctly take up the movement for Black lives, what do they enable?

  • Does Hip Hop have a particular responsibility in the Trump era?

  • How is Hip Hop Studies positioned to critique the academic hustle (e.g. publishing, employment, “diversity & inclusion” discourse)?

  • What does care work look like in Hip Hop culture?

  • How does the U.S. ending Net Neutrality impact Hip Hop cultures online (e.g. Hustling 2.0)?

  • Can battling offer tools for political responses?

  • Is the hustler Hip Hop’s trickster figure? If so, what are the lessons?

  • What does it look like when we move beyond a capitalist framework to understand success in Hip Hop?

  • What is the relationship between cultural responsibility and cultural appropriation?

  • Can we hustle for broader economic change beyond individual gain?

  • What might be enabled when we refuse to respond?

Submit as Word or PDF a 250-word abstract for individual projects, or a 300-word abstract for panel proposals (with no more than 200-word descriptions per/individual contributions to the whole).  Be sure to provide contact information, A/V requirements, length of performances, and any (dis)ability accommodation needs.  *Undergraduate submissions should include a faculty mentor who can serve as a guide in the process of presenting at a conference.  Final submissions are due no later than 11:59pm PST on May 30, 2018.  Accepted proposals will be notified by June 15th. 

To submit proposals or for additional details please contact showproveconf@gmail.com.