Community and Hip Hop: Resistance, Care, and Collective Solutions

Day and time: Friday (March 20) · 14:00–15:30
Location: Job Lounge
Format: Talk

Spaces of Resistance: Palestinian Hip-Hop, Erasure and the Politics of Care

Presented by: Sina Ritt

In relation to my dissertation on articulations of feminist critique in Palestinian rap music, this paper examines Palestinian hip-hop concerts in the European diaspora from 2023 to 2025. Drawing on participatory observation, it explores how hip-hop concerts serve as activist spaces of care, resistance, and community within the context of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Situated within intersectional feminist and postcolonial theoretical frameworks, it analyzes negotiations and (re)negotiations of cultural authenticity and genre boundaries within a broader context of cultural production under conditions of oppression and erasure. By examining practices of performance, audience engagement, and affective exchange, the paper highlights how these concerts act as spaces where resistance manifests through sound, language, and community-building, becoming sites of both cultural resilience and political struggle.

Centering Palestinian voices, this study contributes to broader discussions on art as a tool of political mobilization, affective solidarity, and cultural survival. It shows how hip-hop performances in Zurich, Paris, and London function as affective and political spaces for expressions of collective grief, resistance, care, and celebration—illustrating how cultural practice functions as an infrastructure of resistance in the diaspora.

Hip Hop Can Save Humanity: A Solutions Framework for a World in Crisis

Presented by: Manny Faces

Within Hip Hop studies, we already know the culture is bigger than music. We’ve spent decades mapping its pedagogies, politics, and global impact, and it is imperative that these efforts continue and evolve. Yet even as Hip Hop has proven its ability to teach, heal, and organize, we are still underutilizing one of humanity’s most effective technologies for transformation.

This presentation argues that today’s overlapping crises – inequality, authoritarianism, ecological collapse, and civic despair – demand not just new tools, but new ways of thinking. Hip Hop offers an adaptive, collaborative framework for solving problems through creativity and collective intelligence. But to meet this moment, we must move from analyzing Hip Hop to applying it, not only as subject, but as strategy.

Drawing from global examples in education, civic innovation, and community resilience, this talk repositions Hip Hop’s “remix ethos” as a uniquely powerful methodology for redesigning systems that no longer serve the needs of the people. In a world on fire, Hip Hop’s survival logic, radical imagination, and commitment to remixing the broken into the possible are not just about cultural relevance — they may represent civilization’s best hope.

Trøndercore – The Affective Politics of Hip Hop in Trondheim, Norway

Presented by: Martin Anil Choudhari

For three decades, Trondheim, Norway, has sustained a vibrant underground rap scene that has persisted despite a relative lack of commercial prospects. This paper explores the creative and social practices of Trondheim’s hip-hop scene and ties the scene’s longevity to the affective affordances provided by its rap idiom. The scene is in alliance with a segment of US rap that celebrates hip-hop as a cultural movement and builds on the "golden age" rap of the 90's. This musical tradition is translated and reconfigured to the local context and serves as a ‘blueprint’ for ‘affective politics’ – music's capacity to effect social-affective ordering (Klette-Bøhler et al., 2024; Rose, 1994). Through ethnographic-inspired fieldwork, I investigate how social desire, affective alliances, and discursive practices are assembled in local idioms. Theoretically, I revisit the concept of subculture, analyzing it through the framework of an ‘affective return’ in musicology. Analyzing subcultures affectively might mitigate the critique of positions that are either overly focused on working-class identity or too depoliticized (Blackman, 2005; Skrobanek, 2025). Examining the Trondheim hip-hop scene's affective politics in relation to topical social issues shows how artistic expressions engage with social pressures, aspire to intersectional solidarity, foster community, and resist total market co-optation.