Lean Back II: Embodied Knowledge(s), Pedagogy, and Collective Consciousness
Day and time: Thursday (March 19) · 15:15–16:45
Location: Job Lounge
Format: Talk
Thinking Through Flow: Hip Hop as Embodied Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy
Presented by: Jean-Philippe Clotaire
Explore Hip Hop as a form of embodied philosophy and as a tool for critical pedagogy. Emerging from the margins, Hip Hop constitutes an epistemology of lived experience, an art form where body, voice, and rhythm become instruments of knowledge. Through its core disciplines: rap, dance, graffiti, and DJing. Hip hop transmits situated knowledges of resistance, memory, and collective consciousness. Grounded in the Each One Teach One principle and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, Hip Hop challenges hierarchical models of education by promoting horizontal transmission and peer-to-peer learning.
The presentation focuses on rap writing and philosophy workshops as spaces for intellectual and creative emancipation. Such initiatives, developed in various educational contexts, enable the articulation of critical thought through poetic and rhythmic expression. Drawing on examples from French (Kery James, Oxmo Puccino), American (Kendrick Lamar, KRS-One), and Creole rap(Keros'n, Kalash) , the presentation argues that Hip Hop offers a philosophy of the real embodied, dialogical and reflective, where rhyme becomes method and flow becomes a mode of thought. Ultimately, Hip Hop functions as a pedagogy of the living, re-politicizing the relationship to knowledge and giving voice to those who are rarely heard.
Xulu202x: Collective speculation through Hip Hop
Presented by: Julian Owusu & Antti Uimonen
As an existential trait, Black diasporan art and cultural practices are deeply concerned with collective futurity. This applies to Hip Hop culture as well, even when it is not explicitly articulated. In Hip Hop communities it is mutually understood that shared knowledge in the now traverses into the unpredictable and unforeseeable, but inevitably approaching future. The fifth element, Knowledge, is not only knowing, but a collective consciousness of the realities that create the present and simultaneously build propositions for the multiplicity of futures.
This paper, presented by Julian Owusu and Antti Uimonen, is a reflection on the collective methods used in the Xulu202x project that combines futures studies methods and community-engaged art practices of Hip Hop, focusing on embodied collective knowledge production and dreaming of collective futures. These methods include among others cyphering, each one teach one, embodied speculation, rhythmic arriving on action and decoding of collective experiences. The work is based on decoding social contextuality and relationality through Hip Hop culture. It brings to light a distinct Hip Hop-logic that refuses to accept that the colonially defined singular reality is the only one that exists and that there is more that can be reproduced actively.
