WORKSHOP — Things Done Changed… and Changes Yet to Come

Day and time: Saturday (March 21) · 13:00–14:00
Location: Info Center
Format: Workshop

Things Done Changed… and Changes Yet to Come: A collaborative workshop on imagining Speculative Futures for Hip Hop and Hip Hop Studies

Presented by: Aafje de Roest

Hip hop has always imagined futures through narrative, rhythm, and resistance. Today, both Hip Hop and Hip Hop Studies are shaped by a rapidly changing world with profound and intersecting challenges, such as the climate crisis, the rise of far-right movements, AI, global streaming economies, and new institutional frameworks. How can Hip Hop as an art form and Hip Hop Studies as an academic perspective respond to these crises, and how does the culture position itself within them? How might Hip Hop actively challenge the rise of far-right movements, and what strategies could it employ? How can the culture navigate the creative opportunities and ethical challenges posed by AI and digital technologies?

Instead of ‘just talking’, this session uses speculative fiction as a collaborative creative research method to explore these questions, inviting practitioners, artists, and scholars to collectively imagine the possible futures of Hip Hop and its study. Speculative fiction enables participants to think beyond what currently seems possible, exploring new forms, interventions and ways of being that have yet to emerge. (Oziewicz 2017; Edwards 2019; Craps 2023) By building speculative scenarios together, participants experiment with alternative systems and values, opening spaces for critical reflection, creativity, and radical reimagining.

Through guided exercises and dialogue, participants collaboratively develop short speculative scenarios: possible worlds in which Hip Hop evolves, resists, or reinvents itself. In this process, speculation functions both as critique and method, surfacing our own hopes, anxieties, and positionalities as practitioners and researchers. Rather than seeking definitive answers, this session uses narrative creativity to reimagine what Hip Hop can do, and how we might study, teach, and sustain it amid the changes yet to come.