Hip-hop culture to be explored (is the title)

The Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University will host a panel discussion about the hip-hop generation Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 5 p.m. in Emory Clark Hall, room 111, located at 530 N. 16th Street.

The Department of Social and Cultural Sciences at Marquette University will host a panel discussion about the hip-hop generation Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 5 p.m. in Emory Clark Hall, room 111, located at 530 N. 16th Street.

Wrapped up in the hip-hop culture are clues about race, class, capitalism, globalization and the rise in the rate of incarceration of African-American men over the last 20 years. Four panel members from three different academic institutions – Jerry Gafio Watts, Jooyoung Lee, Hank Williams and Erin Winkler – will explore these issues and how they are affecting race relations in Milwaukee and around the country.

The discussion is being facilitated by Robert Turner, Marquette University’s 2009-10 Arnold L. Mitchem Dissertation Fellow, a doctoral candidate completing his dissertation on the lives of NFL players.

About the Panelists
Jerry Gafio Watts is a professor of English and Sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a leading critic of African-American literature, culture and politics. Watts, who received his bachelor’s degree at Harvard and doctorate at Yale, has been published in numerous academic journals including Contemporary Sociology, New Politics, Social Research, and Dissent. He is also the author of
Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Reflections on Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life and Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual.

Jooyoung Lee is a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an urban ethnographer who studies race, culture, crime and mental health in the inner-city. He received his bachelor’s degree from University of California Berkley in 2003 and his doctorate from University of California, Los Angeles in 2009, focusing his dissertation on the career of aspiring rappers from South Central Los Angeles. His research revealed how urban youth view pathways to upward mobility. He is currently examining how street violence shapes the mental health of inner-city youth and is currently examining the everyday lives of gunshot victims in Philadelphia.

Hank Williams, a doctoral candidate in English and Africana Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center, teaches a course on hip hop culture in New York University and is a Writing Fellow at the City College of New York. He is currently writing his dissertation on the Last Poets, a poetry collective of the Black Arts Movement.

Erin Winkler, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, received her doctorate in African American Studies from the University of California Berkeley. Her research interests include racial socialization; racial identity development in African-American families and communities; the impact of gender, skin tone and other demographic factors on racial identity development and responses to racism; and the effect of place on shaping conceptualizations and experiences of race and racism.