Droppin' Science - European Hip-Hop Studies Network Conference 2024 - The Granary, 23-26 May

14 May 2024

Happening On 23/05/2024

The ERC CIPHER Team in collaboration with University College Cork’s Centre for Arts Research and Practice is geeked to welcome submissions for DROPPIN’ SCIENCE: Hip Hop Ciphering and Deciphering, the seventh annual Meeting of the European HipHop Studies Network.  This year’s meeting is free and open to the public thanks to the European Research Council’s support of the CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation knowledge mapping project.

This year’s theme asks us to bear witness to the strength of street knowledge.  For four days in May, we will recognize hip hop as an organic intellectual arts practice and critically minded culture, building upon that foundation through workshops, conversations, performances, keynotes, scholarship, and fellowship.  For four days in May, we will dance about ideas, considering what it means to flip the script on the university knowledge trade and reimagine our relationship to science, Wissenschaft, and all the narrow “ologies” with which white Europeans claimed mastery over the world.  For four days in May, we will build a “pluriversity” “that is open to epistemic diversity” and “not merely the extension throughout the world of a Eurocentric model presumed to be universal” (Mbembe, 2015).  For four days in May, we will cipher up, form “the ultimate alliance,” and create a hip hop autonomous zone in Ireland’s Rebel City, building common cause around hip hop ways of knowing and ways of being, ceasing to be mere scholars of hip hop and, instead, taking up the mantle of hip hop scholars.

Thank you everyone for your proposals.  Due to the number of submissions and the limited time and space, we had to make a number of difficult decisions.  That said, we’ve now made the selections for what is a sure shot banger of a conference, featuring an artistically, intellectually, and politically dynamic group of international participants from backgrounds ranging across performance, activism, research, archives, education, and beyond.  We’re talking 70+ presentations and keynotes from over 100 folx!  And don’t forget to prep your moves for the evening ciphers – we’ve managed to secure our first-choice venue in Cork City, The Pav. 

We hope to see ALL of you there as we continue to build our global community of hip hop knowledge.  Please register above — it’s free and it’s gonna be fire!