Black studies, or Africana studies, is an interdisciplinary academic field that primarily focuses on the study of the history, culture, and politics of the peoples of the African diaspora and Africa. The field includes scholars of African-American, Afro-Canadian, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latino, Afro-European, Afro-Asian, African Australian, and African literature, history, politics, and religion as well as those from disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, psychology, education, and many other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences including performance and art. The field also uses various types of research methods.
Youth activism is the participation in community organizing for social change by persons between the ages of 15–24. Youth activism has led to a shift in political participation and activism. A notable shift within youth activism is the rise of “Alter-Activism” resulting in an emphasis on lived experiences and connectivity amongst young activists. The young activists have taken lead roles in public protest and advocacy around many issues like climate change, abortion rights and gun violence. Different from past protest or advocacy, technology has become the backbone to many of these modern youth movements. It has been shown in multiple studies that internet use along with seeking information online is shown to have positive impacts on political engagement. Popular applications like Twitter, Instagram and YouTube have become the newest tools for young activists in the 21st century. Technology and the use of digital media has changed the way youth participate in activism globally, and youth are more active in media than older generations.
Critical Resistance is a U.S. based organization that works to build a mass movement to dismantle what it calls the prison-industrial complex (PIC). Critical Resistance's national office is in Oakland, California, with three additional chapters in New York City, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon.
Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati, and a past president of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Collins was the 100th president of the ASA and the first African-American woman to hold this position.
The Hip Hop Caucus (HHC) is a national, non-profit organization in the United States, which aims to promote political activism for young U.S. voters using hip-hop music and culture.
Shamako Noble is a hip hop artist, cultural organizer, and political theorist from San Jose, California. He was a candidate for U.S. Senate for California in 2016. He did not actually file to be on the ballot.
Hip hop activism is a term coined by the hip hop intellectual and journalist Harry Allen. It is meant to describe an activist movement of the post- baby boomer generation.
Political hip-hop is a subgenre of hip hop music that was developed in the 1980s as a way of turning hip hop into a call for political and/or social action and a form of social and/or political activism. Inspired by 1970s political artists such as The Last Poets and musician Gil Scott-Heron, Public Enemy was the first predominantly political hip-hop group. The genre has helped to create a new form of social expression for subordinate groups to speak about their exclusions, injustices and lack of power. Political hip-hop is the use of hip hop music to send political messages to inspire action or social change or to convince the listener of a particular worldview. There is no all-encompassing political hip-hop ideology; rather, there are multiple perspectives that range anywhere from anarchism to Marxism to the values of the Five-Percent Nation. Hip hop and politics have long been intertwined, with many hip hop artists using their music as a means to speak out about political issues and express their views on current events. Over the years, there have been a number of hip hop songs that have addressed political issues such as police brutality, racism, and poverty, among others. Some well-known examples of political hip hop songs include "F*ck tha Police" by N.W.A., "Changes" by Tupac Shakur, and "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy.
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights is a non-profit strategy and action center based in Oakland, California. The stated aim of the center is to work for justice, opportunity and peace in urban America. It is named for Ella Baker, a twentieth-century activist and civil rights leader originally from Virginia and North Carolina.
Dr. Benjamin Franklin Chavis Jr. in Oxford, North Carolina is an African-American civil rights leader and icon, author, journalist, organic chemist, environmentalist, global entrepreneur, and currently President and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association.
Afrocentric education is a pedagogical system designed to empower peoples of the African diaspora with educational modes in contact and in line with the cultural assumptions common in their communities. A central premise behind it is that many Africans have been subjugated by having their awareness of themselves limited and by being indoctrinated with ideas that work against them and their cultures.
The Rouge Forum is an organization of educational activists, which focuses on issues of equality, democracy, and social justice.
The Chicano Art Movement represents groundbreaking movements by Mexican-American artists to establish a unique artistic identity in the United States. Much of the art and the artists creating Chicano Art were heavily influenced by Chicano Movement which began in the 1960s.
Timothy Terrell West, better known as Tim'm T. West, is an American educator and multi-discipline performance artist, author, hip hop recording artist, poet, activist, and youth advocate. Humboldt State University notes West as a Renaissance man who has achieved success as a performer, activist, author, teacher, and poet. He has been featured in many documentaries about hip hop culture, in addition to his books, he is widely anthologized, and has produced nine hip hop albums including with Deep Dickollective. West has been interviewed by an array of media outlets from Newsweek to the New York Times. He was awarded a "2013 Esteem Award", and in 2015 was named an LGBTQ icon.
Progressive rap is a broad subgenre of hip hop music that aims to progress the genre thematically with socially transformative ideas and musically with stylistic experimentation. Developing through the works of innovative US hip hop acts during the 1980s and 1990s, it has also been known at various points as conscious, underground, and alternative hip hop.
Michelle Melody Fine is a distinguished professor at the City University of New York and has her training in Social and Personality Psychology, Environmental Psychology, American Studies, and Urban Education. Her research includes the topics of social injustice and resistance and urban education. Fine is also an author and has written several works, one of her most known being Muslim American Youth (2008).
Pedro Noguera is the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean of the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education. He is recognized as a leading scholar of urban public education, equity, and school reform.
Bettina L. Love is an American author and academic. She is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she has been instrumental in establishing abolitionist teaching in schools. According to Love, abolitionist teaching refers to restoring humanity for children in schools. Love also advocates eliminating the billion-dollar industry of standardized testing.
Michael Ford, known as the "Hip-Hop Architect", is an architect, designer, educator, and keynote speaker whose years of research, publications and lectures seek to fuse his two passions, hip-hop culture and architecture. In hip-hop architecture, Ford provides an alternative to the western canon in architecture and urban theory. This model is not only celebrates diversity, but it is also appealing to young people of color, encouraging them to join the profession and think critically about the built environment they live in. Ford is a professor in the architecture program at Madison College and founder of BrandNu Design.
The Conscious Community, also known as the Black Conscious Community and the African Conscious Community, is a loose affiliation of allied groups composed of individuals from the African diaspora and from Africa. Pan-Africanism, Afrocentrism, Afrofuturism, Black Nationalism, and Black Liberation Religion/Spirituality are foundational sources for the ideologies found among individuals in the Black Conscious Community.
