The Healing Power of Hip Hop

by Raphael Travis

Overview

Using the latest research, real-world examples, and a new theory of healthy development, this book explains Hip Hop culture's ongoing role in helping Black youths to live long, healthy, and productive lives.

• Connects the latest research conclusions about Hip Hop's influences with actual examples of its practice and applied value in action

• Identifies education, health and mental health, and afterschool settings as key to promoting health and well-being

• Disentangles arguments about whether Hip Hop culture is more of a tool for empowerment or a tool for risk promotion

• Explains Hip Hop's ongoing contributions to health and learning, with attention to the Black community

• Provides a common language and structure for helping professionals, researchers, and policymakers to organize work related to Hip Hop and well-being

• Introduces meaningful models, tips, and resources for personal or professional use

• Offers real-world insights from today's leaders within the Hip Hop Ed movement

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440831317
Publisher:	ABC-CLIO, Incorporated
Publication date:	12/14/2015
Series:	Intersections of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	265
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Raphael Travis Jr., DrPH, is associate professor of social work at Texas State University in San Marcos.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword ix

Acknowledgments xi

"For Every Rose" xv

Introduction xvii

Chapter 1 Unpacking the Culture of Hip Hop 1

Chapter 2 Racial Identity, Hip Hop Culture, and the Shift to Mainstream Pop Culture 19

Chapter 3 Hip Hops History of Healing and Empowerment in High-Risk Environments 37

Chapter 4 Affirming Identities: Hip Hop Values, Esteem, and Black Experiences 55

Chapter 5 Context, Surviving, and Thriving: Resilience and Black Experiences 73

Chapter 6 My Life, My Community: Growth and Black Experiences 91

Chapter 7 A Change Is Gonna Come: Calls for Better across Black Communities 109

Chapter 8 From Emotions to Learning and Growth: New Models for Understanding Hip Hop 127

Chapter 9 Hip Hop and Physical Health: Healthy Environments to Live, Work, and Play 137

Chapter 10 Hip Hop and Education: Engagement, Equity, and Excellence 153

Chapter 11 Hip Hop and Out-of-School Time: Creating New Pathways to Growth and Change 171

Chapter 12 Hip Hop and Mental Health: Emotions, Coping, Identity, and Growth 187

Chapter 13 The Healing Power of Hip Hop: The Next Forty Years 203

Notes 217

Index 253

About the Author 267

What People are Saying About This

Neal Halfon

"The Healing Power of Hip Hop bursts forth with challenging and unexpected insights that are fueled by a new and creative set of synaptic connections between the elements of a deeply resonant, modern, and influential cultural tradition and the factors that influence health and healing. Travis peels back layer after layer of hip hop influence to reveal new ways of connecting hip hop to fundamental notions of identity, purpose, mindset, and development that all influence the decisions young people make about their lives, their lifestyles, and their health. I anticipate that this volume will become a bridge not only between the music and anthropology departments on one end of the campus with the public health and medical school at the other end, but will also bridge parts of our consciousness that have also been unfortunately separated."

Samuel Roberts

"If not as old as hip hop itself, perhaps as diverse in its participants, varied in its interpretations and approaches, and vibrant in its disseminative influence is hip hop scholarship. The most recent and forceful addition to the literature is Raphael Travis's The Healing Power of Hip Hop. Moving deftly from larger conceptual meta-questions such as identity formation, improvisational aesthetics, the role of popular culture in society, and individual personality development, to situational and pragmatic applications of personal goal attainment strategies, theories of education, mental and physical health promotion, and community empowerment tactics, The Healing Power of Hip Hop is at once energetically theoretical and stimulatingly practical and prescriptive. In this deeply researched work, Travis draws on a wide variety of approaches, concepts, and sources, and displays the added and appreciable talent of conveying his thoughts in prose that will be accessible across a wide range of professions and interests. For its profound originality, rigorous scholarship, and inspiring implications, this book will be appreciatively used and enjoyed by educators, community-builders, researchers, program architects, and implementers, and, of course, hip hop heads who want to know more about the history, present reality, and the promise of at least one suggested possible future of an art form that has enriched their lives and undoubtedly will continue to do so."

Christopher Emdin

"Raphael Travis has put together a powerful text that challenges the ways that we engage in, and with hip-hop. This work is as engaging as it is informative and is an invaluable resource for anyone in fields related to health and/or human development. Through a frame of healing, this work provides a fresh new landscape. Powerful work!"

Musician with a Message SaulPaul

"Hip Hop can heal. If you're a supporter of Hip Hop, you know that. What Dr. Raphael Travis has done is show that. With the same diligence he used to become one of the leading scholars of Hip Hop education, Dr. Travis has methodically painted the big picture of Hip Hop with numerous individual strokes. With each reference to a song and a lyric in that song, Dr. Travis does what he does best: he educates and empowers the reader with empircal evidence of what they already know . . . Hip Hop is much more than beats and rhymes. Hip Hop can heal."