UT Scholar’s Symposia Series Presents “Home with Hip Hop Feminism” April 20

On Friday, April 20, The University of Tampa will welcome Aisha Durham, associate professor of communication at the University of South Florida, who will present “Home with Hip Hop Feminism” as part of the Department of English and Writing’s Scholars Symposia series. The event begins at 4 p.m. in the Trustees Board Room on the ninth floor of the Vaughn Center and is free and open to the public.

Durham teaches black popular culture to explore the relationship between media representations and everyday life. She uses auto/ethnography, performance writing and intersectional approaches honed in black feminist cultural criticism to analyze representations of black womanhood in hip-hop media.

Her scholarship contributes to an interdisciplinary field called hip-hop feminism, a cultural, intellectual and political project that extends the artistic, analytical and advocacy-oriented work by girls and women of color from the “post” generations. Mining memory, Durham recalls her southern roots to narrate her hip-hop becoming.

Durham’s performance-informed auto ethnography and embodied cultural criticism in “Home with Hip Hop Feminism” demonstrate how critically engaged, community-centered and culturally relevant research can serve as a catalyst for new areas of inquiry and social movements.

Her work has been featured in The Crunk Feminist Collection (Feminist Press, 2017) and her award-winning book, Home with Hip Hop Feminism: Performances in Communication and Culture (Peter Lang, 2014), which extends earlier discussions about hip-hop culture, media representations and the body in her co-edited volumes Home Girls Make Some!: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology (Parker Publishing, 2007) and Globalizing Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Interventions in Theory, Method and Policy (Peter Lang, 2007).

For more information, contact Sarah Lauro, assistant professor of English, at slauro@ut.edu.