Experience

Publications

• “Selfie Harm: Teenage Girls’ Practices of Digital Inscription.”

  American Studies Association, Los Angeles.

  For teenage girls, the digital selfie hides within its pixellated folds a host of new modes of self- inscription: both pleasurable and painful. Along with the liberatory possibilities that accompany girls’ autobiography online also come new forms of surveillance, regulation and voyeurism that discipline experimentation and creativity: the pleasure and pain of growing up in a new digital register.!

• “Selfie Harm: Teenage Girls’ Practices of Digital Inscription.”

  American Studies Association, Los Angeles.

  For teenage girls, the digital selfie hides within its pixellated folds a host of new modes of self- inscription: both pleasurable and painful. Along with the liberatory possibilities that accompany girls’ autobiography online also come new forms of surveillance, regulation and voyeurism that discipline experimentation and creativity: the pleasure and pain of growing up in a new digital register.!

• Digital, Underground: Sounding the Hidden Contours of Hip-Hop Media

  Oxford Handbook of Hip-Hop Studies

  After decades of concern with the elusive question of what hip-hop is across its historical trajectory, critical media studies is turning to the question of what hip-hop does for its practitioners in the context of digital globalization. As this study shows, the longstanding field of Black aesthetic studies can nourish new approaches to understanding a transnational digital landscape in which popular music has become a premium site for emergent digital creativity, even as many of these community fall across the digital divide that makes professional production software, hardware and training difficult to access. Today, hip-hop is as much a global field of digital design as it is a body of musical production.

• “Selfie Harm: Teenage Girls’ Practices of Digital Inscription.”

  American Studies Association, Los Angeles.

  For teenage girls, the digital selfie hides within its pixellated folds a host of new modes of self- inscription: both pleasurable and painful. Along with the liberatory possibilities that accompany girls’ autobiography online also come new forms of surveillance, regulation and voyeurism that discipline experimentation and creativity: the pleasure and pain of growing up in a new digital register.!

• Digital, Underground: Sounding the Hidden Contours of Hip-Hop Media

  Oxford Handbook of Hip-Hop Studies

  After decades of concern with the elusive question of what hip-hop is across its historical trajectory, critical media studies is turning to the question of what hip-hop does for its practitioners in the context of digital globalization. As this study shows, the longstanding field of Black aesthetic studies can nourish new approaches to understanding a transnational digital landscape in which popular music has become a premium site for emergent digital creativity, even as many of these community fall across the digital divide that makes professional production software, hardware and training difficult to access. Today, hip-hop is as much a global field of digital design as it is a body of musical production.

• Collaboration Conversation: Engaged Ethnography as Public Scholarship”

  Collaborative Futures: Critical Reflections on Publicly Active Graduate Education

  Ethnography, literally the practice of “writing culture,” has become a widely used methodology by cultural researchers, qualitative analysts, oral historians, and artists in all corners of academic work. This methodology demands both a public engagement with a community in the “field” of study (for example, a neighborhood, region, school, or musical group) and critical work in the process of representation. This process holds the positive potential to bring awareness to community issues, to shape new understandings of what that community does, and to redistribute resources toward the things that community does best.

• “Selfie Harm: Teenage Girls’ Practices of Digital Inscription.”

  American Studies Association, Los Angeles.

  For teenage girls, the digital selfie hides within its pixellated folds a host of new modes of self- inscription: both pleasurable and painful. Along with the liberatory possibilities that accompany girls’ autobiography online also come new forms of surveillance, regulation and voyeurism that discipline experimentation and creativity: the pleasure and pain of growing up in a new digital register.!

• Digital, Underground: Sounding the Hidden Contours of Hip-Hop Media

  Oxford Handbook of Hip-Hop Studies

  After decades of concern with the elusive question of what hip-hop is across its historical trajectory, critical media studies is turning to the question of what hip-hop does for its practitioners in the context of digital globalization. As this study shows, the longstanding field of Black aesthetic studies can nourish new approaches to understanding a transnational digital landscape in which popular music has become a premium site for emergent digital creativity, even as many of these community fall across the digital divide that makes professional production software, hardware and training difficult to access. Today, hip-hop is as much a global field of digital design as it is a body of musical production.

• Collaboration Conversation: Engaged Ethnography as Public Scholarship”

  Collaborative Futures: Critical Reflections on Publicly Active Graduate Education

  Ethnography, literally the practice of “writing culture,” has become a widely used methodology by cultural researchers, qualitative analysts, oral historians, and artists in all corners of academic work. This methodology demands both a public engagement with a community in the “field” of study (for example, a neighborhood, region, school, or musical group) and critical work in the process of representation. This process holds the positive potential to bring awareness to community issues, to shape new understandings of what that community does, and to redistribute resources toward the things that community does best.

• Roots, Routes and Rhizomes: Sounding Women’s Hip Hop on the Margins of Dakar, Senegal

  Journal of Popular Music Studies

  In my seven years of ethnographic work with women hip hop artists in Dakar, I have witnessed a dozen strong careers cut short under these circumstances and heard of many more. To these add community sexism, family pressures, missteps and rivalries. Fam’Musik is a locus of practice, a bounded interiority from which Toussa and her peers can stake their claim. To understand the forms this music-from-the- margins takes, its influences and its trajectories, popular music studies must situate it in a richer framework: one less concerned with what the music is than what it does for practitioners whose work rarely makes it beyond those interior spaces. Hip hop in the Global South cannot be under- stood without attention to the spatial textures women’s aesthetic practice bring to bear: interiority, privacy, practices of affiliation, and tradition- bearing.

• “Selfie Harm: Teenage Girls’ Practices of Digital Inscription.”

  American Studies Association, Los Angeles.

  For teenage girls, the digital selfie hides within its pixellated folds a host of new modes of self- inscription: both pleasurable and painful. Along with the liberatory possibilities that accompany girls’ autobiography online also come new forms of surveillance, regulation and voyeurism that discipline experimentation and creativity: the pleasure and pain of growing up in a new digital register.!

• Digital, Underground: Sounding the Hidden Contours of Hip-Hop Media

  Oxford Handbook of Hip-Hop Studies

  After decades of concern with the elusive question of what hip-hop is across its historical trajectory, critical media studies is turning to the question of what hip-hop does for its practitioners in the context of digital globalization. As this study shows, the longstanding field of Black aesthetic studies can nourish new approaches to understanding a transnational digital landscape in which popular music has become a premium site for emergent digital creativity, even as many of these community fall across the digital divide that makes professional production software, hardware and training difficult to access. Today, hip-hop is as much a global field of digital design as it is a body of musical production.

• Collaboration Conversation: Engaged Ethnography as Public Scholarship”

  Collaborative Futures: Critical Reflections on Publicly Active Graduate Education

  Ethnography, literally the practice of “writing culture,” has become a widely used methodology by cultural researchers, qualitative analysts, oral historians, and artists in all corners of academic work. This methodology demands both a public engagement with a community in the “field” of study (for example, a neighborhood, region, school, or musical group) and critical work in the process of representation. This process holds the positive potential to bring awareness to community issues, to shape new understandings of what that community does, and to redistribute resources toward the things that community does best.

• Roots, Routes and Rhizomes: Sounding Women’s Hip Hop on the Margins of Dakar, Senegal

  Journal of Popular Music Studies

  In my seven years of ethnographic work with women hip hop artists in Dakar, I have witnessed a dozen strong careers cut short under these circumstances and heard of many more. To these add community sexism, family pressures, missteps and rivalries. Fam’Musik is a locus of practice, a bounded interiority from which Toussa and her peers can stake their claim. To understand the forms this music-from-the- margins takes, its influences and its trajectories, popular music studies must situate it in a richer framework: one less concerned with what the music is than what it does for practitioners whose work rarely makes it beyond those interior spaces. Hip hop in the Global South cannot be under- stood without attention to the spatial textures women’s aesthetic practice bring to bear: interiority, privacy, practices of affiliation, and tradition- bearing.

• Book: Let the World Listen Right: The Mississippi Delta Hip-Hop Story

  University Press of Mississippi

  In the Mississippi Delta, creativity, community, and a rich expressive culture persist despite widespread poverty. Over five years of extensive work in the region, author Ali Colleen Neff collected a wealth of materials that demonstrate a vibrant musical scene. Let the World Listen Right draws from classic studies of the blues as well as extensive ethnographic work to document the "changing same" of Delta music making. From the neighborhood juke joints of the contemporary Delta to the international hip-hop stage, this study traces the musical networks that join the region's African American communities to both traditional forms and new global styles.

• “Selfie Harm: Teenage Girls’ Practices of Digital Inscription.”

  American Studies Association, Los Angeles.

  For teenage girls, the digital selfie hides within its pixellated folds a host of new modes of self- inscription: both pleasurable and painful. Along with the liberatory possibilities that accompany girls’ autobiography online also come new forms of surveillance, regulation and voyeurism that discipline experimentation and creativity: the pleasure and pain of growing up in a new digital register.!

• Digital, Underground: Sounding the Hidden Contours of Hip-Hop Media

  Oxford Handbook of Hip-Hop Studies

  After decades of concern with the elusive question of what hip-hop is across its historical trajectory, critical media studies is turning to the question of what hip-hop does for its practitioners in the context of digital globalization. As this study shows, the longstanding field of Black aesthetic studies can nourish new approaches to understanding a transnational digital landscape in which popular music has become a premium site for emergent digital creativity, even as many of these community fall across the digital divide that makes professional production software, hardware and training difficult to access. Today, hip-hop is as much a global field of digital design as it is a body of musical production.

• Collaboration Conversation: Engaged Ethnography as Public Scholarship”

  Collaborative Futures: Critical Reflections on Publicly Active Graduate Education

  Ethnography, literally the practice of “writing culture,” has become a widely used methodology by cultural researchers, qualitative analysts, oral historians, and artists in all corners of academic work. This methodology demands both a public engagement with a community in the “field” of study (for example, a neighborhood, region, school, or musical group) and critical work in the process of representation. This process holds the positive potential to bring awareness to community issues, to shape new understandings of what that community does, and to redistribute resources toward the things that community does best.

• Roots, Routes and Rhizomes: Sounding Women’s Hip Hop on the Margins of Dakar, Senegal

  Journal of Popular Music Studies

  In my seven years of ethnographic work with women hip hop artists in Dakar, I have witnessed a dozen strong careers cut short under these circumstances and heard of many more. To these add community sexism, family pressures, missteps and rivalries. Fam’Musik is a locus of practice, a bounded interiority from which Toussa and her peers can stake their claim. To understand the forms this music-from-the- margins takes, its influences and its trajectories, popular music studies must situate it in a richer framework: one less concerned with what the music is than what it does for practitioners whose work rarely makes it beyond those interior spaces. Hip hop in the Global South cannot be under- stood without attention to the spatial textures women’s aesthetic practice bring to bear: interiority, privacy, practices of affiliation, and tradition- bearing.

• Book: Let the World Listen Right: The Mississippi Delta Hip-Hop Story

  University Press of Mississippi

  In the Mississippi Delta, creativity, community, and a rich expressive culture persist despite widespread poverty. Over five years of extensive work in the region, author Ali Colleen Neff collected a wealth of materials that demonstrate a vibrant musical scene. Let the World Listen Right draws from classic studies of the blues as well as extensive ethnographic work to document the "changing same" of Delta music making. From the neighborhood juke joints of the contemporary Delta to the international hip-hop stage, this study traces the musical networks that join the region's African American communities to both traditional forms and new global styles.

• Transatlantic Hip-Hop Mobilities

  Southern Cultures

  In the wake of economic collapse over the past decade, new communities of Senegalese flea-market traders (who often have special relationships with Chinese manufacturers), IT specialists, and taxi drivers have come to thicken the suburbs of Atlanta, Raleigh, Houston, Memphis, Virginia Beach, and Miami. They join a host of migrants from throughout a transnational Afrodiasporic circuit, which Black aesthetic theorist Paul Gilroy calls “the Black Atlantic.”4 The new Global South incorporates populations of Caribbean immigrants from Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba; Africans from Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Uganda; Brazilians and East Coast African American families. These immigrants connect with established southern communities that are already textured by global genealogies and cross- cultural conversations.