What it Is

The Show & Prove Hip Hop Studies Conference Series (S&P) has been a biennial conference that is interdisciplinary in practice and international in scope. It is premised on cultivating the necessary and critical dialogues for the development of Hip Hop Studies as a field. As universities adopt classes about Hip Hop and an increasing amount of scholarship gets published, this series was created for those with a vested interest in the culture - including artists and practitioners, students, teachers, scholars, and community activists - to interrogate, complicate, and critically negotiate what it means to bring Hip Hop into the academy.

S&P is one of the few ongoing conferences specifically geared toward developing scholarship on and through Hip Hop. We combine discussion sessions, performances, master classes, workshops, paper presentations, and roundtable discussions among scholars and practitioners at various professional stages. It has become a site for the most ground breaking research precisely because it builds on Hip Hop’s own cultural imperatives.  

Rather than getting larger with each iteration, S&P will shift gears in 2024-25, venture into new cities, and branch out internationally. Through collaborations with community organizers and Hip Hop scholars in geographically diverse sites (Chicago, Atlanta, Mumbai, and Riverside/ San Diego), the conference seeks to expand and deepen the networks of Hip Hop scholars, artists, practitioners, and community organizers engaged in cutting edge, justice minded, culture-centered work.

“Show & Prove” conferences are free and open to the public. And by public, we mean you too. ;)

How it Came To Be

S&P started out as a series designed to showcase student work, and to connect with others who had not yet published but were already in the midst of doing incredible research. Named by a then student, and photographer Amanda Adams-Louis, “show and prove” is the Hip Hop ethos of action over words, or the demonstration of skills over merely talking about them. The conference is a platform for just that. It created a space for scholars and artists across disciplines, experiences, professional lives, and countries to be in conversation and build up research on Hip Hop culture. Originally under the title, “Show & Prove: the Tensions, Contradictions, & Possibilities of Hip Hop Studies,” the first two S&P’s took place at New York University, in 2010 and 2012. From the first conference came a demand for a second, and then a third. After a 4-year gap, the next “Show & Prove” conferences in 2016 and 2018 took place at the University of California Riverside. Now, after another 4-year gap, we are excited to announce S&P as a collaborative series, taking place at multiple sites throughout 2024-2025.