B-Series in collaboration with Red Bull and Show & Prove Hip Hop Studies Conference

Undergrad Scholars Panel Call for Papers

February 29 - March 3, 2024 || Chicago, IL
Keywords: b-longing, futurity

The Dance Center at Columbia College Chicago’s 10th Annual B-Series Festival – B-Long: Honoring and Examining Lineage, Legacy, and Belonging in Hip-Hop & Street Dance Culture will host Chicago’s first Show & Prove Hip Hop Studies Conference (S&P) – an interdisciplinary Hip Hop Studies platform for scholars across fields, Hip Hop artists and practitioners, community organiz-ers, and students to share work and to collectively develop research on Hip Hop. B-Long, presented in partnership with Red Bull and featuring an array of internationally renowned guest artists is the first in a series of small-scale collaborative S&Ps running through Spring 2025. 

This call for papers is a special invitation for regional undergraduate scholars to share, workshop, and present their research. The S&P Chicago conference will amplify two keywords: b-longing and futurity. Broadlyspeaking, b-longing conjures up questions of who or what “belongs”, whether in Hip Hop culture or in practitioner communities or crews. The longing to “b” – meaning to break or even to be/ become – amplifies affective qualities of being part of a community. B-long also points to ideas of longevity, legacy and lineage, and how a community’s past connects to ideas of belonging in the present. Futurity picks up on what is to become, even as it signals the reper-cussions of our current moment: the future in crisis, the future as a speculative project, future utopias. Taken together, these keywords also draw particular attention to what Hip Hop will look like in the coming generations. Papers should gesture toward either or both keywords.

S&P Chicago will be a curated set of programming during the B-Series three-day festival of workshops, cyphers, panels, screenings, battles, and jams uniting academic scholars, commercial practitioners, and community innovators. Submit proposals to showproveconf@gmail.com.

Submit a 250-word abstract or summary of your presentation topic via email to Friday, Jan 26. *Undergraduate submissions should include a faculty mentor who can serve as a guide in the process of presenting at a conference. Be sure to provide contact information, A/V requirements, and any accommodation needs. Proposals are due at 11:59pm PST on Friday, January 26th. Accepted proposals will be notified by Friday, February 2nd.

If you are interested in proposing a session or getting involved in some way, please email Kelsa Rieger-Haywood, kriegerhaywood@colum.edu.