Greetings from Riverside!

Welcome to Show & Prove (S&P) Hip Hop Studies Conference Series. It has grown out of the collective interests of scholars and students of Hip Hop cultures around the world to be in dialogue and exchange with one another. Your active participation is important and welcome!

The Show & Prove 2018 Conference was amazing! Pictures are up!

While initial plans for a 2020 conference (and a 10 Year Anniversary) were pushed due to a global pandemic, the next level of S&P will take place from Winter 2024 to Spring 2025. This time, we return with a series of smaller-scale, collaborative S&Ps happening at different sites throughout the year. I hope that this change will give the conference new life, and allow for us to collectively imagine its future with wider communities.

As people mobilize around the world to combat various institutionalized and culturally embedded forms of racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and the like, S&P acts as an inclusive forum that enacts the possibilities of exchange and dialogue across various forms of difference in an effort to build something substantive. And while it matters that we gather, it also matters how we gather—with a generous intent to listen, critique, share, and develop our work both individually and collectively. In doing so, we create an international community of scholars, artists, students, and activists. 

We continue to grow, and hope to do so with your continued support! If you would like to support Show & Prove, financially or otherwise, please send us a message and we will be in touch!

Sincerely,

Imani Kai Johnson, Ph.D.
Founder & Chair of the Show & Prove Hip Hop Studies Conference Series
Vice Chair, Critical Dance Studies || Associate Professor Dept. of Black Study, UC Riverside

Bio

Dr. Imani Kai Johnson is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on African diasporic ritual cultures, Hip Hop dance in global circulation, and intersections of race, nation, and gender. Her book on breaking cyphers and their epistemological possibilities, titled Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: the Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop was published in Oct. 2022 with Oxford University Press. Through an examination of Africanist aesthetics within Hip Hop and specifically breaking culture, the manuscript looks to the ritual dance circle - the cypher - to illuminate the layers of political, cultural, and spiritual understanding embedded in the practice. Using the physics metaphor of “dark matter,” the manuscript addresses histories of exclusion, marginalization, and invisibilization of Black aesthetics in global Hip Hop. She is currently an Associate Professor of Dance and of Black Study at UC Riverside.