Hip-Hop Pedagogy, Social Justice, and Transnational Media Studies: Eko Fresh's “Aber” and Joyner Lucas's “I'm Not Racist” in Dialogue

This article examines hip-hop as a vehicle for teaching social justice in college-level media and cultural studies courses taught in English or German through engagement with Black American rapper Joyner Lucas's “I'm Not Racist” (2017) and Turkish-German rapper Eko Fresh's “Aber” (2018). Drawing on hiphop's status as an art form grounded in activism, the authors propose that hip-hop offers productive avenues to learn critical media analysis in a comparative framework and develop dialogic practices that transcend the classroom space. While both tracks suggest possibilities for overcoming political differences through their staging of dialogues between opposed parties, the social, linguistic, national, and historical contexts in which each artist operates and their different approaches to these dialogues lead to two thematically and formally similar yet culturally specific tracks. The included teaching materials in this article aim to lead learners to critically examine the various forms of dialogue as they function within their individual contexts and beyond: the staged dialogue of the music videos; the critical dialogue between the videos and their audiences in the process of reception; and the transnational dialogue occurring between the artists' works. These pedagogical approaches demonstrate how hip-hop texts and contexts provide opportunities to analyze key topics such as discrimination based on race, nationality, and religion within a social justice-oriented framework.