Elevate And Find: Developing Young Hip Hop Feminists Through Critical Art Education And Activism

This paper will critically review civic engagement literature to reveal a gap indicating a need for social science research on how the arts contribute to developing critical, civic-minded, activist youth. This paper is predominantly concerned with young women of color in the United States and how they seek to utilize Hip Hop feminism in their civic artist-activist expressions and community mobilization efforts. While there are some programs utilizing the arts in order to increase youth activism and civic participation, currently there is a dearth of literature indicating how critical arts education curricula can scaffold youth civic development. This paper will examine two case studies exemplifying young women of color utilizing the arts, particularly Hip Hop, for activism. Many of the young artist-activist women do not realize the traditions they are building upon. Therefore, young women might benefit from the exploration of theories, traditions and methods utilized in historic or parallel artist-activist movements in order to substantiate youth positionality and to encourage development of youth artist-activist agendas. With this, potential literature will be presented to support and scaffold critical arts education curricula in order to provide a historical basis and an endpoint to such burgeoning youth artist-activist agendas.