Train of thought...

Our group chose Hip-Hop as our topic of choice. There was a natural gravitational pull towards that topic when we first met at the beginning of SPI. The conversation continued outside of the Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) Library and soon enough we began to talk about focusing our research on Mos Def/Yasiin Bey. The benefit of living in the same building is helpful because we would run into each other, which helped our relationship as a Writing and Research family.

Also, the benefit of working together has given us the opportunity to learn about each other and help each other to formulate a blueprint for the dissemination of our abstract, proposal, and individual interests. While it may not always be easy to work with the varying personalities and many ideas, we do our best to contribute and work towards the end goal. Naturally, we feel out the situation and contribute in our own ways to complete our task.

While Hip-Hop may be frequently misunderstood and seen as just a form of entertainment, we are aware that there is a deeper conversation within the hip-hop community that has taken place. We just happen to be contributing towards further developing the discussion. Issues of racism, poverty, crime, politics, and so on are addressed, but popular culture taints the culture with unethical practices: materialism, violence, under-aged/unprotected sex, male dominance, subjugation of women, etc. Yasiin Bey touches on these issues in his tracks and works as the perfect model for our conversation of hip hop and its contribution to society. 

I think the more challenging part is figuring out how all of our approaches to the focal point will connect, but I think we have some good ideas and dedicated family members to make this work out. Another conflict is that we have different schedules that make it difficult to meet, due to our respective research projects, but we manage to find a middle ground to meet and converse.