Ruth Nicole Brown Knihy

Wish To Live: The Hip-hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader moves beyond the traditional understanding of the four elements of hip-hop culture - rapping, breakdancing, graffiti art, and deejaying - to articulate how hip-hop feminist scholarship can inform educational practices and spark, transform, encourage, and sustain local and global youth community activism efforts. This multi-genre and interdisciplinary reader engages performance, poetry, document analysis, playwriting, polemics, cultural critique, and autobiography to radically reimagine the political utility of hip-hop-informed social justice efforts that insist on an accountable analysis of identity and culture. Featuring scholarship from professors and graduate and undergraduate students actively involved in the work they profess, this book’s commitment to making the practice of hip-hop feminist activism practical in our everyday lives is both compelling and unapologetic.

Ruth Nicole Brown explores the intersection of gender, race, and hip-hop culture through her academic work. As an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she focuses on Black girlhood and feminist pedagogy. Her notable contributions include "Black Girlhood Celebration," which advocates for a hip-hop feminist approach to education, and her role as coeditor of "Wish to Live," a collection that delves into hip-hop feminism. Brown's scholarship aims to empower and uplift marginalized voices in educational contexts.

Providing practical guidance based on real-life examples, this book shows researchers different forms and ways of keeping a research journal and how to get the most out of journaling. Giving researchers licence to do things differently, the book encourages and enables readers to develop their own sense of researcher identity and voice.

Focusing on the significance of celebrating Black girlhood, the book explores how everyday experiences are shaped by popular culture and individual narratives. It draws from various academic disciplines, intertwining poetry, autobiographical stories, and insightful commentary to advocate for Black girls within the frameworks of hip-hop feminism and critical pedagogy. Through a blend of humor and rigorous research, it posits that hip-hop transcends music, serving as a powerful tool for engagement and empowerment in the lives of Black girls.

Disrupting Qualitative Inquiry is an edited volume that examines the possibilities and tensions encountered by scholars who adopt disruptive qualitative approaches to the study of educational contexts, issues, and phenomena. It presents a collection of innovative and intellectually stimulating chapters which illustrate the potential for disruptive qualitative research perspectives to advance social justice aims omnipresent in educational policy and practice dialogues. The book defines «disruptive» qualitative methodologies and methods in educational research as processes of inquiry which seek to: 1) Disrupt traditional notions of research roles and relationships 2) Disrupt dominant approaches to the collection and analysis of data 3) Disrupt traditional notions of representing and disseminating research findings 4) Disrupt rigid epistemological and methodological boundaries 5) Disrupt disciplinarily boundaries and assumptive frameworks of how to do educational research Scholars and graduate students interested in disrupting traditional approaches to the study of education will find this book of tremendous value. Given the inclusion of both research examples and reflective narratives, this book is an ideal text for adoption in introductory research design seminars as well as advanced courses devoted to theoretical and practical applications of qualitative and interpretive methodologies.

Over the past decades ‘photovoice’ has emerged as a participatory and creative research method where participants capture and discuss their reality through photographs. This unprecedented ‘how-to’ book takes novice and experienced researchers through the practicalities and ethics of applying this approach.