Foundational Flow

Creative World-Making

At HipHopRx, our guiding practices and methods reflect a deep engagement with the cultural, social, and artistic landscapes. We view our research and artistic practice as interconnected processes that not only seek to understand the world as it is but to imagine and enact the world as it could be. Creativity itself is a form of world-making that carries within it the potential to rupture existing orders of knowledge and create new possibilities for being and becoming.

Listening Otherwise

  • HipHopRx believes in listening otherwise, of listening beyond what we have been taught to hear. That is, what if the archive is a rehearsal space, where Black creative expression practices futures that have yet to arrive? We theorize social life as rhythm, gesture, and voice, recognizing that some of the most profound insights emerge not from what is said but from what is felt, not from what is visible but from what moves between our bodies.  

Beat-Makers

Central to our work is a Black feminist ethic inspired by Tao Leigh Goffe, Bettina Judd, Tina Campt, Regina Bradley, Tavia N’yongo, and others who have long understood that sounds and images hold within them forms of knowing that cannot be defined by neat categories. In these sonic and visual remains, we might ask questions that exceed the grammar of traditional research.

Research as Art

For us, research is more than data; it’s an art form that can capture the texture of everyday life. Broadly, our methods weave critical ethnographic approaches with sound and performance. What does it mean to sit with artists in the space where thought can be felt? How do we remain attentive to the creative process as it unfolds? Perhaps most importantly, how do we honor the ways artists and scholars might theorize together?

Studio/Lab

Music collapses temporal boundaries. Sampling, looping, and layering can become a methodology for understanding how meaning moves across time and space. At its broadest level, HipHopRx functions as both a studio and lab — a hybrid space where creative expression and intellectual inquiry converge. We fundamentally believe that great art and great scholarship co-create one another.

  • Research
  • Creation
  • Education
  • Community