Hip-hop has exploded around the world among youth. It is not simply an American source of entertainment; it is a global cultural movement that provides a voice for youth worldwide who have not been able to express their "cultural world" through mainstream media. The emerging field of critical hip-hop pedagogy has produced little empirical research on how youth understand global citizenship. In this increasingly globalized world, this gap in the research is a serious lacuna. My research examines the intersection of hip-hop, global citizenship education and digital literacies in an effort to increase our understanding of how urban youth from two very different urban areas, (Detroit, Michigan, United States and Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) make sense of and construct identities as global citizens. This study is based on the view that engaging urban and marginalized youth with hip-hop and digital literacies is a way to help them develop the practices of critical global citizenship. Using principled assemblage of qualitative methods, I analyze interviews and classroom observations - as well as digital artifacts produced in workshops - to determine how youth define global citizenship, and how socially conscious, global hip-hop contributes to their definition.
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