Contributions Wanted: Popular Music and Criminal Justice @PopularMusicJnl

Seeking Contributions

Contributions are invited to a special issue of Popular Music on the complex interface between rap music (taken in its broadest sense to include mainstream rap, gangsta rap, activist rap, drill, grime, etc.) and criminal justice systems around the world.

 

Rap music is an international youth-cultural powerhouse and, while its spread has been celebrated, it has also been attended by mounting criminalisation. This special issue asks researchers to explore the policing and prosecuting of rap and how this has been framed in media reporting. It also considers what might make rap susceptible to such state criminalisation and how rappers, communities, civil liberties groups, defence lawyers, and scholars have come to challenge the state weaponisation of rap.

 

The use of rap music in criminal and civil proceedings has emerged as a well-documented issue of public concern in the US—dubbed ‘Rap on Trial’ (Nielson and Dennis; Nielson and Kubrin; Dennis; Dunbar, Kubrin and Scurich). However, outside the US, it is much less understood and there is a pressing need for more scrutiny and critique. This special issue is particularly interested in work that addresses case studies and trends in the global South; in Britain and other non-US parts of the global North; and in comparative work on the US in relation to other countries.

 

We welcome contributions from a range of disciplines (law, popular music, media studies, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, linguistics, socio-psychology, etc.). We believe this topic—situated at the intersection of law and culture—opens significant opportunities for ambitious interdisciplinary work. We’re keen on approaches that open outwards from concrete discourses, poetics, policies and practices to expose broader social trends, institutional processes, and critical concepts that lay bare state violence (racism; economic injustice; overpolicing, etc.) and that offer radical critiques. We are also keen on applied work, and contributions that engage with musicians, communities, activists, and criminal justice professionals.

 

Further details:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/popular-music/prosecuting-and-policing-rap-cfp

 

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: 1ST OCTOBER