How Hip-Hop can Help a Nation in Crisis | HipHopEd Conference 2026

At the 9th annual HipHopEd Conference, educators, artists and activists gathered at Columbia University to explore how hip-hop can respond to a nation in crisis.

It doesn’t matter the digital platform, or how much you are trying to avoid current events — the state of the nation is everywhere. You feel it in your wallet at the gas station and the grocery store. If you have traveled recently outside of the country, you might have been held up by the TSA work stoppage at the airport. If you have elderly family members or friends, they might have confided in you about their concerns over Medicaid or Social Security benefits. It is definitely inescapable in the arts and education sectors: whether you are a teacher or an administrator or a student, the assault on civil liberties and human rights, exacerbated by funding and budget cuts, has widened the inequities that were already deep. 

The first response of many people to address and combat these issues wouldn’t be hip-hop. However, for others in the fields of arts and education, hip-hop culture has been one of the best strategies for bridging these gaps in the classroom, as well as in media and community building. An organization started by educator and academic Dr. Christopher Emdin has long believed in the fact that hip-hop might be one of our best ways to do exactly that. HipHopEd has been impacting the classroom in various disciplines from STEM to school counseling for more than a decade, and the 9th annual HipHopEd Conference convened on June 5. Its website describes the conference as“a unique event that brings together educators, school leaders, students, and community members to explore the intersection between hip-hop and education. This conference is the premier event in the field of hip-hop and education, and it is dedicated to advancing innovation, scholarship, and practice.” The organization also describes the conference theme this year, “Legacy Work: Hip-Hop Education in Response to a Nation in Crisis, is a call to educators, scholars, artists, youth leaders, and community organizers to gather at a moment that demands clarity, courage, and creativity. In a time marked by political unrest, attacks on public education, free speech,  book bans and censorship, widening inequities, and the ongoing criminalization and erasure of Black, Brown, immigrant, and LGBTQ+ communities, this conference centers Hip-Hop education as both a tool for teaching and a practice of resistance.”

Each year, the conference takes place on the campus of Columbia University and convenes over two days. The event includes interactive workshops, plenary discussions and research presentations related to the different sectors outlined in the conference’s theme. Educators from across the country come to gather, learn best practices, hear from leaders inside their fields and further network with other like-minded educators, artists and activists. This past conference was my first one, and I was excited to see what my colleagues were working on and interested to hear about new initiatives, such as the Bronx School of Hip Hop. The conference’s opening session brought a youth organization from Philadelphia, Philly Sound Exchange, to perform excerpts from their hip-hop theater piece that discussed racism and discrimination, followed by an all-women emcee cipher made up of several of the presenters at the conference. The message from the outside was clear: center voices and ideas that often are sidelined and also begin the weekend with joy and energy. Emdin’s brief remarks covered that messaging, while also highlighting that one of our greatest strengths to lean on in resistance is love. From there, everyone broke out into the workshops they selected. 

On day one, two workshops I attended centered the practice of rap in performance and writing as a means to offer a different lens and framework for teaching certain school subjects. The first workshop, “Carrying Our History: Griot Traditions, Hip Hop Pedagogy in A.P. African American Studies,” was presented by two AP history teachers, Tre Johnson and Shannah Henderson Amare. They demonstrated how they used numerous hip-hop songs to not only help students connect with various themes and issues investigated in their studies but also to provide an additional lens. Tre took us through several lessons he uses when working with his AP students, which was both insightful and powerful. The second workshop, “Building the Blueprint: Co-Creating the National Hip-Hop Education Guidelines Index,” was facilitated by Justis Lopez, Martha Diaz and Pinqy Ring. It was an interactive workshop in which the facilitators engaged us in the living curriculum they are working on with pioneering hip-hop educator and academic, Martha Diaz.

My second day, I attended the workshop with beatboxer, educator and organizer Chesney Snow, hip-hop emcee Silk-Kaya aka Eternia and musician AD Kahw, whose discussion covered how theater, rhyme writing and improvisation can be combined as a means to help students highlight systemic and structural inequities in our societies. Utilizing sound, movement and traditional rhyme writing, the workshop split into four small “troupes.” In less than 60 minutes, we produced a 3-minute tableau around various youth issues. Numerous workshops looked at traditional STEM programming and how to disrupt the status quo, as well as bringing hip-hop to the classroom as its own academic subject.

One of the big highlights came from the final plenary, which included members of YELLOW, Pharrell’s hip-hop initiative in Virginia, and several academics who discussed how hip-hop played a role in their journey to activism and education. In particular, Dr. Joyce had an amazing quote: “Happiness is consequential, joy is structural.” This quote was part of her answer to a question about how her formalized schooling  — which did not serve her well — played a role in her search for value, ultimately leading her to hip-hop and academia. For me, the biggest takeaways from the conference were community, innovation, love and literacy. As a nation in crisis, we will need every tool and strategy at our disposal, and the conference demonstrated in its workshops and in its design that not only is joy structural, but so are resistance and change.