Immigrant Youth Hip Hop And Online Games

Anti-Muslim racism with its attendant xenophobia and (the fear of) Salafist hostility are two of the most essential problems facing Europe today. Both result from the enormous failure of the continent’s integration policies, which have either insisted on immigrants’ rigid assimilation or left immigrants to fend for themselves. This book radically breaks with contemporary approaches to immigrant assimilation and integration. Instead it examines non-institutional approaches that facilitate immigrant inclusion through the examples of three alternative small-scale projects that have impacted the lives of urban working-class youth, specifically with second-generation immigrant roots, in Vienna, Austria. These projects involve online gaming, hip hop as an art form, and social work as emancipatory pedagogic practice (commonly referred to as street work). After exploring historic and structural conditions of marginalization in Austria, the book investigates working-class teenagers’ social networks and describes an online game designed to provide a platform for interaction between non-immigrant and immigrant youth who usually either do not interact or display prejudice when they engage each other. Hip hop can provide both a necessary outlet for alienated youth to articulate their frustrations and a highly effective tool for transforming inclusion conflicts. This is achieved through offering individual teens the necessary means to gain the resilience and social grounding necessary to help overcome exclusion and marginalization. In addition to the individual young person’s agency, the inclusion process, of course, also requires corresponding efforts by the majority society. Social work with marginalized youth is crucial for successful inclusion. Specifically individual support in small-scale settings provides a unique opportunity to open up spaces for discouraged and disaffected teenagers to gain self-worth and dignity. While the book focuses on identity formation and the teenagers’ agency, it argues that only projects that include both “newcomer” and “native” can aid in overcoming exclusionary attitudes and policies, eventually allowing some form of social bonding to take place.

The story of how hip-hop created, and came to dominate, the twenty-first century. In Dead Precedents, Roy Christopher traces the story of how hip-hop invented the twenty-first century. Emerging alongside cyberpunk in the 1980s, the hallmarks of hip-hop - allusion, self-reference, the use of new technologies, sampling, the cutting and splicing of language and sound - would come to define the culture of the new millennium. Taking in the groundbreaking work of DJs and MCs, alongside writers like Dick and Gibson, as well as graffiti and DIY culture, Dead Precedents is a counter-culture history of the twentieth century, showcasing hip-hop's role in the creation of the world we now live in.

This timely study explores how societies have responded to mass inflows of refugees between 1945 and 2000.

With all new and expanded chapters, the third edition provides an in-depth look at how terrorists exploit mass media to get attention, spread fear and anxiety among the targets of this sort of violence, and threaten further attacks. The traditional news media’s appetite for shocking, sensational, and tragic stories has always resulted in over-coverage of terrorist events and threats. But today, social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, allow terrorists to communicate directly with huge audiences around the globe spreading their propaganda, radicalizing and recruiting followers, and providing know-how to “lone wolves.” On the other hand, governments in democracies, too, utilize mass media to enlist public support for counterterrorist measures. This volume will help readers to understand the centrality of media considerations in both terrorism and counterterrorism.

This book deals with large-scale, systemic corruption, a phenomenon that it identifies as part of the political landscape in most, if not all, societies of the contemporary world. While the analysis is grounded in the political thought of earlier thinkers, especially Edmund Burke, and integrates the insights of several modern analysts of corruption, the volume offers a new, updated theoretical perspective on the topic. This perspective reflects deep concerns with corruption in a world facing accelerated social transition, increased economic polarization, and growing distrust toward political elites in many countries. This book approaches corrupt practices both theoretically and empirically, offering the perspectives of scholars who come to the topic from different traditions and cultures. It contains the collective efforts of members of the Research Committee on Political Finance and Public Corruption of the International Political Science Association. In formulating a comprehensive approach on corruption, the volume offers insights in regard to new developments in the United States, in Middle Eastern countries (especially in the wake of the Arab Spring), in several European counties (Austria, Italy, Spain), as well as in the People’s Republic of China. The analysis goes beyond the traditional legal definitions of corruption or purely economic views of it and focuses more broadly on institutional, cultural, and normative dimensions of this globally important phenomenon.

This book reports on a two-year long, qualitative literacy case study of the academic literacies of first and second-generation immigrant youth in an afterschool tutoring program in South Bronx, New York. Through transcripts of tutoring sessions, interview data, and youths’ written work, each chapter highlights how youth interpreted and navigated various school assignments, and what resources and perspectives they brought to unpacking the meaning and significance of texts and disciplinary discourses. By focusing on the immigrant youth themselves, and not on the teaching that happens (or does not happen) inside classrooms, this volume provides a unique and much-needed vantage point to understanding the academic literacies and engagement of urban immigrant youth.

Featuring both well known and emerging scholars from the UK, the USA and mainland Europe, this fascinating new volume addresses core theoretical and methodological developments before going on to examine key substantive themes in the study of young people's identities and lifestyles.

This book examines language and identity among White American middle and upper-middle class youth who affiliate with Hip Hop culture. Hip Hop youth engage in practices that range from the consumption of rap music and fashion to practices like MC-ing (writing and performing raps or "rhymes"), DJ-ing (mixing records to produce a beat for the MC), graffiti tagging, and break-dancing. Cutler explores the way in which these young people stylize their speech using linguistic resources drawn from African American English and Hip Hop slang terms. She also looks at the way they construct their identities in discussions with their friends, and how they talk about and use language to construct themselves as authentic within Hip Hop. Cutler considers the possibility that young people experimenting with AAVE-styled speech may improve the status of AAVE in the broader society. She also addresses the need for educators to be aware of the linguistic patterns found in AAVE and Hip Hop language, and ways to build on Hip Hop skills like rhyming and rapping in order to motivate students and promote literacy.