Rap(p) i käften. Hiphopmusikers konstnärliga och pedagogiska strategier

Sammanfattning: Title: Verbally fa(s)t. Hip-hop Musicians' artistic and educational strategies. During the last decade there has been an awakening interest in concidering not only the formalised learning situations within institutional settings, but also all forms of learning that goes on in informal musical learning practices outside schools. My own personal experience of informal learning, my fascination and curiosity concerning hip-hop culture, and my interest in school, education and learning - are the foundations for my interest and reserach focus and the driving forces behind this doctoral theisis. The aim of this doctoral thesis is to study how hip-hop musicians talk about learning and artistic and educational strategies in different contexts. The study is focusing on both amateurish and professional milieus with female and male informants. How the informants talk about creative strategies, aesthetics, identity, transmitting tradition, fostering and adult education is the focus of the four articles. The research question in articles (1-4) are formulated as: How is the meeting between words and music in the creation of a hip-hop song and how do the informants talk about creativity and learning strategies? What interpretation repertoires are in use when the rappers construct a professional identity, how are they being legitimised and what discourses are they influenced by? What aspects of learning appear when two American rappers talk about their activities in interviews, group conversations, media interviews and in texts produced by themselves? How do rappers talk about hip-hop, their activities and learning with the focus on musical craft, education and activism? The theoretical points for this dissertation are: social constructionism, discourse, identity, field theory and culture criticism. It may seem like many theoretical perspectives, but every article has its own specific theory. The methodological approach suggest a broad attitude to method which is more about describing how the researcher has approached the topic. Methodology is, in the first place, a reflective activity. Individual interviews are the dominating research method in all the articles and discourse analysis has been used as a method in article 2. Howewer, there are inspiration from discourse analysis throughout the thesis. The hip-hop musicians are seen as fosterers, popular adult educators, jazz musicians, tradition-bearers, preachers, craftsmen, artists etc. Finally, it is important to emphasise that aesthetic contexts like hip-hop should not be described as radically different compared to the schools or other institutions. It seems as if both formal learning and informal learning exist in a dialectic way in and outside school.