[Commlist] CFP: Special Issue -- prosecuting and policing rap

*Special issue of /Popular Music /(Cambridge University Press) 40.4 
(2021), CALL FOR PAPERS*

**

*Prosecuting and Policing Rap*

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, grime, drill, activist rap, 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 criminalization and how rappers, communities, civil liberties 
groups, defence lawyers, and scholars have come to challenge 
‘prosecuting rap’.

The growing use of rap music in criminal and civil proceedings has 
emerged as a well-documented debate and issue of public concern in the 
US—dubbed ‘Rap on Trial’ (as per the title of Erik Nielson and Andrea 
Dennis’ recent book).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’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 rappers, 
communities, activists, and criminal justice professionals.

Rap music is policed by the state in a range of national contexts. In 
the UK, for instance, rappers have had injunctions imposed on their 
music, while rap is increasingly used as evidence in criminal trials, 
replayed in courtrooms to confirm stereotypes about the violent and 
criminal propensities of young black men. Rap music can be used to sweep 
groups of youngsters into a single serious-violence charge through gang 
narratives and controversial ‘joint enterprise’ law. How might rapfeed 
into racist and class-based disparities in criminal-justice monitoring, 
censoring, data-gathering, policing, charging, convicting, sentencing, 
and media-framing in different countries? How might the prosecuting rap 
phenomenon open a window into wider racial inequalities in criminal 
justice systems?

These questions about institutional racism in criminal justice systems 
and the weaponisation of black youth culture have been injected with 
urgency by the international antiracism protests that have swept 2020.

Contributions shouldactively position themselves in relation to what’s 
already been said in the small but growing literature to generate new 
insights and approaches.

Topics to be addressed may include:

  * the use of rap music and black youth culture in criminal proceedings
    in various national contexts
  * state regulation and censorship of rap recording, circulation and
    performance
  * rap evidence and gang narratives in joint-enterprise and conspiracy
    cases
  * informal policing (behaviour orders, public space protection orders,
    risk assessment forms, etc.)
  * police databases, rap and the surveillance state
  * rap and racism (institutional, cultural, overt) in criminal justice
    systems
  * digital musical culture and rap evidence
  * prosecuting rap as constraint on human capabilities/rights
  * rap and laws of evidence
  * the news-media framing of rap in criminal proceedings
  * rap as anti-carceral ‘defunding’ culture
  * community, musician and inter-generational responses to prosecuting rap
  * youth, rap and criminal justice
  * geographies of prosecuting rap and comparative perspectives
  * prosecuting rap, capitalism and the cultural industries
  * rap distinctions (genre labels; amateur v professional) and racial
    bias in the courtroom
  * challenging prosecuting rap
**

*Call for Abstracts*

Please send Abstracts (300 words max) + bio (150 words max) to the three 
co-editors of the special issue by *1 October 2020* (commissioning of 
articles scheduled for October 2020, with completed commissioned 
articles by 1 July 2021):

Dr Eithne Quinn, University of Manchester (eithne.quinn /at/ manchester.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(eithne.quinn /at/ manchester.ac.uk)>

Dr Joy White, University of Bedfordshire (joy.white /at/ beds.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(joy.white /at/ beds.ac.uk)>

Prof John Street, University of East Anglia (j.street /at/ uea.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(j.street /at/ uea.ac.uk)>




---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------