A course all about Kanye West is now being offered by Washington University. It is being taught by Dr. Jeffrey McCune, and he is also a member of the St. Louis Institution’s African and African American Studies along with Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Departments.
The class will run for 14 weeks. At the moment, 75 students have registered for the course and a lot more are signed up on the waiting list. Topics discussed will include “Who is Kanye West and Why Is He in the Flashing Lights?” “Father Stretch My Hands, or How Hip-Hop Takes Us to Church,” and “Love Lock Down, or Hip-Hop’s Queer Love Languages.”
He said that he also created the course to please his students who have loved Kanye for many years. Hip-Hop culture has seeped into every crevice of society, and there’s no exception for college courses as well. Georgia Tech has introduced a new Spring 2017 Semester Course known as “Exploring the Lyrics of Outkast and Trap Music to Explore Politics of Social Justice.”
Dr. Joycelyn Wilson is the professor, an Atlanta scholar of hip-hop who has completed ethnographic studies at Virginia Tech and Harvard will be the one teaching this course. She is also a documentary producer who has been Emmy-Award nominated for Walking With Guns. She also appears in the VH1 documentary called ‘The Untold Story of Atlanta’s Rise In The Rap Game.’
The curriculum permits students to study Trap Music and show how it has evolved over the years. The class will also touch on major names like of famous young and old Atlanta artists along with non-Atlanta artists like Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur, and Lauryn Hill.
A primary component of the course will talk about ‘The OUTKAST imagination. It is a topic detailed by Dr. Wilson during a TED Talk in YouTube. HipHopDX reports that Dr. Wilson said her students are majors in Economics, Engineering, media and communications, public policy and also biomedical sciences.
They have a great sensibility towards hip hop and a great affinity towards trap music. She has a math degree as a result of which, she can understand and connect to the undergraduate experiences at Georgia Tech while trying to make sense of what is happening around them in a cultural manner.
While studying hip-hop from the Atlanta perspective, they were able to explore Trap as an ideology of social justice, self-determination and also civic engagement.
She further continued, saying that they are the next generation lineup of STEM leaders. Her hope is that they can acquire basic principles and also fundamental truths while applying them to their work-life after completing graduation.
That is the main mission, aim, and goal of the course. Hip Hop is the metaphor they use to perceive the pedagogical implications of the music. She reminded that it is a 40-year old Metaphor.
While she works with 18-20-year-old students, she stresses that we need innovative and contemporary ways to work with them. That is where the Trap Element kicks in.Meanwhile, her college courses centered around hip-hop are getting immensely popular.
In conflicted times, people need to find common ground and restore peace. Meanwhile, one other thing everyone can agree upon is that Kanye West doesn’t need a greater ego. However, the past few months have been quite tough for him.