Hiphop Archive End Of The Year Video - 2009-2010

Jasmine Ford

Jasmine began working in the Archive in the spring of 2010. She is a senior in the Germanic Languages and Literatures Department, with a secondary field in Linguistics. She first became interested in Hip-Hop after taking Urban Speech Communities with Professor Morgan, and is currently writing her senior thesis on the construction of Afro-German identity through Hip-Hop culture, and how it has been used to mobilize the Afro-German community politically since the Leitkultur debates of 2000.

Christian began working for the archive in December 2008, after taking a class on Urban Speech Communities with Professor Morgan. He is a senior linguistics concentrator who hails from New Mexico (though born to lifelong New Yorkers in South Jamaica, Queens), and his greatest passion has always been language, both in its structure and its usage in society. His research at the archive focuses on the language of hiphop, and how language is used to construct social identities, signify and index the broader culture, and (his personal favorite) foster competition and feuding among artists. He has been a lifelong fan of hiphop, like his parents before him, having been raised on the sounds of hiphop radio and his parents' narratives of how it all started in their neighborhoods years ago. An aspiring academic, his desire is to bridge the gap between theoretical and applied treatments of language, and hiphop will surely be influential in this pursuit.

Kay Thompson has worked with the Hiphop Archive since the summer of 2009, when she conducted field research on hiphop in Kaduna, Northern Nigeria. She is currently writing her senior thesis - and compiling a documentary for the Archive - on the power of hiphop music and language to educate and unify young Nigerians of diverse linguistic, religious, ethnic, and regional backgrounds. Kay is especially interested in the ways that language interacts with social identities and urban spaces to produce social outcomes. Through the Archive, she continues to learn enthusiastically about the Hiphop Nation and Hiphop Globe.

Justin was born and raised in Washington Heights, NYC. Before coming to Harvard, he went to Hunter Elementary and Hunter High School. He grew up loving football and basketball, but played competitive tennis for 12 years. As far as hip-hop, Justin did not go anywhere without his RCA Discman, circa 1996. He listened to Hot97 religiously (his discman had a then-revolutionary radio feature), and always carried a classic Jay-Z, Biggie, or 2Pac CD on his person. Nowadays, Justin majors in Anthropology and plans to become a comedy writer one day.