Networking Global Hip Hop Knowledges: The CIPHER Method

CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation is a global hip hop knowledge mapping project using ethnographic, digital, and arts practice research methods to better understand the emergences and flows of the culture’s deeply local yet immanently global intertextualities. In this collaborative article, we network and develop ideas from six of CIPHER’s global hip hop researchers, elaborating the project in method as well as theory. In so doing, we model our community-engaged CIPHER method of tracking thematic, conceptual, and archetypal relationships, presenting preliminary findings in four interrelated case studies: examples of hip hop knowledge transfer that evidence hip hop’s generative glocal dialogue.