Insight Communities: Making connections with hip hop in Cork

Submitted on Friday, 24/06/2022

In February J. Griffith Rollefson and his ERC CIPHER team were featured in an RTÉ documentary series called Change Makers. The community-engaged research project is collaborating with the Cork Migrant Centre and Kabin Studios on an arts research project that is generating and networking “glocal hip hop knowledges.” The documentary tracks the youth arts NGOs as they work with the CIPHER team on a live performance titled “UBUNTU: Local is Global.”

Housed in the UCC School of Film, Music, and Theatre this ERC funded project, CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation, is the world’s first global study of hip hop music and culture. UCC’s Prof Rollefson and a team of global researchers are investigating how and why this highly localised African American music has translated so easily to far-flung communities and contexts around the globe.

If you want to see the impact of this work on local communities, the RTE piece is really worth a watch.