Hip-hop has a story to tell — from early works like Grandmaster Flash’s The Message to Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer-winning album DAMN. and beyond.

As education scholar Bettina L. Loves notes, in hip-hop-based education, young urban and Black children and youth find space to critically reflect on the world around them.

To explore the potential of hip-hop and rap music as a platform for research and translating relevant knowledge related to various types of Canadian law, RISE Edutainment, an arts-based youth organization, piloted their Legal Artivism program.

RISE stands for Reaching Intelligent Souls Everywhere. This longstanding organization is based in Scarborough, Ont., in the Greater Toronto Area, and serves racialized communities throughout the GTA.

Rap music — as one of hip-hop’s four main elements (the other three are DJing, breaking (dance) and graffiti) — can provide young people an opportunity to enter into public discourse using cultural competencies and skills that are familiar to them.

For researchers interested in understanding and studying young people, rap music offers a platform to allow young people to share their lived experiences through more accessible language than surveys or interviews.

Using rap music to discuss research offers a form of arts-based knowledge translation for researchers to share ideas, research findings and information. In this way, research that was previously only in journals and reports is made into music that young people already listen to.

RISE’s Legal Artivism program “promoted access to justice to socioeconomically marginalized and racialized youth, teaching them about their rights, how to navigate justice and education........

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