Popular music scholars and ethnographers Anthony Kwame Harrison and Ali Colleen Neff will explore the concept of Auto-mobility, from automobiles themselves to the broader idea of personal mobility as they are sounded in Black music—especially hip hop—in the United States and around the world. Presented in conjunction with MUS 217, “Black Music in America.”

Anthony Kwame Harrison is a cultural anthropologist and popular music scholar who teaches in the Africana Studies program at Virginia Tech. He is author of Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification (Temple University Press) and Associate Editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies.  Dr. Harrison has published widely in the areas of popular music, race and ethnography. He is also a recording artist who has released multiple CDs with the San Francisco-based Forest Fires Collective and Washington D.C.-based Candlewax Records.

As a Culture and Communication Studies doctoral student at the University of North Carolina, Ali Colleen Neff is committed to documenting, amplifying and celebrating the musical creativity of young people throughout the Global South. Her extensive ethnographic work in Mississippi and Senegal is manifest in her book, Let the World Listen Right: The Mississippi Delta Hip-Hop Story, her ethnographic films and articles on both field sites, and a website that archives her work with women pop artists in Dakar. These and other work can be found at her website, www.ethnolyrical.org.