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Kalonji Nzinga
Kalonji Nzinga is a cultural psychologist, rapper and educator exploring how young people’s holistic development is influenced by the cultural lifeworlds and scenes that they inhabit. One major strand of his research has attended to young people in hip hop scenes and how their participation as hip hop artists, critics, writers, composers and producers provides them with philosophical orientations, literacy skills and technological savvy to engage in self-authorship, cultural production and community artivism. Using methods of validated psychological instruments, clinical interviews, cognitive think-alouds and ethnographic observation, his research investigates the philosophies and voices of youth hip hop practitioners. As a rapper and hip hop practitioner himself Kalonji also produces music that draws on Black ancestral legacies, depicts the sociopolitics of the hood and explores visions of Afrofuturist healing. His research has informed the design of learning environments for all ages, multimedia arts exhibitions, and is published in the Journal of Cognition & Culture and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He is currently the director of CU Boulder’s RAP Lab (Ritual Arts & Pedagogy), an interdisciplinary hub for the study of hip hop praxis.
Contact: School of Education, University of Colorado Boulder, 249 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0249, USA.