Tareeq Jalloh

Doctoral Work

My doctoral research brought frameworks from analytic philosophy to bear on prominent public debates about rap music’s putative link to violence, its role in perpetuating oppression, and policies and practices that criminalise it. I developed a (non-exhaustive) taxonomy of the prominent lines of critique that underpin rap’s criminalisation: i. that rap incites violence; ii. that rap causes violence; iii. that rap evidences violence.

Postdoctoral Work

University of Manchester

My postdoctoral research at Manchester investigated how to build archival collections of Black British music in a way that retains and strengthens knowledge and agency within source communities and creatives. My research developed a systematic literature review exploring interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Black British archival practice and creative enterprise. I also began to think about how we might avoid appropriation in institutional archives.

University of Oxford

My current research project builds on my extant work on drill music –a particularly heavily criminalised subgenre of rap –towards a positive framework for understanding contemporary rap more broadly, as well as the online subcultures and institutions in which it is produced and consumed. Here are some questions I am interested in:

1. How does contemporary rap challenge and extend our understandings of art, genre and heritage?
2. Can contemporary rap function as a form of political resistance?
3. How does the mainstreaming and institutional archiving of contemporary rap music function as a form of cultural and epistemic appropriation?