If you read a poem or you listen to a song and then like you catch a pattern, it felt like you were solving a puzzle, it feels like magic. That was the thing that drew me to making music. My name is A.D Carson. I'm assistant professor of hip-hop in the Global South. I am a rapper, you know try to make art that hopefully people listen to. As a young student, of course the creative stuff was encouraged but it was always extra. It felt to me like it shouldn't be extra, it felt like it was the thing. I believe that art is necessary for us to be able to interpret the world in ways that will connect us to other people.

The students come from all across the university, varying levels of experience and expertise, and I find them to be really curious. And I think that curiosity is probably the best thing that you could have as a hip-hop artist or as a person who's looking to study anything. Where we really get down to business is when we have our open hours, when everybody is there and they're just bringing their questions, they're bringing their music they're bringing their ideas. It's really really helpful time the unstructured time to just be in a room with creative people making stuff. They have so much to bring to our conversations about knowledge production, about argumentation, about what's happening in the world right now. 

How do you make an expert in something that has been historically excluded from the space? It's a question that I hold about myself and it's a question that I continue to hold about hip-hop in academia. How did we get here? And what makes the work good? What makes the work valuable? What makes the work rigorous? There are lots of classes that I've been in and that I've taught where I just went to do my work and then I left and I didn't know anybody, didn't know anybody's name. I hope that it's impossible for students to come into my class and not learn each other's names and learn about one another and so it's not just a matter of creating a connection between me as an instructor and them as students, but it's a connection between them as people who share a community not just in the classroom, but at the University and eventually, you know, the world.