ABSTRACT
While typically inhabiting worlds far apart, hip-hop artists and social action researchers find common ground in their insistence on ‘keepin’ it real’. For hip-hop artists, the term registers an ethical obligation to remain grounded in the actual experiences of oppressed communities (T. Rose 2008). For social action researchers, staying close to the real means working at the social margins and producing knowledge that contributes to a more just world (Fine 2006). Even as these traditions differ in their modes of representing human experience, hip-hop artists and action researchers share an attitude of defiance toward conventional practices. They each operate outside the borders of bourgeois sensibilities, whether aesthetically, epistemologically, or methodologically.
