Dr. Lakeyta Bonnette-Bailey is a Professor of Africana Studies at Georgia State University and the Co-Director for the Center for the Advancement of Students and Alumni (CASA). Her research interests include Hip Hop culture, popular culture, political behavior, political attitudes, African-American politics, Black women and Politics, political psychology and public opinion.
Her current research examines the relationship between political rap music and racial attitudes in a book (with Adolphus Belk, Jr) tentatively titled, Check the Rhyme: Political Rap Music and Racial Attitudes (New York University Press).
She recently published a co-edited volume with Jonathan Gayles entitled Black Popular Culture and Social Justice: Beyond the Culture (Routledge Press 2023). Dr. Bonnette-Bailey has also published a co-edited volume with Adolphus Belk Jr entitled For the Culture: Hip-Hop and Social Justice (University of Michigan Press, 2022) examining the relationships between Hip-Hop culture and social justice. Additionally, Dr. Bonnette-Bailey published (2015) a book with the University of Pennsylvania Press entitled, Pulse of the People: Rap Music and Black Political Attitudes.
Dr. Bonnette-Bailey has published over 5 articles and 7 book chapters in addition to the three books she has authored. These articles have been published in a variety of journals including the journals, Ethnic Studies Review, New Political Science, and Du Bois Review. She is also the winner of numerous awards including the Provost’s Outstanding Tenure Track Faculty Achievement Award (2023) and their Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) (2022) award as well as the College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Faculty Diversity Award (2020). Currently, she serves as the Co-Principal Investigator on two Mellon Foundation grants “Intersectionality in the American South,” and the “Humanities Inclusivity Program,” totaling over 2 million dollars.
In 2017, she hosted the first political Hip Hop conference at Georgia State University entitled, Behind the Music: Hip Hop and Social Justice, which examined the ways in which social justice is addressed and expressed within Hip Hop culture. In 2018, she was a Nasir Jones/ W. E. B. Du Bois Hip-Hop Fellow with the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Later that year she completed two talks in Ingelheim and Kaiserslautern, Germany discussing the relevance and importance of rap music, activism and social justice and she received her certificate in psychoanalysis from Emory University’s Psychoanalytic Institute.
In 2019, Dr. Bonnette-Bailey presented at TedX talk entitled “The Political Impact of Rap Music” and in 2020, she hosted Beyond the Culture: Black Popular Culture and Social Justice at Georgia State University. In 2021, Dr. Bonnette-Bailey founded the podcast The Intersection: Where Black Popular Culture Meets Social Justice, which can be found on all of your podcasts servers. Also, in 2021 Dr. Bonnette-Bailey appeared in the Bounce Network original documentary Protect or Neglect, where she discussed the history of policing and the disparities within the Black community and on February 23, 2023 was featured in the ABC news documentary titled Rap Trap: Hip-Hop on Trial which aired on Hulu. Finally, Dr. Bonnette-Bailey curated the second iteration of the conference Beyond the Culture II in February 2023. Dr. Bonnette-Bailey has been interviewed by numerous news outlets including VOX, the AJC, CBS 46, Washington Post, W.A.B.E., BBC, Atlanta Magazine, ABC News, 11 Alive News, and TheGrio among many other news outlets.
Dr. J. L. Adolph completed his Ph.D. in English/African Diaspora Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2018. His dissertation centered on Fatherhood Narratives in Hip-hop Lyricism. He received an MA from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2009 and a BA in English with a minor in Africana Studies from Central Missouri State University, May 2005. Dr. JL Adolph has a professional background in utilizing hip-hop culture as a tool to teach at-promise youth and families with histories of trauma successfully. The English professor employs innovative communication methods furnishing an educational space to discuss urban male parenting in Contemporary America. His keynote speeches and interactive online series Dad Cypher: A Hip-hop Guide to Fatherhood challenges critics’ skepticism of hip-hop culture and the mythology of African American fatherhood. As a media literacy specialist and researcher, Adolph utilizes his expertise to empower inner-city marginalized dads. Hence, his works seek to alter or “remix” the mainstream narrative of African-American fatherhood.
Booker Edwards is the founder of one of the most successful and recognizable independent record labels in the state of Virginia, Illyaas Recordings, Professor Booker Edwards produced, distributed and sold multiple albums releases for the artist on his label. Over the last 25 years, he has worked with a multitude of high-end clients as a producer, engineer, trainer or consultant including: Seal, Trey Songz, Pusha-T, Bink, Needlz, Akai Professional, New Millennium Studios, TV One, and Radio One.
Booker is also an Apple Certified Trainer in Logic Pro and founder of the Atlanta Logic Users Group. He also creates online training courses for MacProVideo.com on various music production and audio production topics including: Trap music production, recording and editing audio, external MIDI hardware production, Logic Pro, and Pro Tools. For the last thirteen years, Booker taught at the Art Institute of Atlanta as the lead faculty in the Audio Production department (before that he taught at Virginia State University and Virginia Tech). AIA named Booker its 2016 Faculty of the Year, an honor generated by the students.
Dr. Maurice Hobson is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Historian at Georgia State University. He earned the Ph.D. degree in History, focusing on African American History and 20th Century U.S. History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are grounded in the fields of African American history, 20th Century U.S. history, comparative labor, African American studies, oral history and ethnography, urban and rural history, political economy, and popular cultural studies. He is the author of award-winning book titled The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta and the lead historian for the forthcoming With Faith in God and Heart and Mind: A History of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, both with the University of North Carolina Press as well as a corpus of peer-reviewed journal articles.
Dr. Hobson engages the social sciences and has created a new paradigm called the Black New South that explores the experiences of black folk in the American South, with national and international implications, since WWII. For this, he has served as an expert witness in court cases and as a voice of insight for public historical markers, monuments, and museum exhibitions.
In popular media, Dr. Hobson was consulted for the Netflix documentary “The Art of Organized Noize,” which featured the Atlanta production team that changed the sound of Hip-Hop with their work with OutKast and Goodie Mob. Also, he was the chief historian for the documentary “Maynard,” which detailed the life and times of the honorable Maynard Holbrook Jackson Jr., Atlanta’s first black mayor. He was also the consulting historian for “Hip Hop Evolution: Atlanta,” a docuseries tracing Hip-Hop’s dynamic evolution from its beginning through the 1990s. He was also the consulting historian for the “ESPN 30 For 30: Vick” documentary detailing the controversial career of NFL quarterback Michael Vick. He served as a consulting producer and historian for HBO Documentaries’ “Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children,” which details the dark history of the Atlanta Child Murders, where Atlanta’s most vibrant yet vulnerable population—its poor black children—were being hunted, kidnapped, murdered, and left in fields around the Atlanta metro-area. Most recently, he served as the chief-historian for the award-winning iHeartRadio podcast titled “Fight Night and the Million Dollar Heist,” a true-crime podcast series detailing the infamous armed robbery after Muhammad Ali’s historic 1970 comeback fight. He served as a historical consultant for the PBS documentary “Downing of a Flag: A Documentary, A Film” detailing the removal of the Confederate Battle Flag in South Carolina and “This World is Not My Own,” a documentary detailing the legacy of Nellie Mae Rowe, a renowned Black woman folk artist who worked across mediums addressing the racial legacies of slavery and themes of religion and gender. Currently, he is the featured historian and expert on American race relations for Amerika Ungesschminkt (America without Make-Up) with Markus Lanz for ZDF Mediathek—Germany’s Centralized National Public TV and served as the chief historian for “The Epic of Collier Heights Podcast,” produced by 99% Invisible, a sound-rich, narrative podcast that discusses unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world. Most recently, he served as the chief historian for the documentary “Bo Legs: Marvin Arrington Sr., An Atlanta Story” a film on the life, career, and impact of Judge Marvin S. Arrington, Sr of Atlanta, “Untrapped: The Story of Lil Baby,” a documentary featuring the Atlanta Hip-Hop superstar, activist, and mogul Lil’ Baby, the MSNBC News podcast “Get Your Freaknik On, Into America, a show about being Black in America holding truth to power and this country to its promises told by people who have the most stake produced by Trymaine Lee, and “The BMF Documentary: Blowing Money Fast,” a docuseries about the Black Mafia Family, a drug empire.
Dr. Elizabeth J. West is a Professor of English and the John B. and Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University. West served previously as Executive Director of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association and Treasurer of the College Language Association and is presently Director of Academics for Georgia State University’s Center for Studies on Africa and Its Diaspora (CSAD). She is also a member of The University of Mississippi Medical Center’s Asylum Hill Research Consortium and the Advisory Board of The Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies (Johannes Gutenberg University). West is PI for “Intersectionality in the American South,” a Mellon Foundation Grant (2022-25) supporting the establishment of cross-institutional collectives to advance research, teaching, and public engagement in Intersectionality Studies; and she is director of the CSAD-American Family Insurance initiative focusing on Financial Literacy in the public sector (2021-23). She is a former AAUW Fellow, DAAD (Johannes Gütenberg University) Fellow, and scholar in residence at Dartmouth College in the Department of AAAS.
West’s scholarship focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to studies of early African Diaspora Literatures of the Americas with particular emphasis on spirituality and gender in these works and their connections to the present. Winner of the 2023 College Language Association Book Award, her recent book, Finding Francis: One Family’s Journey from Slavery to Freedom (USC Press 2022) melds biography and historiography in its exploration of slaving and forced migration on Black family and kinship formations in the U.S. South. She is the author of African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature and Being (Lexington 2011), a work distinct in its employment of a diachronic lens to examine specific African spiritual sensibilities traceable from early to modern Black women’s writings. Her essays and shorter works can be found in critical anthologies and journals such as MELUS, JTAS, Amerikastudien, CLAJ, PALARA, Religions, boundary 2, Womanist, Black Magnolias, South Atlantic Review, and South Central Review. Among her edited projects are the coedited anthology, Literary Expressions of African Spirituality (Lexington 2013), the co-edited section, “Religion and Spirituality,” in the Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric (2018), and the co-edited Roman & Littlefield/Lexington book series, Black Diasporic Worlds: Origins and Evolutions from New World Slaving.
Dr. Casey Philip Wong is an Assistant Professor of Social Foundations of Education in the Georgia State University College of Education and Human Development. Dr. Wong aims to advance justice by interrogating systems of coloniality, carcerality, and oppression in education through critical feminist, anti-colonial, and abolitionist frameworks and by investigating and developing culturally sustaining and strength-based pedagogies to teach and learn otherwise. He researches and collaborates with communities to affirm, foster, sustain, and revitalize educational institutions and relations that critically center overlapping and interconnected African/Black, Indigenous, Latine/a/o, Asian and Pacific Islander communities. He was recently an invited panelist for a Presidential Session at the American Educational Research Association on centering cultural and artistic practice in scientific design (San Diego), an invited presenter for a Presidential Session on Hip Hop Pedagogies at the American Association of Applied Linguistics (Chicago), an invited presenter on an Executive Session Roundtable at the American Anthropological Association that focused on abolitionist anthropology (Baltimore), and a speaker at the International James Baldwin Conference (Paris). Building upon his background as a bboy, beatmaker, and educator, Dr. Wong worked with scholars and activists in Hip Hop Education to organize four Think Tank gatherings and a Global Symposium on the Future and Promise of Hip Hop Pedagogy. He is a co-editor with H. Samy Alim and Jeff Chang of the volume, Freedom Moves: Hip Hop Knowledges, Pedagogies, and Futures, and has published in forums such as Educational Researcher, Review of Research in Education, and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. As a scholar-in-residence at Youth United for Community Action, he is currently working with middle- and high school-aged Youth of Color to envision and organize a grassroots community-controlled education system that centers transformative justice. He has been working inside and outside of schools to heal, cultivate critical thinking, and educate for collective freedom with K-12 youth, undergraduate, and graduate students, from East Palo Alto to Atlanta, for over 15 years.