Grime and University: Language and the Negotiation of Black Cultural Alignment among British University Students

There has been a great deal of recent interest in increasing
the participation of Black people in higher education, and
the intervention of high-profile grime artists has intensified
this (e.g. the Stormzy scholarships at Cambridge, Big
Narstie's talks on grime music and mental health at
universities across the UK). Grime is itself hugely important
as a cultural formation for young British Black people, and
its spread beyond the original inner-city sites of its
production has meant that for young Black and mixed-race
people in non-urban and/or mainly white areas, grime has
become a major source of learning about the meanings of
Blackness. But at the same time, the socialisation and the
models of personhood that grime offers can contrast
sharply with the mainstream cultural socialisation provided
at university. Figures like Stormzy, Big Narstie and Akala
seek to draw grime and HE closer, and in the US, Hip Hop
studies is well-established in university curricula. But in the
unspectacular practices of everyday university life in the
UK, how do young people themselves actually negotiate
the relationship between these two formations and the
subjectivities they promote? My project will approach this
question with interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic
ethnography, and it is motivated by my own experience
and development as a non-urban, mixed-race person
navigating the potentially conflicting meanings of grime
and university.