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Download fileFreedom within bars: maximum security prisoners' negotiations of identity through rap
This paper examines the construction of prisoners’ identity through rap in England’s high
security prisons. While hip hop studies has often addressed rap’s connection to the social
practices of criminalised youths, prison rap cultures have received scant attention. This
paper draws on a series of rap workshops and interviews with prisoners to investigate the
experiences of black prisoners in high security prisons and how identities are produced and
negotiated through rap. Rap is associated with the production of a range of identities and
identifications, enabling prisoners to accommodate themselves to the conditions of their
incarceration and to challenge aspects of the criminal justice system that they experience as
unfair or illegitimate.
Funding
This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/M011275/3]; Economic and Social Research Council [ES/L003120/1].
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Identities: Global Studies in Culture and PowerCitation
BRAMWELL, R., 2017. Freedom within bars: maximum security prisoners' negotiations of identity through rap. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 25 (4), pp.475-492.Publisher
Routledge (© Taylor & Francis Group)Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-01-04Publication date
2017Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power on 15 Feb 2017, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2017.1287487ISSN
1070-289XeISSN
1547-3384Publisher version
Language
- en