Wanda Canton

My PhD explores the contributions rap music and in particular, UK Drill, can provide to understand and respond to social policy in the context of knife violence. 

Rap has a history of being criminalised as a form of Afro-diasporic music, repeatedly disregarded as violent noise. The criminalisation and phobia of rap music has therefore ostracised it from political and philosophical debate. I champion rap as a decolonising epistemology and method.

As an interdisciplinary project, I draw upon psychoanalysis, radical political theory and criminology to examine subjectivity. Rather than seeking a politics of recognition, I am interested in whether tolerating non-recognition can create spaces of uncertainty and collaboration, which I propose rap music is uniquely equipped to facilitate.