Abstract
Hip Hop is a transnational culture ignored in social work academia. A qualitative exploratory study with a social constructionist lens used a non-probability sampling method to recruit six Masters-level social work students in a stakeholder-engaged focus group. Subjects took the Rap Music Attitude and Perception (RAP) Scale, to gage perceptions about the music genre. As part of the focus group, open-ended questions were presented about Hip Hop music video content with themes of institutional racism. Data analysis verified individual and collective processes of social identity construction, delineating social agency versus oppression, and exploring the educational merits of Hip Hop. A remarkable result was how students reacted to satirical manifestations of discrimination in the videos with both laughter and indignation towards misogynistic motifs. This study demonstrates the need to further investigate Hip Hop in social work andragogy through critical discourse to uncover personal bias.