KMDI Speaker Series – Blowin’ Up: Rap Dreams in South Central by Dr. Jooyoung Lee

Dr. Jooyoung Lee from the Department of Sociology will give a talk on his recently published book Blowin’ Up: Rap Dreams in South Central (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

“Blowin’ Up: Rap Dreams in South Central  is a long-term ethnographic study of young Black men growing up in the shadows of gang violence and the glittering entertainment industries in Los Angeles. This book shows how hip hop culture shields young men from the dangers of gang violence. It also reveals the larger structural forces that inspire ‘existential urgency’ during the transition to adulthood” – Department of Sociology, University of Toronto.

Jooyoung Lee is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the University of Toronto. He is also Senior Fellow in the Yale University Urban Ethnography Project. Previously, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D in Sociology from UCLA and received funding from the American Sociological Association’s Minority Fellowship Program. In addition to Blowin’ Up, he is also author of Gunshot, a book-in-progress about the everyday lives of gunshot victims in Philadelphia.

Check out Dr. Lee’s TEDxUofT Talk here before the KMDI talk on May 25.

RSVP required: kmdimay25.eventbrite.com