Lectures in Music Studies: Stevie "Dr. View" Johnson, Ohio State

Stevie "Dr. View" Johnson, assistant professor of creative practice in popular music, The Ohio State University, presents "What does Scholarship Sounds Like? Hip-Hop, Music Education, and Reimagining the Academic Book."

What happens when the music is not simply the subject of scholarship, but the scholarship itself? Drawing from Curriculum of the Mind — a Hip-Hop album and multimedia e-book published by the University of Michigan Press that brings together original music, lyrics, video, storytelling, and written scholarship as interconnected forms of research — Stevie “Dr. View” Johnson explores Hip-Hop as a scholarly praxis that challenges conventional distinctions between research, composition, performance, teaching, and publication.

This lecture considers how sampling, beatmaking, collaboration, storytelling, sound, and performance can function as methods of inquiry and knowledge production alongside — and in conversation with — more traditional forms of musical scholarship. Johnson will also reflect on the process of transforming Curriculum of the Mind from a Hip-Hop album and nontraditional dissertation into an open-access academic publication with the University of Michigan Press, examining both the possibilities and complexities of publishing scholarship whose breadth cannot be fully represented through text alone.

Through music, lyrics, video, written scholarship, and other digital materials, Curriculum of the Mind raises a larger question for music education: If music is one of the ways we understand the world, why must our scholarship about music primarily live on the page?

Stevie "Dr. View" Johnson is assistant professor of Creative Practice in Popular Music at The Ohio State University, where his research explores Hip Hop studies, Black sound, creative practice, and community-engaged scholarship. He is the founder of SOUSE, a performance-research platform that positions DJing as a method of inquiry, cultural preservation, and public scholarship. Dr. View earned his PhD in Higher Education Administration from the University of Oklahoma, where his dissertation, "Curriculum of the Mind," became the first non-traditional dissertation to receive the Association for the Study of Higher Education's (ASHE) Bobby Wright Dissertation of the Year Award. The project has since been reimagined as an interactive e-book published by the University of Michigan Press. Dr. View is the founder and executive producer of Fire in Little Africa, the Motown-released multimedia project inspired by Black Wall Street and was named the 2023 Nasir Jones Hip Hop Fellow at Harvard University.