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This ethnographic research on embodied hip hop pedagogies bridges the fields of dance studies, hip hop, and education. This dissertation sheds light on the transgressive possibilities of embodied hip hop pedagogies, a curricular and pedagogical model I developed, which resists traditional Western teaching and learning systems by placing students’ realities at the center and capitalizing on the multidisciplinary, kinesthetic, and engaged nature of hip hop culture.In this dissertation, I perform choreographic readings of Western pedagogical and institutional spaces such as missionary buildings or classrooms and participate in action research in schools in the Inland Empire. I am particularly interested in the tensions between hip hop and Western hegemonic epistemologies. My analysis focuses on how bodies navigate their agency in these Western institutional spaces and how they resist and challenge such spaces through movement and hip hop.This research introduces the concepts of choreography of the classroom and critical moving and reinterprets the concept of the otherwise through a new valance (otherwise cypher, call-and-response and knowledge otherwise). The overall aim of this dissertation is to improve the current Eurocentric and disembodied culture of education through hip hop and movement. Embodied hip hop pedagogies can help future scholars, educators, and community leaders connect with students through popular culture and non-static teaching and learning. By placing hip hop—an African diasporic and once marginalized culture— and movement at the center of the curriculum, this research helps legitimize non-dominant knowledges, challenges the Cartesian mind and body split, and revalidates people’ s identities, narratives, and bodies.

My dissertation is focused on one question from different cultural and historical sites: what is a perpetual state of emergency and how is it used to enact state violence? Generally, I hope for this dissertation to stage an intervention in, and to open questions and investigations around, violence, condemnation, ethics, and the law. More specifically, through this project I seek to read explicit legal state violence in post-Revolutionary Iran to elucidate more implicit legal state violence in the contemporary U.S. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the state does not conceal that it functions as what Édouard Glissant calls a “root model” with hierarchical and fixed moral parameters determining the laws of the country; in fact, the government publicly touts its widespread deployment of violence in order to deter individuals—condemned as enemies—who may try to deviate from, or challenge, the laws. In the U.S., the state rhetorically reinvents seemingly new crises—such as the War on Drugs—to sustain the notion of an enemy warranting the state’s use of violence. While I investigate published texts that pertain to the U.S. system, I have chosen to examine Iranian cinema—rather than published texts—as a venue for critical discourse addressing the issue of state violence. Ultimately, this project proposes the following inquiries: how can a reading of state violence—legal, juridical, rhetorical, and physical—in post-Revolutionary Iran elucidate concealed state violence in the contemporary U.S.? What is at stake when one compares U.S. legal and juridical systems with those of the Islamic Republic of Iran? How can our relation to law be critically and creatively re-imagined?