Electric Relaxation: Hip Hop Therapy Comes to Fordham

Fordham hosts day-long ‘One Mic, One Movement’ conference featuring guest speakers and performances

(Mike Madden/The Observer)

By MIKE MADDEN
February 5, 2012

On Feb. 4, Fordham opened its doors to welcome in ‘One Mic, One Movement,’ a conference dedicated to the psychological benefits found in hip-hop music and culture through performance, lyricism, music and spoken-word. The student-organized event was presented in collaboration with Dr. Edgar H. Tyson, founder of Hip Hop Therapy and assistant professor in the Graduate School of Business at Fordham, three doctoral graduate students, as well as the Graduate School of Social Service at Fordham.

“Hip-hop-based interventions have received significant attention in literature and yet there has not been a conference solely dedicated to this unique aspect,” Tyson said. Throughout the event, some of the seminars included were “The Hero’s Journey in Hip-Hop and its Application in Music Therapy” and “Poetic Justice: Expressing the Philosophical, Spiritual, and Psychological Underpinnings of Social Justice Narratives from Three Urban Scholar-Artists.”

At the end of the day, the ‘One Mic, One Movement’ concert took to the stage of Pope Auditorium, giving a number of artists the opportunity to express in their own way how hip-hop has helped them, whether it’s being confined to a wheelchair such as rapper 4Wheel City or how they’ve made it successively out of rehab like Brandon (B-Dot) Cromwell did.