Christine Pash, PhD Student

Justine Walker (she/her)is a PhD student in Critical Music Studies, a drummer, and a dog aficionado. She holds a BMus in Performance Studies (2018) and an M.A. in Music & Culture (spec. in African Studies) (2024) from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

Her M.A. thesis, “Anti-Rap or Anti-Black?: A Critical Examination of White Moral Panic in Response to West Coast Gangsta Rap,” historicizes larger patterns of a white-American status quo’s anti-Blackness (feigned as “moral panic”) toward the development, emergence, and popularity of Black American musical formations leading up to the advent of hip hop. Her research demonstrates how America’s legacy of outright white supremacy toward Black Americans and Afrological musics have mutated into covert forms of “socially acceptable” panics toward hip hop cultures, rap practices, Black sonic epistemologies, and Black communities more broadly.

Justine is currently researching hip hop (her)stories/feminisms, liminalization/marginalization, and hip hop’s autoethnographic methods as epistemological formation. Her research is informed by Black radical traditions/historiographies, race-based epistemologies, Afro-diasporic methodologies, and anti-racist, intersectional, and decolonial approaches.