The RAP CLASS

One of RAP’s goals is to facilitate dialogue with students about the intersection of race, arts, and urban space. Many of the RAP faculty have taught such courses for years, as can be found on their websites.

We also created the self-titled RAP class in 2017. The class syllabus not only offers frameworks for students but is organized for them to contribute and uplift the work of our partners through their scholarship. They have created oral history media projects archived at USC library, including the oral histories from our symposia on the 25th anniversary of the 1992 LA civil unrest.

BENDING SPACE

One of the lessons we learned as we reviewed RAP’s years is that each of our partners in one way or another must magically bend space in order to contend with our racialized landscape. These space bending practices have included imaginative defiance of distance, inverting the divide between public and private spaces, and casting seeds to break concrete for future pathways… Bending space, RAP members have used art and culture to break through isolation, to re-make places of belonging, and to occupy the city and live with radical joy.

To learn more about these practices view the multi-media websites created by the remarkable 2022 RAP class grad students. They had deep experience and passions about the intersection of race, arts, and place coming into the class and share the significance of particular community partners and how they bend space.