Dr. Dawn-Elissa Fischer

In the Department of Africana Studies at San Francisco State University, Dr. Dawn-Elissa Fischer is an Associate Professor and she teaches courses on international Black popular culture, information technology and visual ethnography. Thanks to the support of the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship, she is completing two manuscripts entitled Blackness, Race and Gender Politics in Japanese Hiphop and Methods to Floss, Theories to Flow: Hiphop Research, Aesthetics and Activism (an introductory textbook).  Her work has been published in Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Transforming Anthropology, FIRE!!! The Multimedia Journal of Black Studies and The Western Journal of Black Studies.

Dr. Fischer co-produced a short film, Nihon Style, with Bianca White, which documents an annual Hiphop festival and its related organizations in Japan. She co-directs the BAHHRS (the Bay Area Hip Hop Research and Scholarship) project with Dave “Davey D” Cook, which was awarded the Cesar Chavez Institute’s Community-University Empowerment Grant.  Dr. Fischer is a founding staff member of Dr. Marcyliena Morgan’s Hiphop Archive as well as a co-founder of the National Hip Hop Political Convention.

ischer’s motto remains “Edutainment4Life,” which is the name of a non-profit that she began with her mother, Cheryl Fischer, who founded the organization, Kuumba na Umoja (Swahili for “Creativity and Unity”). Edutainment4Life is intended to remind us all about the importance of lifelong learning and life skills development. These include the centrality of “radical acts of self-care” (cf., Audre Lorde), “DMP: deep mirroring pedagogy” (TM by Durryle Brooks), “the three ends” of Black empowerment as “self-determination, self-respect, self-defense” (cf., the Kawaida/ the Karengas) and how “Black lives matter” (cf. Alicia Garza et al) because beyond the “Black experience lies the human experience” (cf., St. Clair Drake).

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