UNSW School of Art & Design
Hip Hop collaborations can promote women’s activism and community-led change
The Hip Hop cypher can foster women’s solidarity, addressing issues across race, class, gender and community.
Published on the 20 July 2026
Tsidi Bang Bang recording 'Imbokodo Rise' at Chillie Fly Studios in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Photo: Supplied
Hip Hop collaborations can empower women’s activism and promote community-led change, says Dr Sudiipta Dowsett from UNSW’s School of Art & Design.
Dr Dowsett’s research explores how artists in South Africa and Australia use Hip Hop to make sense of and navigate complex neo-colonial contexts.
“Hip Hop has capacities to revitalise language and culture, enabling communities to remix, assert and claim their place in the world,” says the socio-cultural anthropologist and hip-hop artist.
While Hip Hop remains male dominated, its practices can help foster women’s solidarity, she says. “This solidarity is not based solely on common identity, but rather an ethical commitment to recognise and work across difference.”
Research has shown synchronised bodies in motion blur the distinction between self and other, fostering cooperative behaviour and compassion.
“Collaborative songwriting and studio jams can build transformative connections through words, ideas, narrative and collective embodied rhythmic activity.”
Dr Dowsett grew up in rural NSW in a community that valued collective ownership, self-sufficiency and alternative lifestyles. Hip Hop proved integral to finding her voice.
“Moving to the city and encountering mainstream white Australian culture was a shock to my system. Composing rap as I walked through the city was a powerful means of reorienting my bush-kid sensibilities to the earth beneath.”
Dr Dowsett met South African activist Hip Hop collective Soundz of the South (Soundz) in 2008. They have collaborated on several projects, most recently “Rebel Sistah Cypher”: Hip Hop as Embodied Practice for Social Change in 2023.
The practice-based research, funded by the Freilich Project for the Study of Bigotry, used dialogue and collaborative songwriting to document female Hip Hop artists’ experiences through the cypher.
A cypher is a circle of rappers, beatboxers or dancers that often emerges organically at Hip Hop events when someone starts rhyming and a crowd gathers.
“Emcees take turns rapping to a beat in the centre, trying to keep the flow going to the rhythm of a beatbox, instrumental-style beats made with the mouth,” Dr Dowsett says.
Soundz is based in Khayelitsha on the outskirts of Cape Town. It has hosted Rebel Sistah Cypher, a space for female Hip Hop artists and poets to ‘perform critique’, addressing pressing social issues faced by their communities, since 2015.
“Rebel Sistah Cypher expands the definition of the cypher, building collective and feminist Hip Hop-based knowledge with the practice of the rap cypher at its heart.”
Project participants engaged in discussion workshops and one-on-one interviews, co-writing and producing the song 'Imbokodo Rise'. ‘Imbokodo’ means a rock or grinding stone in isiZulu/isiXhosa; it symbolises the enduring strength and resilience of women.
This phrase comes from a chant made famous in a 1956 women’s march in Pretoria to protest racist, oppressive apartheid laws.
Nonceba Terblanche, aka Millz the First, from Soundz says: “The lyrics of each of our verses reflect our different, collective and shared perspectives, stories, experiences of, in this case, living under patriarchy”.
Mapping experiences and issues affecting women’s participation
Hip Hop events in Khayelitsha are deeply embedded in the everyday, Dr Dowsett says.
“Hip Hop artists create change in their communities by changing what happens there and providing a physical interactive context for storytelling, social commentary and the exchange of ideas.”
The project examined how the cypher helps Khayelitsha women address racism, sexism, economic oppression and the lasting effects of colonialism and apartheid within their township.
“[Cape Town] is one of the toughest places in the world to grow up in, especially as a young woman,” says Ms Terblanche. “The education system is basic and doesn’t allow anyone to grow. Gender-based violence and crime are the norm.
“[Moving from the Eastern Cape] I found music as an escape and activism as a way to educate and spread awareness about everything that the working-class people go through every day.”
The project itself demonstrated the reasons why it’s difficult for women to participate in Hip Hop, in public life, in community organising and activism.
Common issues included safety affecting transport access to events, being sole-providers, caring roles and responsibilities, gendered expectations and sexism within the township, Hip Hop and activist communities.
“We negotiated and renegotiated child-care and other family responsibilities, had children and babies with us most of the time,” Dr Dowsett said.
Project participants co-wrote the song 'Imbokodo Rise'; ‘Imbokodo’ means a grinding stone, symbolising women’s strength and resilience. Image: Supplied.
Collaborative Hip Hop as research method and output
The research methods built on prior collaborations; on the African philosophy of ubuntu, prioritising compassionate interconnection or “I am because we are”; and African models of dialogue, such as isiXhosa unkundla, or communal gathering, which some Hip Hop artists in Khayelitsha had previously connected to the Hip Hop cypher.
Rebel Sistah Cypher centres ‘Knowledge of Self’ within the collective, Dr Dowsett says. “It promotes what B-Girl and Hip Hop scholar Imani Kai Johnson calls ‘badass femininity’.
“Badass femininity in Hip Hop enables women to access qualities that aren’t necessarily socially acceptable or associated with conventional norms of femininity.”
San Diego-based B-Girl Chyna describes this: “Breaking is an opportunity to talk shit, be angry, and be a badass, and it’s cool.”
Rebel Sistah Cypher then becomes a site of feminist empowerment built on empathic listening, Dr Dowsett says. “Dialogue leading up to the studio recording built trust through stories shared and tears shed and an openness to dialogue and disagreement.”
Collaborative songwriting involves responsibilities to other emcees on the track; it relies on shifting authority, leadership, creative direction and critical feedback in real time, she says. “This flips or at least levels the power dynamics between researcher and researched.
“The songwriting also allows for creative expression of the otherwise inexplicable, the things in experience that escape formal interviews and dialogue. Things that can only to be expressed in metaphor and can only be unpacked over time, left open to ongoing interpretation.”
Collaborative songwriting and studio jams build transformative connections. Photo: Supplied.
The feminist ethics of care within the Hip Hop studio
The studio session took place over an afternoon at Chillie Fly Studios in an informal settlement in Khayelitsha. Participants worked with an instrumental beat provided by Australian producer Monkey Marc.
“There was a collective energy, focus, industriousness and dedication as we all got to work writing. The beat played on a loop; the mood turned introspective.
“Then as each artist recorded their verse, the focus shifted from the recent challenges to a shared growing satisfaction with the evolving song and creative energy.”
Participants expressed their appreciation for each other’s unique style and contribution; the organic progression of the song; and the layering of verse after verse as they passed the mic to each other, just like a cypher.
“We took turns, not completely as separate bodies, but yes, of course, as different personalities, identities, each bringing individual style, life story, individual and shared experience into the verse.
“The most immediate impact of the project was the shared sense of pride and healing the song produced.”
This collective meaning-making, built through mutual support and a blurring of self/other, can be understood as a feminist ethics of care, she says.
“Not merely personal or domestic, [care becomes] a political framework that values interdependence, attentiveness and nurturing others.”
Tsidi Bang Bang recording 'Imbokodo Rise' at Chillie Fly Studios in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Photo: Supplied.
Community-led research for ongoing impact
The project prioritised relationships and codesign, enabling artists to shape and access research outputs according to their own needs.
One artist, Tsidi Bang Bang, requested a copy of her recorded interview to use in community Gender Based Violence (GBV) workshops.
“She felt it best explained how she uses Hip Hop in activism and provided an accessible media tool for her participants along with the song 'Imbokodo Rise'.
“In her verse, she sings a catchphrase from South African GBV campaigning: ‘our bodies will never be a crime scene’.”
The collaboration has also led to co-teaching: a trickle-up effect from the field to the classroom. In 2026, Ms Terblanche featured in a two-day intensive course at the Cologne Hip Hop Institute as part of Dr Dowsett’s international lectureship.
Rebel Sistah Cypher enacts a form of feminist world-making, where voice, vulnerability and relationship are central, features we centred in our co-teaching session during the weekend course, Dr Dowsett says.
“It’s a space where women co-produce knowledge, hold space for one another’s stories, and collectively shape sonic rhythmic expressions of lived experience. Music becomes both a product and a practice of social transformation.”
The project documents female Hip Hop artists’ experiences through the cypher. Pictured: Tsidi Bang Bang, Diamond the Rose and Millz the First. Photo: Supplied.
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