The Oxhorn Music Mix

The First Annual Hip Hop & Peacebuilding Festival is the brainchild of Stacy Willyard, is a George Mason University grad student at the Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution. The event is designed to bring together artists, diplomats, intellectuals & peacemakers from the US, Africa & the Middle East to increase understanding and awareness of political and social turmoil. The conference will focus on the role hip hop can play in empowering youth to speak out, organize and act to secure more peaceful future outcomes.

This conference represents everything good and awesome about this music. Hip Hop is a powerful art form and as such it has an incredible, if seldom recognized/realized, potential to be used for good. The medium can provide its practitioners an engaging forum to speak out about issues of real importance. And people listen. Whether or not the general populous is aware of this, real heads know it as truth.Consciously and conscientiously practiced Hip Hop is a positive influence on the communities in which it grows and provides otherwise disenfranchised youth with the means to affect real change on local and international levels. Hip Hop gives voice, gives direction, gives community, gives identity, gives understanding. Despite its somewhat sordid history, this art form can play an important role in peacemaking processes worldwide.The DC Hip Hop and Peacebuilding Festival represents the culmination of Stacy’s work with other GMU students, DC artists, and other foreign and domestic music groups to create a festival to promote co-existence and dialogue through Hip Hop. She is also a researcher at the United States Institute for Peace and is co-sponsoring the festival along with others such as Nomadic Wax, Rosetta Stoned, and Sol Productions, and GMU student group Project Nur. She deserves a hug, a handshake and a hardy round of applause.Word up.

Contact: transformationalart@gmail.com
Websitio: http://www.beats4peace.org/

Story by Ryn Burns

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