BIography
Jabari “Naledge” Evans, Ph.D., has spent his career moving between hip-hop, technology, education, and scholarship, building a body of work that examines how culture can become a vehicle for expression, opportunity, and social change.
Best known as the MC and co-founder of the progressive hip-hop duo Kidz in the Hall, Evans was born in Cincinnati and raised on Chicago’s South Side from the age of two. The son of two Ph.D.-educated parents, he was an early and gifted writer, graduating as valedictorian of his high school class before attending the University of Pennsylvania. His interest in poetry and writing eventually found its way into hip-hop through his cousin Memo, a member of the Chicago production collective the Molemen, who encouraged him to turn his writing into rhymes.
While visiting Penn in 2000, Evans met DJ and producer Double O. The two became friends and musical collaborators, eventually forming Kidz in the Hall. After graduating from Penn in 2004 with a degree in Communication and Culture, Naledge released The College Graduate mixtape and began building momentum through a series of independent releases and an emerging online fanbase. Kidz in the Hall released their debut album, School Was My Hustle, through Rawkus Records in 2006 before signing with Duck Down Records. The duo went on to release several critically recognized projects, including The In Crowd, Land of Make Believe, and Occasion, while touring internationally and becoming fixtures of the late-2000s independent and alternative hip-hop landscape.
That experience also sparked a larger set of questions for Evans about creativity, technology, education, and the opportunities available to young people navigating rapidly changing media environments. He subsequently earned a Master of Social Work from the University of Southern California and a Ph.D. in Media, Technology and Society from Northwestern University, where he studied at the Center on Media and Human Development. He was also selected for a doctoral research internship with Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective.
Today, Evans is an Assistant Professor of Race and Media at the University of South Carolina and an MLK Visiting Scholar at MIT for the 2026–27 academic year. His research focuses on the relationships among race, media, technology, hip-hop, and creator culture, with particular attention to how young people of color use digital platforms and creative practices to develop identities, build communities, and pursue professional aspirations. He is also affiliated with Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and the blackBox Lab at Harvard Business School.
His 2025 book, Hip-Hop Civics: Connected Learning in the Classroom and Beyond, draws from his research with a hip-hop-based education program in Chicago Public Schools to examine how rap songwriting, digital media, and culturally relevant learning can create new pathways for student engagement and connected learning. His scholarship has appeared in publications including the International Journal of Communication, Journal of Global Hip Hop Studies, and Journal of Media Literacy Education, and his work has been recognized by the International Communication Association.
Across research, music, teaching, consulting, and public speaking, Evans brings together perspectives that are too often kept in separate rooms. His work is grounded in a simple idea: culture is not merely something to study or consume. It is something people use to understand themselves, build worlds, challenge institutions, and imagine what comes next.
Best known as the MC and co-founder of the progressive hip-hop duo Kidz in the Hall, Evans was born in Cincinnati and raised on Chicago’s South Side from the age of two. The son of two Ph.D.-educated parents, he was an early and gifted writer, graduating as valedictorian of his high school class before attending the University of Pennsylvania. His interest in poetry and writing eventually found its way into hip-hop through his cousin Memo, a member of the Chicago production collective the Molemen, who encouraged him to turn his writing into rhymes.
While visiting Penn in 2000, Evans met DJ and producer Double O. The two became friends and musical collaborators, eventually forming Kidz in the Hall. After graduating from Penn in 2004 with a degree in Communication and Culture, Naledge released The College Graduate mixtape and began building momentum through a series of independent releases and an emerging online fanbase. Kidz in the Hall released their debut album, School Was My Hustle, through Rawkus Records in 2006 before signing with Duck Down Records. The duo went on to release several critically recognized projects, including The In Crowd, Land of Make Believe, and Occasion, while touring internationally and becoming fixtures of the late-2000s independent and alternative hip-hop landscape.
That experience also sparked a larger set of questions for Evans about creativity, technology, education, and the opportunities available to young people navigating rapidly changing media environments. He subsequently earned a Master of Social Work from the University of Southern California and a Ph.D. in Media, Technology and Society from Northwestern University, where he studied at the Center on Media and Human Development. He was also selected for a doctoral research internship with Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective.
Today, Evans is an Assistant Professor of Race and Media at the University of South Carolina and an MLK Visiting Scholar at MIT for the 2026–27 academic year. His research focuses on the relationships among race, media, technology, hip-hop, and creator culture, with particular attention to how young people of color use digital platforms and creative practices to develop identities, build communities, and pursue professional aspirations. He is also affiliated with Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and the blackBox Lab at Harvard Business School.
His 2025 book, Hip-Hop Civics: Connected Learning in the Classroom and Beyond, draws from his research with a hip-hop-based education program in Chicago Public Schools to examine how rap songwriting, digital media, and culturally relevant learning can create new pathways for student engagement and connected learning. His scholarship has appeared in publications including the International Journal of Communication, Journal of Global Hip Hop Studies, and Journal of Media Literacy Education, and his work has been recognized by the International Communication Association.
Across research, music, teaching, consulting, and public speaking, Evans brings together perspectives that are too often kept in separate rooms. His work is grounded in a simple idea: culture is not merely something to study or consume. It is something people use to understand themselves, build worlds, challenge institutions, and imagine what comes next.
Book Projects:
Hip-Hop Civics (2025; University of Michigan Press) is an ethnographic study of a hip-hop-based education (HHBE) program administered by a local nonprofit in two of Chicago’s lowest performing schools. The manuscript explores the program’s impact on middle-school-age students as well as the teacher artists who taught them. The project is articulating the claim that Black youth, particularly those from low-income areas, should be both allowed and encouraged to learn digital media literacy and develop critical thinking schools in a curriculum centered on (an aspect of) their culture, hip-hop, and that their experience, and that of the program, should be extrapolated to “core” or formal education contexts.
Drill Rap, Sex Work and the Digital Underground: (Clout)chasing on Chicago's Southside (2024; Rowman and Littlefield) is a collection of empirical papers which deal with the “always on” nature of social media for Drill Hip-Hop musicians, who often are tasked with keeping constant connection between multiple platforms to affirm their street authenticity locally and promote themselves to an imaginary audience of global Hip-Hop fans. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and several interviews with prominent members of Chicago’s Hip-Hop scene, this study examines the role of social media as an economic resource in their artistic labor. Clout was a term that was heavily used by respondents to refer to the way they measured their influence on social media according to counts of likes, views, re-posts and followers. Ultimately, I argue that Black youth of Drill effectively use Hip-Hop cultural norms to harness the power of clout and gain individual celebrity but often with ambivalence over unwanted surveillance of their private lives and the need to rely on negative stereotypes as central to their identities.
