99.9% of aspiring rappers never make it in the music industry. So why do we only hear the stories of the ones who do? DVS Mindz might be the greatest rap group you’ve never heard of. Formed in Topeka, Kansas, in the mid-1990s, they developed a reputation for ferocious rhyming and frenetic live performances. In their heyday, DVS Mindz released a critically acclaimed CD, received nominations for prestigious awards, and opened for legends such as Wu-Tang Clan, Run-DMC, and De La Soul as well as KC icon Tech N9ne. But the group struggled with creative differences, substance abuse, ego battles, and money issues, and they split up in 2003. Geoff Harkness takes readers on a unique two-decade journey alongside the members of DVS Mindz, chronicling their childhoods, their brush with success, and what became of them in the years that followed. Based on more than one hundred hours of video and audio recordings from 1999 to 2022, this fly-on-the-wall account offers a backstage pass into the recording studios and radio stations, video shoots and house parties, nightclubs and concert halls of the Kansas City-Lawrence-Topeka music scene circa 2000. DVS Mindz is at once a compulsively readable group biography of four talented MCs, a vibrant voyage through the forgotten history of local hip hop, and a breathtakingly real story of struggling to achieve big dreams.

On September 4, 2012, Joseph Coleman, an eighteen-year-old aspiring gangsta rapper, was gunned down in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. Police immediately began investigating the connections between Coleman’s murder and an online war of words and music he was having with another Chicago rapper in a rival gang. In Chicago Hustle and Flow, Geoff Harkness points out how common this type of incident can be when rap groups form as extensions of gangs. Gangs and rap music, he argues, can be a deadly combination. Set in one of the largest underground music scenes in the nation, this book takes readers into the heart of gangsta rap culture in Chicago. From the electric buzz of nightclubs to the sights and sounds of bedroom recording studios, Harkness presents gripping accounts of the lives, beliefs, and ambitions of the gang members and rappers with whom he spent six years. A music genre obsessed with authenticity, gangsta rap promised those from crime-infested neighborhoods a ticket out of poverty. But while firsthand experiences with gangs and crime gave rappers a leg up, it also meant carrying weapons and traveling collectively for protection. Street gangs serve as a fan base and provide protection to rappers who bring in income and help to recruit for the gang. In examining this symbiotic relationship, Chicago Hustle and Flow ultimately illustrates how class stratification creates and maintains inequalities, even at the level of a local rap-music scene.

A multi-author exploration of contemporary challenges in leadership, team building, and conflict, through the lens of the superhero genre. In the past decade, heroes and villains spawned from the pages of comic books have upended popular culture and revolutionized the entertainment industry. The narratives weave together a multitude of complementary and sometimes competing storylines, spun across decades, generations, and mediums, forming a complex tapestry that simultaneously captures the imagination and captivates the mind. These stories reveal our own vulnerabilities while casting an ideal to which we aspire. They pull at our deepest emotions and push us to the cusp of reality, and bring us back to Earth with a renewed hope of a better tomorrow. They are an endless source of powerful metaphors to help us learn and develop, then be the best versions of ourselves possible. Through the lens of the superhero genre, each chapter explores contemporary challenges in leadership, team building, and conflict, while emphasizing the role of humanity and human nature in our own world. Contributors: Ian Boley, Jo Brick, Mitch Brian, Max Brooks, Mike Burke, Kelsey Cipolla, Amelia Cohen-Levy, Mick Cook, Jeff Drake, Clara Engle, Candice Frost, Ronald Granieri, PhD, Heather S, Gregg, PhD, James Groves, Geoff Harkness, PhD, Theresa Hitchens, Kayla Hodges, Cory Hollon, PhD, Joshua Huminski, Erica Iverson, Alyssa Jones, Mathew Klickstein, Jonathan Klug, Matt Lancaster, Steve Leonard, Karolyn McEwen, Eric Muirhead, Jon Niccum, Kera Rolsen, Mick Ryan, Julie Still, Patrick Sullivan, Aaron Rahsaan Thomas, Dan Ward, Janeen Webb, PhD.

Winner of the 2019-20 Distinguished Book Award - Midwest Sociological Society In Lesson Plans, Judson G. Everitt takes readers into the everyday worlds of teacher training, and reveals the complexities and dilemmas teacher candidates confront as they learn how to perform a job that many people assume anybody can do. Using rich qualitative data, Everitt analyzes how people make sense of their prospective jobs as teachers, and how their introduction to this profession is shaped by the institutionalized rules and practices of higher education, K-12 education, and gender. Trained to constantly adapt to various contingencies that routinely arise in schools and classrooms, teacher candidates learn that they must continually try to reconcile the competing expectations of their jobs to meet students’ needs in an era of accountability. Lesson Plans reveals how institutions shape the ways we produce teachers, and how new teachers make sense of the multiple and complicated demands they face in their efforts to educate students.