Just hold on

When the organizers of a violence prevention program for children and youth invited Dr. Adam Ellis to contribute a recorded lecture to their array of teaching resources, he wasn’t all that keen. Instead, he pitched a hip hop song.

“From a communication standpoint, it was really important for me to get the message out this way,” says Ellis, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies.

The song and a short film were created to speak to kids in grades six through nine about the pitfalls of gangs, crime and other social challenges they might encounter. Funded by Victim Services Durham Region, the 2024 Youth Violence Prevention Symposium wrapped up in early March. With last year’s symposium reaching approximately 30,000 Ontario students, the program has strong potential to engage children and youth in learning how to protect themselves from drifting into negative situations.

All five collaborators have lived experience of social marginalization that directly inform the lyrics of the song. It all came together organically, says Ellis, “with our past lives making it easier to accelerate what we were trying to achieve, because we all get it.” The result is Just Hold On. 

I was a beast in these streets
I blame the school system
Child of an immigrant livin the worse condition

Lived experience is key for studying and teaching these issues, and for Ellis, it’s a deal breaker. While researchers of social and other forms of marginalization may go into the community to gather stories for their studies, Ellis says this empirical methodology often leaves “no real pathways for those young people to tell their own stories.”

I feel ya pain
When they treating u like u strange-
An calling you outcha name-

He focuses both his scholarship and work as an artist-musician on youth criminology and systemic barriers to education. In a previous Waterloo story on his pedagogy, he talks about taking education out of the institution and engaging with youth where they are at — in every sense.

One of Ellis’ research goals it to create ways for the people who the subjects of studies to tell their own stories in the dissemination, and in this way contribute to institutional change. He’s using the example of creating Just Hold On in his forthcoming book, Know the Ledge: Taking on the University Industrial Complex, which “challenges mainstream research and pedagogy, including how the education system has blocked marginalized children/youth from ascending into post-secondary education.”

Turn a new page-
From this mental maze-
Shock the critics-
Break the mold-
You can do it-
Come out tha cold-
I know you’re strong-

Part of this work to decolonize education, says Ellis, is advocating to open the institution to more people who have experienced socio-economic marginalization. “I'm hoping to bring a whole bunch of people to the table, including artists and community.” Much of this is inspired by Indigenous communities, he adds. Ellis recently co-founded the Urban Art(z) Lab with the Jessica Rumboldt, Educational Developer, Indigenous Knowledges, with the Centre for Teaching Excellence at Waterloo, to explore decolonizing, arts-based methods as alternative ways of understanding and developing knowledge about social issues.

Contributing a hip hop song rather than a lecture for the violence prevention symposium is powerful example. “I'm showing how knowledge creation and mobilization looks different from people who are part of the hip hop community,” says Ellis. “We created the song to help young people see that they don't need to go down a certain path, and to keep education, and all the good things, as part of their lives.”