Friendship, Love, and Hip Hop

Friendship, Love, and Hip Hop investigates how young Black men live and change inside a mental institution in contemporary America. While the youth in Hejtmanek's study face the rigidity of institutionalized life, they also productively maneuver through what the author analyzes as the 'give' - friendship, love, and hip hop - in the system.

"This remarkable study takes us deep into the intersection of custody and race in the United States and offers a fresh and surprising perspective. By becoming a full-time resident at the treatment facility she studied, Hejtmanek goes where most institutional ethnographers have not. A must-read for anyone interested in the meaning of confinement." - Lorna A Rhodes, Professor Emeritus, University of Washington, USA, and author of Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison (2004) and Emptying Beds: The Work of An Emergency Psychiatric Unit (1995)

"With Friendship, Love, and Hip Hop, Hejtmanek has written the definitive ethnographic study on the psychiatric implications of a society organized around particular (and particularly biased) assumptions about race, gender, and the potentially therapeutic value of specific forms of popular culture. Demonstrating the importance of an anthropological approach that can link larger macrostructural contexts to the most intimate of interpersonal ties, Hejtmanek tells us a truly compelling (and up to this point under-appreciated) social scientific story about how and why questions of racialization are key to understanding the cultural coordinates of mental/psychological well-being in the twenty-first century. This well-written and convincingly argued book is easy to teach and a vital contribution to the literature. A genuine must-read for anyone interested in the most nuanced research situated at the nexus where critical race theory meets psychological anthropology." - John L. Jackson, Jr., Dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, USA and co-author of Impolite Conversations: On Race, Politics, Sex, Money, and Religion (2014)

Katie Rose Hejtmanek is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology and Children and Youth Studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA.