Alyssah Hall
As someone born and raised in Northern California in the ‘80s, Imani Kai Johnson, Ph.D. recalled coming up in a time where there was an emphasis on dance and pop culture, noting “Fame” and “Solid Gold” as early influences. Johnson always had an interest in dance, but didn’t recognize it as an area of study until later in life when she earned her Ph.D. in American Studies & Ethnicity.
Johnson didn’t have formal dance training, but had life experience and an appreciation for dance and music. She used to go out with her peers in high school and college and participate in casual social dances.
She is now an associate professor and vice chair of the department of dance, as well as an associate professor of the department of Black Study at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). Johnson, an author and interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in hip hop, the African Diaspora and global popular culture, has held her position at UCR since 2014.
The department of Black Study began offering classes last winter, making 2025 their first full year in operation under the new department.
“I had always been looking for positions in Black Study, which don’t always recognize the arts or dance,” Johnson said. She explained that the university doesn’t always think about the arts in relation to other subjects like politics. Dance is often dismissed as being a fun activity. But, the new department of Black Study takes a more serious approach when it comes to dance.
Before Johnson landed at UCR, she was pursuing her post graduate education and traveling back and forth between New York and California with a brief stint in Tennessee. Dance studies is not a large field and anyone who works in dance in any capacity is often adopted by the dance community, according to Johnson. Once she had finished her dissertation, she began looking for work and applying for fellowships. One fellowship she applied to included attending a retreat. Although she wasn’t awarded the fellowship, the retreat played a big role in how she came to UCR.
“[The retreat] introduced me to people of my generation in the field of dance studies who came up more formally through dance practices and programs…being in conversation with them was really helpful to better situate my research, and I met people who worked here [UCR], who were graduating from this program, and I ended up getting a visiting professorship for one quarter,” Johnson said.
Once UCR’s department of dance was able to hire full time, they were looking for an instructor who did ethnographic research, making Johnson qualified to fill that role. Johnson’s discipline focuses on social dance and considers questions of power. She wrote a book on the “ritual circle in international Hip Hop dance communities,” titled Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: the Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop.
“History is part of it, but I’m not a historian…it’s [the curriculum] like a close analysis of dance and ritual practices in the context of a cultural framework that gives philosophical insight and importance about life and living under various kinds of conditions,” Johnson described.
At UCR, Johnson appreciates being able to teach some of the most diverse classes, but recognizes a generational difference that didn’t exist earlier in her career. She attributes some of the differences to virtual learning during COVID where she had to teach students how to “talk to each other” again.
According to Johnson, many students who aren’t dance majors have taken one of Johnson’s dance classes because they thought it would be an easy A, and thought of it as dance appreciation. Johnson’s approach to the instruction of dance studies is often different from what most of her students know about traditional subjects.
“I recognize that’s how they’ve been trained, which means that they also then need space and room to risk or experiment or play a little without it being immediately negative for them,” Johnson explained. “Which means certain assignments, you get the points for doing the work, but you got to pay attention to my comments to get a sense of the quality of the work.”
“My time being here has also taught me how to teach in a way that de-emphasizes a points based — regurgitation based approach to ‘learning’ in favor of something more active. I don’t know if my approaches are always effective. I know some students get very nervous about that,” Johnson continued.
One previous class Johnson taught centered on dance cultures in the context of battling, not only in terms of competition. She encouraged students to think of protests as a form of battle. Johnson shared that choreography can engage the body in a way that interacts with the world, and how such choreography can go beyond stage entertainment.
Johnson believes that the current discussion around education does a disservice to students by dismissing or overlooking departments like dance or Black Study. Johnsons said even STEM disciplines recognize what they lose when students don’t know how to write or think independently.
“We live in a world that is, at least for the past several years, increasingly anti-intellectual and kind of myopic in what they think a college education is about. So, when we articulate an education as being about getting a job, you lose a lot of what actually goes into learning,” Johnson shared.
To Johnson, as an interdisciplinary scholar, disciplinary distinctions are not necessarily how people live. She said it’s important for students to think about their education in connection to their lives, the cultures they come from and what they want to do beyond their jobs.
“The era I grew up in, education was talked about as the thing that can’t be taken from you. I think for Black folk in particular, that’s very meaningful. So, if you reduce it to the skill set for a job that might be defunct in 20 years, what is the point of that?” Johnson stated.
Johnson wears many hats and is also the founder and co-host of the Show & Prove Hip Hop Studies Conference held in San Diego on May 31. The conference was created to forge a space for dialogue and exchange about hip hop among diverse communities of scholars and students of hip hop.
Before the fall semester rolls back around, Johnson will develop new syllabi for the department of Black Study that will allow her to continue her work in that department in a fuller way. Johnson enjoys working with graduate students who “are themselves” at the beginning of their careers, and helping them figure out what they want to do, what their projects are and what their research will be.