Derrick P. Alridge is an associate professor in the college of education at the University of Georgia. He wrote “From Civil Rights to Hiphop: Toward a Nexus of Ideas,” an article in the 2005 Journal of African American History (Vol. 90).

Michael Shermer, author of The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (2011), wrote a June 7, 2011, column in New Scientist explaining that for both religious and secular people, apocalyptic thinking is spurred by a desire to bring order to the randomness of events.

Charles E. Jones chairs the African-American studies at Georgia State University. He recently took part in the second annual Hiphop Summit Behind Prison Walls at the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ USP Coleman II high-security prison near Ocala, Fla., where participants discussed the role of hiphop in crime and violence in black communities.

Brad Mathias is president of Bema Media LLC, the parent company of iShine, the world’s largest preteen Christian media group in Nashville. He can discuss the hiphop genre of Christian music.

Dr. Layli Phillips is executive director of the Wellesley Centers for Women in Wellesley, Mass. She was formerly the associate professor of women’s studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she is also a faculty affiliate in the African-American studies department. Her teaching and research are on women and hiphop, womanism, black feminism and black […]

Read a March 9, 2012, ABC news story about an online post in which Harold Camping acknowledged being wrong about a 2011 doomsday.

Dr. Dawn-Elissa Fischer is an associate professor in the department of africana studies at San Francisco State University. She teaches courses on international Black popular culture, information technology and visual ethnography. She was the education outreach coordinator for Stanford University’s Hiphop Archive and the founder of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention. She works with youth in […]

Read a Nov. 13, 2012, article from The Sun in San Bernardino, Calif., about NASA rebutting doomsday claims based on the Mayan calendar

James Scandrick directs the Institute on Black Church Sacred Music and Worship at Nashville’s American Baptist College.