Owen Kohl

Kohl’s anthropological research explores media-making and different social imaginations of home, including exclusivist visions of homeland. He asks how communication technologies intersect with dynamic understandings of belonging and power, both in the contemporary US and after socialist Yugoslavia’s dismemberment. His extensive teaching is interwoven with themes from an emergent manuscript: Were the Balkans Made for Rap? A Domestic Hip-Hop Primer. These considerations of media politics now extend to analyzing news and crisis narratives.

Book Chapters:

• Kohl, Owen and Dragana Cvetanović. 2024. “Stacking Nightingales, Male Tears, and Albums of the Year: How the Balkans and Other Scales of Domestic Hip-Hop Are Crafted” in Routledge Handbook of Popular Music and Politics of the Balkans, edited by Catherine Baker. New York, NY: Routledge.

• Kohl, Owen and Dragana Cvetanović. 2023. “Traces of Solidarity and Breakdown: Scales of Domestic Collection in Post-Yugoslav Hip Hop Fanzines and Mixtapes” in Hip Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production, edited by Mark V. Campbell and Murray Forman. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books.

Other Publications:  

• Kohl, Owen and Ilana Gershon. 2021. “Media as Channel” in The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, edited by James Stanlaw. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

• Kohl, Owen and Falina Enriquez. 2021. “Introduction: The MultiRepository (A database tool for qualitative researchers, pedagogues, and their students).” Platypus, the CASTAC Blog (Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing). October 14.

• Kunreuther, Laura and Owen Kohl. 2020. “Feeling the Voice: Affect, Media, and Communication” in The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion, edited by James W. Wilce, Janina Fenigsen, and Sonya E. Pritzker. New York, NY: Routledge. 

• Kohl, Owen. 2016. “Debating the Industrial Limits of Domestic Hip Hop.” Signs and Society Fall (2).