Dr Kam Robinson Jones
Alumni, London College of Fashion UAL
Dr Kam Robinson Jones is a sociologist and interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of performance, costume, and cultural studies. She holds a PhD in Sociology and Cultural Studies from London College of Fashion, UAL. Her research spans scenography, costume, and dance of the African Diaspora, with a strong commitment to ethnographic methods and dismantling structural barriers to arts and cultural participation and education.
Her doctoral research explores how Hip-Hop dance performance operates through social, material, and spatial entanglements. Drawing on New Materialism – a theoretical approach that emphasises the active role of matter in shaping the world and the interconnectedness of human and non-human elements – she highlights the dynamic role of clothing, bodies, spaces, and technologies as co-constitutive participants in performance. Ethnographic methods support a “follow the actors” approach – attending to both human and non-human participants – and foreground community-based knowledge and collective creation, revealing Hip-Hop as a complex, multi-sited network shaped by multiplicity and performative identity. Through the lens of fashion and costume, this work provides a situated account of how notions of “freshness” and embodiment produce diverse, shifting expressions of race, gender, and locality in contemporary Hip-Hop dance.
Parris Goebel, New Zealand Choreographer and Director, holds hip-hop dance auditions at Jacksons Lane, London (2016)