Hazim Hardeman

Biography

Hazim Hardeman, Philadelphia, graduated magna cum laude from Temple University in May with a concentration in strategic communication. He is Temple's first Rhodes Scholar. He grew up four blocks from Temple; his single mother found a way to enroll him in a better elementary school two hours away by public transportation but he had to return to his inner city high school. From there he attended the Community College of Philadelphia where he graduated with High Honors. His research interests include critical pedagogy, race and politics, and African-American intellectual history. He has written on hip hop music, gun control, and the prison abolition movement. He is a substitute teacher in the Philadelphia School District, was a fellow in the Philadelphia Mayor's Office of Community Empowerment, and took a course on death and dying with inmates in a prison hospice program. He explains that "arriving at truth through letting suffering speak" has been a guiding ideal.