Academics like it like that, too. The Association of Black Sociologists hosted its annual conference in Philadelphia last week and kicked off day one (Aug. 9) with a panel on Cardi B.

Titled "Invasion of Privacy: The Sociology of Cardi B," the panel featured five speakers discussing new papers analyzing, among other things, the nit-picking and policing of Cardi's blackness, the ways white media portrays black women, and Cardi and Offset's complicated childbearing decision.

Moderator Candice C. Robinson, a graduate assistant at the University of Pittsburgh, explained during the panel that the outspoken Afro-Latinx stripper-turned-pop star is, unsurprisingly, a useful case study when discussing race, gender, media, respectability politics and more.

“When I teach, I use a lot of Cardi B examples because she crosses over into a lot of communities," Robinson said, per The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Aaryn Green, a doctoral candidate who visited the panel, said figures like Cardi B serve as positive role models for young women coping with racial and social issues in America.

“These are the girls who taught me how to navigate the matrices of oppression,” Green said. “Teaching me how, as a black girl and a black woman, to avoid these pitfalls.”

Unfortunately, the five sociology papers discussed are not yet publicly viewable, as far as we can tell, but you can read their titles and authors here.

The panel is just the latest example of academic research into contemporary black pop artists. In recent years, universities have launched courses on Jay-Z and Kanye West (University of Missouri), Outkast (Armstrong State University) and Frank Ocean (University of California, Berkeley). Q-Tip, for his part, will be co-teaching a jazz history course at New York University this fall.

You can read XXL's 2017 interview with Cardi, which was cited during the panel, here.

See Cardi B's Different Looks in 2018

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