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Graffiti art and street art have been increasingly described as an artistic movement, with a constant presence in the streets, but also in galleries and museums. In this article we use the term urban art to define this institutionalized category, originating from informal street expressions. In the specific context of the city of São Paulo (Brazil), most of the social actors that make up this art world have backgrounds linked to graffiti and pixação. These two urban subcultures are linked to informal forms of appropriation of the urban space through illicit inscriptions. In this article, we aim, on the one hand, to describe the features and singularities of urban art as an emerging art world and, on the other, to understand how careers are developed in this universe. The empirical data derives from a qualitative research (in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation) developed during the past three years.

This article is a study of a sample of eighteen animal rights graffiti slogans that were chalked on the walls of a tunnel known as Potterow Port near the main University of Edinburgh campus, in Scotland, in February 2020. The purpose of the article is to interrogate the implicit ideological commitments underpinning the graffiti slogans, the rhetorical aims of their authors and the linguistic devices and structures they used to achieve their goals. These three dimensions of the slogans are analysed using an inter-disciplinary framework inspired by work on discourse and ideology, recent studies of graffiti slogans in protest contexts and important contributions to the animal rights canon. Regarding the ideological underpinnings of the slogans, the study reveals four core concepts that it argues are central to contemporary vegan thought: the speciesist relationship between human and non-human animals; species egalitarianism; the vegan imperative; and a commitment to non-violent direct action. In addition to these core beliefs, it detects the presence in the slogans of adherence to adjacent values and ideals such as love, compassion and respect for life, attempts to thicken vegan ideology by reaching out to environmentalism and the peace movement and tension around the moral basis for adopting vegan practices. The interconnected conceptual map that lies at the heart of contemporary veganism has emerged, it argues, in response to ‘dislocations’ in human/animal relations and within the animal advocacy movement, between advocates of a welfarist response to animal exploitation and those such as the authors of the graffiti slogans committed to a more radical, vegan inspired solution to animal oppression.

Past research on bathroom graffiti (latrinalia) has utilized disparate collection and analysis methodologies. Here, we seek to devise a rigorous, unified methodological framework for the collection and analysis of latrinalia. We begin by reviewing the disjointed methodological approaches and findings of previous research on bathroom graffiti in order to trace the limitations which prevent generalizability across datasets in comparable, meaningful ways. We also target some of the specific arguments and research questions presented in previous studies. Then, using study of bathroom graffiti, we sketch a replicable, scalable methodological framework for studying bathroom graffiti in order to analyze the discourse of a large corpus of latrinalia collected from the bathrooms of George Mason University in Virginia. This article as a whole illustrates that until the field aligns collection and analysis methods – defining what constitutes discourse, collecting data from male and female bathrooms, and accounting for the number of buildings, restrooms, and stalls – the seminal questions of the field will never be adequately addressed. We conclude by discussing the limitations of our research design and pointing toward potential future directions in latrinalia research.

Urban art has emerged as a new feature of cities in recent decades. Its wide success as a fresh, youthful, and cosmopolitan artistic movement has elicited the attention of urban planners, who increasingly use it in their strategies for urban development. This artistic expression has been understood as a resource to be used in urban and cultural policymaking, especially when it comes to urban reassessment and marketing. This dynamic is embedded in a paradigm where the arts and culture are increasingly understood as resources for urban development and city marketing. In this article, we draw on qualitative empirical material (interviews, official documents, press releases, websites) from an ongoing research project in the context of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. One of the aims of this project is to analyze the link between local authorities and urban art aiming at understanding existing representations and the kinds of strategies that were put in place for its management. We conclude that largely local authorities use urban art to achieve three main strategic goals: the strategy of “landscape construction and urban reassessment,” the strategy of “refashioning the city image/city branding,” and the strategy of “social promotion of stigmatized territories and communities.”

The human rights conditions of Northern Ireland and Palestine have been analyzed up, down, and sideways by a robust scholarly literature, this article provides a fresh approach to the analysis of media with respect to cultural aspects of human rights conundrums through images of localized as well as globalized “graffiti.” From the near universal influence of the painting of George Washington and company crossing the Delaware River, to brave but dangerous anti-regime graffiti in North Korea, the political nature of private artists operating in the public realm for human rights is recognized as a potentially destabilizing and regime-busting act. With a lens pointed on Palestine and Northern Ireland, we examine this cultural artifact’s power to get attention, obstruct persecution, and ultimately to mitigate some human rights abuses. How does such graffiti work? What are the similarities and differences in their power for enhancing human dignity through different times and places? We also look at the relationship of human rights graffiti to current political trends internationally. Images are used here as method of analysis that may help explain the broader implications of political graffiti for the study of a particular medium of transmission for the study of cultural and societal norms.

Multimodal graffiti are constrained by the environment in which they are written and by the activities in which graffiti writing takes place. This article examines graffiti collected in Graffiti Park and Nam Van Lake Underground in Macao. The graffiti in the two sites display systematic differences in topics, objectives, subjects, affordance, texture and framing, which are attributed to varied activity types and the multimodality/materiality of public space. Specifically, those in Graffiti Park – a small and secluded area – are products of one-off activities attended by professional writers, ordinary citizens and tourists. Nam Van Lakeside has a more visible space, and yet the graffiti there – largely murals painted by a few commissioned writers – display limited topics/themes under institutional appropriation. The materiality of the wall space also contributes to the variations in styles and contents of graffiti in the two sites.

The central idea of this essay is that nonindigenous vernacular image-making by protest tourists on the Palestinian side of the Israeli separation barrier and elsewhere holds little meaning for the permanent residents beyond a relatively minor revenue stream. Prior to making this argument, I provide a short historical background about the use of vernacular messages in the occupied Palestinian territory known as the West Bank. I then focus on images of martyrs or shaheed and then on separation barrier images by protest tourists mostly in Bethlehem. The final sections are about two artists from the Dheisheh Palestinian Refugee Camp and the images they create within the camp. A coda of sorts discusses a mural within the camp that is venerated by the residents as opposed to the overpainting and defacement that takes place on the separation barrier. Within this final section and elsewhere within this essay, the meaning of sumood is explicated. As a note, protest tourists are defined here not as anti-tourism protesters but rather as tourists whose intent is protest Israeli policies regarding Palestinians.

Graffiti art is a controversial art form, and as such there has been little empirical work assessing its aesthetic value. A recent study examined image statistical properties of text-based artwork and revealed that images of text contain less global structure relative to fine detail compared to artworks. However, previous research did not include graffiti tags or murals, which reside in the space between text and visual art. The current study investigated the image statistical properties and attractiveness of graffiti relative to other text-based and pictorial art forms, focusing additionally on the role of expertise. A series of images (N = 140; graffiti, text and paintings) were presented to a group of observers with varying degrees of art interest and expertise ( N = 169). Findings revealed that image statistics predicted attractiveness ratings to images, and that biases against graffiti art are less salient in an expert sample.

Subvertising, a portmanteau for ‘subverting advertising’, is the illicit practice of intervening into urban advertising space, from graffiti scribbles and removed adverts, to full-blown billboard takeovers and digitally hacked adverts. In this article, I draw from 24 months of ethnography with subvertisers to suggest that a particular ideal of public space, that of a ‘regime of order’, is folded into the hegemonic spatial management of urban communication by advertising actors. This ‘regime’ relies on separating worlds from common use, that is, on what Giorgio Agamben has phrased ‘consecration’. As an operation with capacities for ‘profanation’, subvertising makes visible the ‘natural’ appearance of this urban regime, and enacts highly temporary placeholder forms for the communicative commons to come. Contributing to debates on the geographies of public space and publicness, subvertisers show that the possibility of common use does not emerge from property rights, shared value-systems or a pre-determined scope of usage. Instead, common use emerges from the deactivation of the very notions of rights, laws, identity and ends. Here I trace subvertisers’ insistence on taking seriously the charge of openness, incompatibility, contestation, excess and the dysfunctional in urban expression as sources of inspiration and (self-)transformation.

Graffiti game boards attest to the presence of historical populations at an archaeological site and, in some cases, assist in dating an archaeological context. While games suggest the presence of a social activity, their contextual significance compared to the graffiti of texts and images, pottery finds, and other diagnostic tools of archaeology is open to further enquiry. The presence of multiple board game traditions at Gebel el-Silsila in Egypt creates an ideal environment to study the differences between graffiti texts and images, excavated materials and game boards when they are found in the same location. It is shown that game boards may confirm human presence in different historical time periods for which only limited additional evidence exists, or they may signal the presence of a different historical population. Their symbolic significance remains unclear, but game boards otherwise provide an independent source of information and an asset to a general archaeological inquiry.

Hybrid leaders seek job security. To stay in power, it may be intuitive that they respond to dissent with a heavy hand. However, these leaders are subject to accountability and concerned with legitimacy and therefore must consider the optics of their decisions. By co-opting a previously independent avenue of communication and its leadership, the state eliminates challengers, curates its public image through trusted social leaders, and reinforces control without resorting to repressive methods that may backfire. Based on a decade of fieldwork, data collection, and expert interviews, I evidence the co-optation of dissent via thematic, spatial, and material shifts in political public art, crafted between the 2012 and 2018 Russian presidential elections. As it consolidated power during this time, the Putin administration co-opted critical graffiti artists and flooded out those unwilling to cooperate, replacing subversive and anonymous anti-regime graffiti with Kremlin-curated murals, particularly in the city center.

International audience; Fifty years after May 68, spring 2018 in France was marked by mass student protest against the Parcoursup/ORE reform of university entry. After a riot police intervention on campus, Nanterre University was blocked and occupied. It was profoundly affected, both as a community and as a physical site. This linguistic ethnographic study proposes a systematic analysis of more than 500 physical interventions (political graffiti, tags and posters) on the campus during that period, to identify the functions of graffiti as political discourse. The graffiti (1) expressed resistance, reclaimed the university's identity and manifested presence on site; (2) established dialogue with local and national authorities and (3) anchored the movement in a larger web of historical references and sites of political resistance. A striking feature was the complex indexicality of the graffiti. Each item was relevant at multiple scales beyond the here and now, anchoring graffiti in larger networks of relations, which endowed them with political power.

Any visitor who walked the streets of Paris in the days or weeks following the attacks of January 2015 would definitely have witnessed a particular form of graphic irruption: the dissemination of messages of solidarity and mourning, and the repetition, within this mass of writing, of the formula ‘I am Charlie’. Although the situation was different, the responses to terrorist attacks in January 2015 and the 9/11 aftermath are comparable by the ‘writing event’ (Fraenkel, 2002, 2018) they produced: temporary and atypical dispositifs of writing turned to the public space in order to be read or at least seen by passers-by. This article, structured along chronological lines, traces the evolution of the viral formula over the long term from Twitter to the urban public space. Firstly, the author focuses on the origin and meanings of the statement and formulates several hypotheses that may explain its wide circulation on social networks. Secondly, she analyses the post-attack graffiti based on databases of several private graffiti-cleaning companies in order to highlight the temporary sacralization of illegal writings. The ‘ Je suis Charlie’ phenomenon is interesting in many ways: its staggering, massive diffusion; the apparent unanimity with which it was greeted in the world of politics and the media; and the way it was managed by local authorities.

Municipal graffiti abatement approaches in North America have shaped the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves upon these city walls. This article examines how the City of Ottawa (Canada) manages graffiti and murals. In doing so, I demonstrate how those management practices connect to longstanding tensions about unauthorized markings in public places and the criminalization of style. Drawing from extensive ongoing ethnographic research on graffiti and the moral and legal regulation of urban performances, I reveal the aesthetics of security which fosters a visual logic of so-called ‘crime prevention,’ state-sanctioned redactions and racialized dispossession of phrasing and text. To close, I consider how urban art regimes are implicated in the colonizing of public spaces, while also considering the liberating possibilities of graffiti.

Urban parkland is a quintessential form of public space. Various actors—from government managers, to civic groups, to individual visitors—actively negotiate and co-create the governance, use, and meaning of parks. One form of negotiation occurs through signage and writing. Here, we focus on 42 parks in New York City and the multiple narratives within them. Through coding the messages, material qualities, and meanings in 784 signs, qualitative analysis of graffiti in parks, triangulated with ethnographic field notes, we identify and discuss what sort of urban park subjectivities are being constructed. These include not only an “ideal park subject,” but also alternative subjectivities such as the neighbor or steward, the graffiti writer, and “free agents” who use wilderness as refuge. We seek to inform new ways of thinking about parks as social–ecological resources that are co-created by users and managers as places that allow multiple subjectivities to be expressed.

Graffiti and street art research (GSAR) has become more acknowledged within the academic discourse; however, it has much to gain from theorising its methodological aspects. As a multidisciplinary field, GSAR has mostly used qualitative research methods, exploring urban space through methods that range from visual recordings to ethnography, emphasising the researchers’ reflexivity. This qualitative approach has, however, paid little attention to the role of embodied practices. In this paper we discuss how embodied methodologies provide multisensory research results where the experienced moments, the participant’s and researcher’s senses, cognition and mobility in urban spaces are connected. Our discussion draws on the authors’ fieldwork experiences of walking and edge working, and on the literature concerning embodiment and embodied methodology related to the context of GSAR.

In the emerging context of hashtag feminism, this article explores the #SupportIslandWomen pro-choice initiative in Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada. The movement gained visibility by using the altered image of Anne of Green Gables (rogue Anne) on posters and graffiti throughout PEI and on social media. Drawing from organizational discourse theory, we analyse how rogue Anne was invoked by activists who spoke in her name, thus enacting the polyphonic nature of discourse. Our case study was built by performing non-participant observation online and by conducting a search in Canadian blogs and newspapers. First, we detail the discursive practices developed within the #SupportIslandWomen movement and underline their constitutive effects, namely, by focusing on the organizing properties of the hashtag feature. Then, we investigate the benefits and limitations of using rogue Anne as a unifying symbol and reflect on the discursive struggles that led to and were generated by her usurpation.

It is widely believed that education is a socially situated cultural process. Generally, schools are regarded as the key educational institutions. However, education can be formal, non-formal and informal, based on media-driven communicative settings. These types coalesce within formal institutions of learning. This study focuses on the transmission of cultural knowledge in informal spaces such as the bathroom. It argues that graffiti is a medium that offers students a unique communicative dynamic enabling an open engagement with issues they would otherwise not do elsewhere. It facilitates the transmission of vital cultural knowledge/literacy whose length and breadth cannot be adequately exhausted by the formal school curriculum alone. Bathroom interactions, therefore, bring a different dynamic to cultural education in learning institutions. Sexuality, hygiene and decency, among others, are negotiated from a strictly student perspective. A trip to the bathroom therefore marks a crucial transition from formal to informal education, and back.

Based on the ethnographic insight gained from the fieldwork conducted between 2006 and 2012 on the island of O‘ahu, this article attempts to capture the aesthetic and symbolic expressions of decolonization in aerosol writing pieces by a crew primarily composed of Kanaka Maoli (“true human being,” indigenous people of Hawai‘i) writers. By focusing on the indigenous aesthetic practice of kaona (“hidden meaning”), the article analyzes the ways in which Hawaiian style graffiti unveils the contested issues of jurisdiction, sovereignty, property claims, and ecological integrity under the prolonged colonial and military occupation. It simultaneously illuminates the decolonial vision brought forth by Kānaka Maoli writers that seeks to transcend and transform the realities imposed by the colonial and occupational power. Through socio-historical contextualization, the article draws parallels between the time of Hawaiian Kingdom and the present, to unravel the integration of ancestral knowledge and contemporary expressions in Hawaiian style graffiti.

The subject of this article is a selected group of textual graffiti intended as a preview to a comprehensive hieroglyphic and hieratic corpus of Middle Kingdom rock inscriptions at Gebel el-Silsila currently being prepared for publication. All texts included were incised into the sandstone bedrock and stretched along the so-called Middle Kingdom road as well as along today’s main touristic pathway along the New Kingdom cenotaphs, also on the west bank of Gebel el-Silsila. The inscriptions were documented by the current scientific team during the course of several survey seasons (2012–15) and demonstrate various administrative and official titles providing an insight into activity during the Middle Kingdom, which otherwise is difficult to demonstrate archaeologically, i.e. within the physical remains of the ancient quarries. Titles included herein, such as [Formula: see text] – inspector, [Formula: see text] – general/mission leader, [Formula: see text] – seal-bearer of the God and [Formula: see text] – Royal seal-bearer, indicate an official politico-economic interest in the site, while simultaneously demonstrating religious activity and involvement. The current selection of texts is merely intended as a very brief introduction to the variety of titles and individuals once active at Gebel el-Silsila.

Writing as an ideological act of resistance and recognition among members of the socially disenfranchised has been engaged with in myriad contested political and cultural terrains. Historically, for Palestinian refugees living under conditions of Israeli occupation, expressions of resistance and recognition were visually and textually inscribed through provocative displays of graffiti on the very separatist wall erected by their occupiers. More recently, however, these acts have been (re)articulated through various forms of social media. We capture this phenomenon as being one dimension of transmedia storytelling, and specifically as a consolidation of, what we are calling here, Wall 1.0 and Wall 2.0. We argue that this consolidation has engendered significant implications for how ideological acts of resistance and recognition among disempowered subjects ought to be conceptualized. Indeed, this consolidation marks a necessary move in the contest over place from geographically constrained physical spaces to spreadable and editable digital spaces. In terms of theoretical contribution, it has illuminated how discursive political claims are transitioning from a state of temporality and attributed ownership to a state of permanence and coproduction.

The aim of this article is to explore urban knitting as a worldwide social movement, rather than solely a kind of “inoffensive urban graffiti” made with knitted fabric. Building on the available literature and original research, the article argues that this movement weaves together elements from craftivism, domesticity, handicraft, art, and feminism. It then explores a specific urban knitting initiative, called “Mettiamoci una pezza” (“Let’s patch it”), carried out in L’Aquila, Italy, 3 years after the earthquake that devastated the city in 2009. To analyze the sociopolitical aspects of this initiative, a series of qualitative research studies was conducted over time, to which were added semistructured interviews with the initiative’s local organizers. The findings show that the initiative in L’Aquila clearly exhibits the five original features of the urban knitting movement that emerge from the literature as being characteristic of this movement.

The Soviet canonisation of Abai, the nineteenth-century Kazakh poet and enlightener became a problematic theme for local intellectuals in the 2010s after the Occupy Abai movement in Moscow raised concerns over the heritage of Abai as a Sovietised canon and as an independent non-Soviet thinker. In 2012 oppositional leaders in Russia occupied Abai monument in Moscow and the leader of the opposition Alexey Navalny, called for his supporters to gather around the monument to unknown strange Kazakh guy using the Russian slang word – neponyatnii Kazakh. Local audience in Kazakhstan at first responded with offensive comments and questions to the Russian opposition movement – how come Abai, the Kazakh version of Russian poet and a visionary Alexander Pushkin, the symbol and canon of Soviet Kazakh literature and the symbol of post-Soviet Kazakhness and its culture could be unknown and strange? From the celebrated writer of the Soviet dekadas and Leninist prizes for Mukhtar Auezov's novel The Path of Abai ( Abai Zholy) Abai turned into neponyatnii – incomprehensible, strange (in words of Russian Alexey Navalny) and neponyatii – misunderstood poet. These discussions on popular online Russophone as well as Kazakhophone platforms and blogs opened up a debate on the legacy and problematic canonisation of Abai. Is Abai misunderstood in contemporary Kazakhstani society? From short essays when famous writer Gerold Belger speaks to Abai's monument in central Almaty to mobile phone applications featuring Abai's Qara Sozder, to the famous anonymous Abai graffiti in central Almaty and Occupy Abai movement responses in Kazakh internet sphere, I trace the mutations of Abai's canon. These discussions reveal the conflicting trends of young Kazakhs and Kazakhstanis who take their cultural criticisms online but continue using the “national” frameworks in their globalized discussions.

A republication of Hatnub Inscription XIV, belonging to a chief of sculptors Any. A newly discovered second line of text provides Any’s genealogy.

Trespassing behaviour is a problem for railway operations because it leads to train–pedestrian collisions and important delays. Trespassing incidents result from the violation of the rail track access rules by pedestrians. In many cases, this behaviour is driven by vandalism intentions. Various measures have been developed and implemented to reduce trespass and vandalism on railway premises, but to date there is no publication to show which of these measures are more effective. This paper aims to review the good practices and recommendations on the prevention of railway trespass and vandalism and to provide a summary of the most promising preventive measures that involve human factors namely collaborative measures, enforcement, staff training, public education and environmental measures, which are likely to influence people’s behaviour. Physical measures (e.g. fencing) and purely technical ones (e.g. detection systems) are not within the scope of this paper, since there is consistent literature indicating the effectiveness of these interventions. The method included a systematic review of the literature on the topic, as well as a collection of prevention practices from the railway operating community. Both the procedures were conducted during the EU-funded projects RESTRAIL (REduction of Suicides and Trespasses on the RAILway property) and GRAFFOLUTION (Awareness and prevention solutions against graffiti vandalism in public areas and transport). Although the results reveal promising preventive measures, very few studies show evidence for their effectiveness. We discuss how measures can be combined to increase their efficiency for trespass and vandalism prevention in the background of a behavioural theoretical framework applied to the rail context.

This article looks at the graffiti practice known as “tagging”—and, more specifically, “scratching” or “scratch tagging”—as a social phenomenon that can aid the thinking through of potential resistance to the hegemony of what is sometimes referred to as entrepreneurial subjectivity. While much interesting work has been produced on more “artistic” forms of graffiti—as have been made famous by stencil artists such as Banksy—there is very little work that looks to read scratch tagging as a form of political artistic practice, albeit one that emerges unconsciously and outside of what is commonly designated as the “art world.” Given that the figure of the contemporary artist is so wedded to the flows of international capital, it is worthwhile considering how the scratch tagger unconsciously engages in what the contemporary theorist Maurizio Lazzarato has referred to as “lazy techniques:” that is, forms of practice that are not circumscribed within the dominant logics of utility and productivity and are, accordingly, potentially resistant to the logics underpinning neoliberal capital.

In this article, based on two case studies conducted in Stockholm and London, we discuss how graffiti and street art provide forms of expressive cosmopolitanism in reclaiming voice and reciprocity in the city. Through in-depth interviews and observations, we explore how urban artists, using their practice, foster ever-transient and contesting senses of outsidered aesthetics and communicative culture that both seek to challenge the institutionalization and hegemonic indoctrination of today's media cities and, as such, become part of the ensemble that constitute its visual geography. While there are many parallels and inter-urban synchronicity, our results indicate that locally-specific elements are prominent in each city. Both studies indicate that the solidaritarian and spatially mediating character of graffiti and street art, and not just their contents, constitutes a resource in sustaining the possibility of coproducing worldly visions in and of the cities. They both observe struggles for openness and social critique taking place across time and space.

Based on several years of near-nightly excursions into London’s disused, non-public, forgotten, subterranean and infrastructural spaces, this article considers the significance of discovering years - or even decades - old surviving traces of graffiti (‘ghosts’, in graffiti parlance) in situ. The article also draws on extensive ethnographic research into London’s graffiti subculture, as well as in-depth semi-structured interviews with several generations of graffiti writers. The article proceeds in four parts. The first part reflects on three sources of methodological inspiration: unauthorised urban exploration and documentation; more-or-less formal archaeological studies of graffiti; and ‘ghost ethnography’, an emergent methodological orientation which places an emphasis on absence and the interpretation of material and atmospheric traces. The second part of the article considers recent theoretical work associated with the ‘spectral turn’. Here, ghosts and haunting provide useful conceptual metaphors for thinking about lingering material and atmospheric traces of the past. The third part of the article offers some methodological caveats and reflections. The fourth and final part of the article seeks to connect theory and method, and asks what significance can be drawn from unauthorised encounters with graffiti ‘ghosts’.

Recent scholarship into the uses of social media has opened up productive ways of thinking about the dynamic relationship between user-generated content and new forms of sociality and social practice. However, compared with Twitter and Facebook, the photo- and video-sharing platform Instagram has received relatively little scholarly attention. Instagram is only the latest in a complex media history that has shaped a range of social practices, including graffiti and street art. This article considers the relationship between street art, graffiti, and mobile digital technologies, in particular the ways in which the production and consumption of forms of street art and graffiti are increasingly shaped by the architectures, protocols, and uses of Instagram. Beyond thinking conceptually about how Instagram is reshaping these practices, it also considers some analytic strategies for Instagram research that can illuminate this emerging and dynamic relationship. We also suggest that thinking of Instagram simply as another tool obscures both the complex issues of using Instagram metadata for research (privacy, the definition of publication, intellectual property, archiving, and conservation) and they ways in which the platform itself is in no way distinct from the cultural formations to which it promises access.

The painting of murals and graffiti is a widespread and well-established practice in Colombia. Most of the artwork is not directly political. However, a significant number of murals speak directly to the political problems of the society; to the protracted violent political conflict and the emerging peace process in Colombia. They articulate the memory of violence and represent the demands of victims for acknowledgement, reparation and justice. That articulation varies through different regions in Colombia, depending on the balance of forces between guerrillas, former paramilitaries and the state. The phenomenon of mural painting represents the meeting between victims’ agency and activist art in Colombia.

The Graffiti Transformation Project was a City of Toronto, Canada sponsored programme funding ‘marginalised youth’ to paint over graffitied walls with public murals. I argue the imperatives driving the project extended beyond the reaches of policy concentrated on youth remediation, to include concerns of urban governance as a spatial and aesthetic problematic. I explore the manner in which practices of graffiti eradication and community mural making generated a set of calculations that were informed by globally mobile aesthetic norms and were, in turn, aesthetically informing. These calculations were used as an epistemological baseline for assessing, at least at the level of appearance, a host of urban problematics including Toronto’s desire to position itself globally as a functioning multicultural city. Turning to Jacques Ranciere’s thoughts about the space of political aesthetics, I draw on an ethnographic example to tease out a moment of aesthetic engagement in which youth artists interrupted the codes and practices associated with creative city entrepreneurialism to render another configuration of politics, another way of being social. Implications for broadening the scope of urban youth policy scholarship to include analysis of an aesthetic turn are considered.

Interviews conducted in situ—literally at “the scene of the crime”1—can elicit more nuanced data than interviews conducted in locations removed from where the activity in question occurred. This is particularly true when conducting research on and with members of spatially conscious, “deviant,” and vulnerable communities who may for the sake of social and existential survival defer to rehearsed narratives and formula stories about their actions and perspectives when interviewed in “safe” spaces. In this article, which is based on participant observation and structured, semi-structured, and unstructured interviews with 108 graffiti writers, I contend that place-based elicitation can provide researchers with greater exposure to extradiscursive expression, reflection, and affective narratives about transgressive and illicit subcultural activity. The method of place-based elicitation has implications for where and how ethnographers and other qualitative researchers conduct interviews and seek to extract nuanced data from respondents.

The İstanbul Gezi Park protest (June 2013) was the first multicultural and humorous youth uprising in Turkish history. The protests were begun by a group of environmentalists to protest the uprooting of the Istanbul Taksim Gezi Park trees for the reconstruction of Artillery Barracks. However, these protests turned into a large, leaderless forum that used slogans, humorous graffiti, and music to express suppressed feelings and thoughts regarding human rights and to criticize Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s restrictive and uncompromising acts and his disproportionate use of police force. This article provides an identity profile of the protesting youth based on their humorous messages during the protests. However, it primarily concentrates on how Erdogan rationalizes authority and power through contradictory mental cognitions by referring to mythical dichotomies regarding the protesters, himself, and his supporters and, further, how he configures a specific concept of democracy. The research was based on contextual analysis utilizing critical discourse analysis tools. The research derives conclusions regarding the identity of the protesting youth and the type of identity that Erdogan is seeking to enact for the protesters, himself, his supporters, and the country. This article’s contribution lies in its elucidation of the main characteristics of a unique Turkish protest movement, the rhetorical divide between the protesters and the Prime Minister during the protests, and, particularly, how Prime Minister Erdogan rationalized the contradictory cognitive dichotomies to maintain his power, thwart the democratic demands of the protesters, and manipulate his supporters.

O. Birmingham 1969W71 is a very well preserved mid-Twentieth Dynasty ostracon belonging to the class of so-called ‘ostraca-stelae’. It shows two men in proskynesis in front of a unique iconographical composition of Mertseger and Ptah. While the captions added to the scene identify the men by their names and titles and additionally mention another individual not visually represented, they do not provide any information regarding their mutual relationship. Taking two graffiti as point of departure for the investigation into the ostracon, the present article will reconstruct the prosopography of the men named and demonstrate the agency of single individuals in matters of personal religion in Ramesside Egypt.

Analyzing graffiti—the image, the act, and the space in which it unfolds—reveals the institutional structures that shape urban spaces, and this is particularly evident in the context of Wall-era West Berlin. Through an investigation of two Berlin Wall graffiti-based artworks, Gordon Matta-Clark’s Made in America from 1976 and Keith Haring’s 1986 Berlin Wall mural, this article considers how these artists used graffiti practice to reveal the economic, social, and political processes with which West Berlin was connected and which it signified. In analyzing Matta-Clark’s and Haring’s artworks, these works’ specific political and historical contexts, and the specific institutions that sponsored their creation, the author considers the relationship of specific examples of graffiti to the larger processes from which they emerged. The author furthermore argues that considering individual examples of graffiti, on their own terms, is crucial to understanding the relationships between their creation and the power structures that govern urban spaces in which they are created.

Drawing upon ethnographical research carried out in Greek cities, this article discusses the use of political graffiti as a creative, playful response to the economic depression, social upheavals and precariousness surrounding the writers and as an act of civil disobedience and political protest in the context of the Greek economic crisis. The graffiti creation releases a flood of cultural responses to the crisis and gives an insight into the lived experience endured by the Greek people faced with the gloomy conditions of a society in crisis. The analysis traces the ways in which activists and unaligned writers turn their attention to the creative and expressive potential of graffiti and articulate cultural heterotopias on the visual landscape of Greek cities. Spatial politics allow distinctive political voices to transform the material dimensions of urban life in meaningful visual expression. The act of doing graffiti in the dystopia of crisis shows the desire of grassroots artists and cultural activists to use their creative capacities to overcome the unfavourable material conditions of their existence and to build alternative counter-hegemonic spaces of representation in the urban landscapes, challenging austerity policies and the existing social order.

The present paper aims to analyse a number of those slogans collected from the sit-in quarters in Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Using political discourse analysis, it unravels various typical discourse structures and strategies that are used in slogans in the construction of a sub-genre of political discourse in the Arab world. Drawing data from several mediums, including banners, wall graffiti, audio-visual instruments, chanting, speeches and songs, this paper tries to show the extent to which the slogans serve as a medium by which political complaints and comments are dispensed and consumed. This paper draws on a rhetorical analysis to find out their persuasive effect on shaping the Arab intellect and on the change of the political atmosphere in the region. Lastly, this paper attempts to show to what extent the slogans meet the standards of political discourse and whether they can be considered as a sub-genre of political discourse or not.

Last Breath is a project that invites artists to contribute a piece of work to a building which is soon to be destroyed. Artistic offerings are recorded in photographs and on video, records released once the building, along with the art, has been demolished. These place-making events perform a kind of audio/visual memento mori, reminding us not only of the perpetual transitoriness of urban existence but also of the potential for participation in such processes. In this article, words, still images and videographic footage are blended to explore and imagine what sorts of affective capacities the project might afford through its creative interventions and mediations.

Objectives: We examine the process of disorder perception to test whether different people perceive social and physical phenomenon the same way. Methods: We use laboratory experimental methods to collect information from 361 respondents (120 police officers and 241 students). One hundred photos with various social and physical attributes were shown during the experiment to test how they affect individuals’ judgments. Specifically, we test the effects of physical signs and social traits such as the race and dress styles of social actors on disorder perception. Results: The presence of physical disorder, such as trash and graffiti, increases respondents’ ratings of disorderliness. Moreover, race and dress style had significant impacts on how respondents perceived social and physical environments. Conclusions: We challenge the perception invariant assumption behind the broken windows thesis. When only physical disorder is present, the consistency of ratings is high. When both social and physical cues are present, agreement among respondents drops to about 50 percent. Moreover, places with lower-class foreign groups are more likely to be viewed as disorderly. Thus, we caution the validity of broken windows-based policies. Future research needs to replicate the research in a more diverse society to verify the generalizability of the findings.

This article offers a conceptualization of the interrelations between street art and social media in (post-)revolutionary Cairo by focusing on the reasons as to why certain politically engaged young people in Egypt select graffiti as their medium for political expression in a time in which many other media of communication, most notably social media, are available. It contends that the particular appeal of street art for the graffiti artist lies in its ability to function simultaneously as a medium of communication and a contentious performance, combined with the particular power of the aesthetic to change conceptions of social reality of the audience through what Rancière has called the ‘(re)distribution of the sensible’. Graffiti and street art thus present artists with singular possibilities to express their political ideas and appeal to the public because street art combines the power of framing, the power of performance and the power of imagination.

Centred on the theorization, design and implications of the Sydney Graffiti Archive, this article considers how the virtual image archive intervenes in the experience of graffiti to shift negative perceptions about graffiti as damage to cultural heritage. As a parallel discursive arena (see Fraser, 1995; Hauser, 1998), the Sydney Graffiti Archive infiltrates and transgresses normative conceptions of place and cultural narratives through the formation and circulation of unofficial visual discourses embedded in graffiti photographs. This article evaluates the place of the archive as a heuristic device and heterotopic entity and encourages new ways of seeing illicit graffiti, and other everyday digital cultures of commemoration, in that it reshapes present relations to the past through photographic reframing, image digitization, interface design and user engagement. Essentially, this research is about hacking into, recovering and honouring graffiti’s discursive sites to reimagine graffiti’s place as digital heritage.

Graffiti as writing and painting with spray cans in public spaces was recognised as a special youth movement in the 1960s and 1970s in New York City. From there, it spread to other metropolitan cities around the world. Through graffiti activity, young people positioned themselves in a youth movement that violates public spaces. This article focuses on the contradictions and tensions of being part of an illegal subculture and being recognised as painting art. The tensions will be analysed from the perspective of societal conditions as well as painters’ experiences, drawing on literature about graffiti and an interview project with graffiti painters in Denmark. Psychological aspects of the young person’s engagement are analysed using concepts from Vygotsky’s theory of creativity and art. The analyses contribute to understanding what graffiti activity means for a group of young persons in their change of position from childhood to young adulthood, and to a differentiation of Vygotsky’s theory of art.

Adolescents choose to be graffiti painters for very different reasons. Depending on their motivations as well as their abilities, different developmental trajectories can be observed within a given group of graffiti painters. In addition, the significance of movement and places has to be considered. On the one hand, the adolescents must have access to certain groups so that these groups can become meaningful for the individual. On the other hand, moving through different places and through time can open up new opportunities as well as creating tensions around different experiences within and between identity facets. Identity development is thus not a static but an ongoing process. For the observer, different influential factors must be considered in order to achieve a rudimentary understanding of this complex process.

Antisocial behaviour including littering and graffiti, crime and social disorder pose an important social problem within contemporary cities. Perceptions regarding the extent of antisocial behaviour are likely to differ not only along socioeconomic and demographic lines of the individual but importantly are also likely to differ depending on the type of neighbourhood or community one resides in. In particular, it is often assumed that antisocial behaviour, both real and perceived, will be higher in localities characterised by higher levels of public housing. Situated broadly in the antisocial behaviour and neighbourhood effects/social mix literature this paper examines perceptions of antisocial behaviour reported in a large sample survey in Australia focusing specifically on how responses differ by the housing social mix characteristics of the neighbourhood the respondent lives in.