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The paper analyses a group of New Kingdom hieratic ink-written labels added to the Middle Kingdom relief figures of offering bearers in the North Chapel of the pyramid precinct of King Senwosret III of the 12th Dynasty at Dahshur. It applies a close observation of the spatial properties of the secondary epigraphy combined with contexts of the Egyptian written culture. To a large extent, it is a beginning, rather than a fixed and detailed outline, of a more differentiated, location-specific interpretation of secondary texts and figures added to the decoration of various parts of the royal pyramid complexes. The interpretation of this specific scene suggests that the visitors articulated their status alongside a personal involvement with this prestigious site by labelling the offering bearers in order to achieve a purposeful revivification, and an arrogation, of the offering scene performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor is a featured project of China's Belt and Road Initiative that is creating new resource frontiers in Tharparkar, Pakistan. Centered around coal mining and energy production, these new sites of resource extraction and their infrastructures have sparked dissensus throughout the Desert district of Sindh, Pakistan. Our analysis draws on research on socio-technical imaginaries and Rancière's thoughts on political change and aesthetics. In doing so, we examine how political dissensus is represented though graffiti and works in contrast to the socio-technical imaginaries represented by the state in public signage. The differences, we suggest, represent socio-technical counter imaginaries that form a politics that disrupts the established socio-political order embedded within the political goals of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. These counter imaginaries have important implications for the creation of just and equitable opportunities for people impacted by the emerging coal extraction and power generation complex. Our ethnographic approach provides a street-level analysis of the politicization of imagined socio-technical futures in the Tharparkar desert and emerging energy resource frontiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last 10 years, the mobile phone and the emergence of websites, such as Youtube, which facilitate user-generated content, have enabled an explosion of pictures and video clips posted on the internet by civilians documenting the activities of authority figures. This "sousveillance" is a kind of inverse surveillance, reciprocal to surveillance, where members of the grassroots monitor those in power. Initially, sousveillance was primarily seen as an inverse form of surveillance in which citizens monitor their surveillors in order to challenge the surveillance state. The individuals filmed were originally thought to be aware of being sousveilled by others, and it was assumed that every watcher would voluntarily give free access to all information recorded. This article, drawing from an analysis of selfdocumented graffiti videos, aims to further the understanding of sousveillance through showing how graffiti writers—the supposed target of surveillance—use documentation of surveillance in order to present themselves as superior in terms of control and knowledge. Through analyzing the narrative structure and composition of these videos, I will demonstrate that sousveillance, for the graffiti writer, becomes less a matter of resistance and more a means for the symbolic representation of subcultural emotions, activities, and identities. The documentation and dissemination of the movements and activities of anti-graffiti officers, as well as the graffiti writers' successful attempts to outsmart them, are analyzed as a part of a subcultural play, centered on the establishment of an equilibrium or a dance where key roles and rules are assigned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the role of graffiti as a medium in urban spaces, particularly in the context of Macau. Graffiti, seen as a form of artistic expression, has the potential to invigorate and enliven public spaces. Utilizing visual ethnography methods and analyzing cultural policies, the paper aims to examine the presence of graffiti in various neighborhoods within Macau. The concept of nostalgia also serves as a theoretical framework to understand how graffiti can evoke memories and create an emotional connection to the past. By investigating hotspots like Largo do Estaleiro, Rua de S. Tiago da Barra, and the vicinity surrounding Ruins of St. Paul's through interviews with residents and an examination of distribution patterns, we aim to comprehend how these graffiti sites can establish a link to history and contribute to a shared memory and sense of locality. The findings of this research have important implications for urban planning and cultural policy in Macau, as they highlight the significance of incorporating graffiti as a legitimate form of public art that can contribute to the cultural identity and sense of nostalgia in urban spaces. Plain Language Summary: Nostalgia and Graffitti This study examines the role of graffiti as a medium in urban spaces, particularly in the context of Macau. Graffiti, seen as a form of artistic expression, has the potential to invigorate and enliven public spaces. Utilizing visual ethnography methods and analyzing cultural policies, the paper aims to examine the presence of graffiti in various neighborhoods within Macau. The concept of nostalgia also serves as a theoretical framework to understand how graffiti can evoke memories and create an emotional connection to the past. By investigating hotspots like Largo do Estaleiro, Rua de S. Tiago da Barra, and the vicinity surrounding Ruins of St. Paul's through interviews with residents and an examination of distribution patterns, we aim to comprehend how these graffiti sites can establish a link to history and contribute to a shared memory and sense of locality. The findings of this research have important implications for urban planning and cultural policy in Macau, as they highlight the significance of incorporating graffiti as a legitimate form of public art that can contribute to the cultural identity and sense of nostalgia in urban spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last decade, street art has received increased attention within heritage studies. However, current heritage research has not sufficiently explored street art's crucial relationships with everyday life and change, as well as its performative, sensuous and atmospheric components. In this paper, I apply the notion of affective atmosphere within more-than-representational theory, heritage and urban studies, to conceptualise street art as a sensuous, ephemeral, political and embodied heritage experience of everyday life. My investigation of street art and affective atmospheres is further based on my improvised everyday practices of sensing, feeling, observing, walking and photographing in the streets of Oslo. Engaging with theory and praxis, I explore the compositional and multi-sensual aspects of street art and affective urban atmospheres, including sound, colour, movement, social hybridity and power. My analysis highlights that the experience of street art heritage involves more than simply embodied encounters with artworks, as it also integrates urban atmospheres and smooth and striated worlds. The research thus contributes practical and theoretical knowledge of street art, heritage and affective atmospheres within street art and urban and heritage studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city of Rome has been a contested site for unauthorized graffiti since antiquity. Modern times have seen graffiti practices endure in their disruptive form and viral versions of digital street art. This paper applies critical, speculative methods to approximate distinct areas of graffiti research into a common framework of analysis. The idea was to offer insights into graffiti audiencing on digital and street-based spheres of perception while discussing the method's limitations. After listing convergences and divergences between human-centric and algorithm-centric viewpoints, results revealed an interesting set of details uniquely brought up by computer vision metadata, but which, in turn, exposed limitations in recgonizing graffiti as a politicized practice with deep radical roots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the time communism collapsed in East Europe, there were several signs of backlash to liberal democracy worldwide. The writing on the wall first was deciphered as a resurgence of populism, and by the 2010s the interpretation soured into an experience of widespread democratic backsliding. The literature on these phenomena exploded, and by the early 2020s, some datasets were also created. This paper summarizes the main trends of contemporary views about populism and de-democratization and defends three claims that have abundant empirical support from the new datasets. The claims themselves are rooted in 21st century political science and many-century-old philosophical traditions. (i) Populism is not simply anti-pluralism, and not the negative end of a pluralism-populism continuum; (ii) types of populism vary in history and also with the “host” ideology; the current democratic backsliding is associated with right-wing populism; and (iii) people’s experience of equality in their country affects their receptivity to populist and anti-pluralist appeals. The first part of the paper articulates the theoretical background against which the claims receive meaning and relevance, and the second substantiates the claims and refers to the empirical evidence supporting them. The concluding part contemplates what it takes to make democracies survive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 4000 graffiti are scattered throughout the Theban necropolis. Among them, around 2500 graffiti can be dated to Nineteenth, Twentieth, and Twenty-First Dynasties. These New Kingdom graffiti were made by members of the community of workmen from Deir el-Medina. Only a small group of no more than 120 graffiti consist of depictions of deities and veneration scenes. The interpretation of graffiti with depictions of Amun-Re on rock surfaces in the Valley of the Kings reveals valuable information regarding their locations. This study thus attempts to identify particular locations in the valley where the workmen of Deir el-Medina venerated Amun-Re in different forms. These spots may have been considered to be of religious significance to the workmen of Deir el-Medina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading the writing on the walls concerning the COVID-19 pandemic reveals a graffiti community that can best be described as diverse in terms of its members' sentiments, with heavy leanings toward conspiratorial perspectives as well as public health preoccupations. Both from the perspective of having spent most of my life as a member of the graffiti community, as well as having written about graffiti and graffiti writers from a scholarly perspective, I have arrived at the conclusion that my community is impossible to categorize, notwithstanding my rather radically conservative definition of what actually constitutes graffiti ([1]; see also [5] for a more inclusive perspective on what constitutes graffiti). Graffiti depicting and referencing the COVID-19 pandemic is no-less representative of all forms of graffiti writing, as well as of those who take to the walls to express themselves artistically, egotistically, politically, and transgressively. [Extracted from the article]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With STEM education garnering an increasing share of educational budgets and press, humanities teachers should consider how to respond to the growing power of math and science. Should humanists read the writing on the wall and tether themselves to the economic engine of STEM? Or should humanists separate themselves, retreating securely into their own disciplinary homes? Middle ground options, including critique of and partnership with STEM, are available as well. This article lays out five postures or approaches that humanists should weigh as they consider how to proceed. Drawing from various case studies, including medical humanities, digital humanities, and innovative interdisciplinary curricula, the article fleshes out the advantages and limitations of each approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civic writing has appeared on walls over centuries, across cultures, and in response to political concerns. This article advances a civic interrogation of how civic writing is publicly authored, read, and discussed as openly accessible and multimodal texts on digital walls. Drawing upon critical literacy perspectives, we examine how a repertoire of 10 civic writing practices associated with open web annotation (OWA) helped educators develop critical literacy. We introduce a social design experiment in which educators leveraged OWA to discuss educational equity across sociopolitical texts and contexts. We then describe a single case of OWA conversation among educators and use discourse analysis to examine shifting situated meanings and political expressions present in educators' civic writing practices. We conclude by considering implications for theorizing the marginality of critical literacy, designing learning environments that foster educators' civic writing, and facilitating learning opportunities that encourage educators' civic writing across digital walls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, Google announced a new initiative for its Cultural Institute. Called the Street Art Project, the online database was seen by many (Google included) as a continuation of the Google Art Project, in that it sought to make street art from around the world more easily accessible to interested audiences. The company acknowledged that such art was temporary, and that, by virtue of the artwork's eventual disappearance, it would eventually become an important record of preservation for the practice. However, in its focus on the physical artwork, the project unwittingly highlights a problematic trend in street art's protection as intangible heritage: one where its safeguard often becomes overpowered by the tangibility of its material elements. Exploring Google Street Art through the lens of Melbourne, a city that has long negotiated with street art and graffiti as forms of cultural heritage, this article outlines the consequences of such tangibility for the intangible artwork. It argues that any protection of intangible heritage requires a tacit acknowledgement of the subjectivity which surrounds its experience: those community reactions and responses whose wide variability help define that heritage as something intangible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 – inspector, – general/mission leader, – seal-bearer of the God and – 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional legal responses to street art have tended to characterize it as a problem that is best dealt with through criminal or property law. This is not necessarily perceived of as a problem by street artists who have actively sought to situate understandings of their work outside of the law. But attitudes are changing. Street art is increasingly seen as having commercial value, enhancing the cityscape, creating new local art markets, attracting tourists, and contributing to the gentrification of impoverished areas. The result is that conventional ways of conceiving of street art have begun to pose new challenges to concepts of crime and property. Drawing on an observational study in London, this article proposes a new theorization of the legal problems posed by street art that pays close attention to the sensual experience of encountering it in the city and to street art as performance rather than artefact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tagging is a category of graffiti defined as a stylized signature, monogram, word, or name marked on public and private physical spaces. It is an illegal action seen as a disfigurement to many communities, yet it remains a pre-occupation for adolescents worldwide. This theoretical article explores the hidden aspects of taggers and their subculture. We argue that tagging is a ritualistic act that is part of a psychological growth process suggestive of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner’s research on traditional rites of passage practices. We use the developmental theories of Winnicott and Erikson to investigate how these rites of passage experiences are integrated into the adolescent tagger’s psyche. Graffiti writing gives taggers the freedom to discover different aspects of the self; a dynamic interaction with unconscious processes that mirror traditional rites of passage rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

The removal of street art from community walls for private auction is a morally problematic yet legal action. This paper examines community reactions to the removal of Banksy’s No Ball Games for private auction. Five hundred unique reader comments on online newspaper articles reporting this controversial event were collected and analyzed. An emerging set of urban moral codes was used to position street art as a valuable community asset rather than as an index of crime and social decay. The latter discourse informed a repertoire that depicted No Ball Games as unlawful graffiti that was rightfully removed. Here, the operations of ‘the police’ (Rancière, 1998: 17) in the distribution of the sensible are evident in the assertions that validate and depoliticize the removal of No Ball Games. This repertoire was used to attribute responsibility for the work’s removal to deterministic external forces, while reducing the accountability attributable to those responsible for the removal of the work. A contrasting anti-removal repertoire depicted street art as a gift to the community, and its removal as a form of theft and a source of harm to the community. The pro-removal repertoire incorporates and depoliticizes elements of the anti-removal repertoire, by acknowledging the moral wrong of the removal, but yielding to the legal rights of the wall owners to sell the work; and by recognizing the status of street art as valuable, but asserting that the proper place for art is a museum. The anti-removal repertoire counters elements of the pro-removal repertoire, by acknowledging the illegality of street art, but containing this to the initial act of making unsanctioned marks on a wall, after which point the work becomes the property of the community it is located within. This analysis reveals an emergent set of urban moral codes that positions a currently legal action as a form of criminal activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses his essay "The Police and Neighborhood Safety: Broken Windows." Topics covered include disorderly conditions and behavior like public urination and graffiti, the role of the police in crime prevention and the use of the broken windows theory in policing in the U.S. Also mentioned are the root causes of crime, including poverty, injustice and racism.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Israel Barrier, known as the jidar al-fasl al-unsuri (wall of segregation) or hafrada geder (separation fence), that cuts into Palestinian areas of the West Bank region. Topics include political aspects of graffiti murals on the wall, the creation of checkpoints along the Barrier, and the lessened number of Israeli work permits currently offered to West Bank Palestinians.

The majority of scholarly research on graffiti and street art has examined this phenomenon in terms of its distribution and the nature of the perpetrators. Rarely has the law enforcement response been investigated. To better understand this neglected aspect, the investigators constructed a survey that they administered to a sample of officers in a large Mid-Atlantic police department to determine their attitudes, in particular their perceptions, regarding graffiti, street art, and perpetrators of this behavior. The survey takes into consideration important police-related variables and situational factors to provide a portrait of officer perceptions. The major finding indicates that the shift and race of police officers might have an influence on their decisions to stop, question, and arrest suspects on graffiti and street art vandalism-related charges. This is consistent with other studies of police perceptions of illegal behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent criminological research has engaged with images of crime such that there increasingly appears to exist a need for a specifically visual criminology. Within visual criminology, however, images are frequently constructed as objects of analysis rather than as constitutive elements of the discursive field. This article draws upon the specific context of the social, cultural and legal responses to uncommissioned words and images in public space—street art and graffiti writing. Focusing on one instance of unauthorized image making, I argue for the dynamic role of the image in the constitution of crime in contemporary society and culture, thanks to the affective dimension of the encounter between spectator and image. The complex range of responses to street art and graffiti highlights ways in which visual criminology must ensure that it eschews an object-centred approach to the image, and conceptualize it instead by means of an aesthetic politics of the encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Galatians 3:1, Paul makes a striking statement: “It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly exhibited as crucified.” The meaning of Paul's assertion is debated, since it is unlikely that any of his Galatian audience had been eyewitnesses to Jesus’ crucifixion. A number of elements need to be brought together to shed light on Paul's statement. Issues from the Roman world (rhetoric, street announcing, graffiti, and how crucifixions were conducted) shed light on other statements of Paul. Paul saw his preaching on Christ's crucifixion as more than a message—he wanted it to be an experience, a re-presentation of the event. The thesis is that Paul intended his audience to witness or experience Christ's crucifixion as he vividly portrayed it to them, so that it would be memorable for them and they would stay committed to Paul's teachings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Street artist Blu creates remarkable wall-painted animations, in which he depicts cartoon figures cavorting along, around and through actual urban surfaces. Through this activity, his film Muto (2008) pictures a fraught relationship between urban space and its dwellers. In some way, the film seems to epitomize contemporary thinking about urban space. Emphasizing the primarily visual and spectacular character of the modern city, such thinking casts it as a space where a totalizing gaze elides the embodied experience of the individual. Yet, in Muto, Blu deploys this visual aspect to conceive of the metropolis as a complex ballet of individual choreographies. Envisioning the city as paradox, Muto casts urban space as both highly spectacular and embodied multiplicity. As a work of animation, Muto also encodes this contradiction formally; even as it depicts the city as a capitalistic sphere of exhaustion, it imbues its morphing bodies with the capacity to redefine place. Connecting the shapeshifting bodies of its beings, the bodies of its spectators and the body of the artist, Muto invests urban space with a sense of plurality. Incarnating urban movement as inscription, and urban inscription as movement, his artistic practice recognizes how bodies shape the spaces in which they dwell. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on legal implications of graffiti in Australia. It discusses the DIY rainbow crossing campaign initially started as a localized protest by the LGBTQI community in Sydney. Topics includes offences under section 6 of Graffiti Control Act of South Australia, possibility of legal prosecution against creators of chalk rainbows for damaging property or defacing property by graffiti decoration, and costs associated with their removal and the feelings generated by those graffiti.

This article sets up a dialogue between photographs of urban art, artifacts, and architecture in the Prenzlauer Berg district of former East Berlin with a meditation on the ways in which urban subjects interact with their environment so as to transform both themselves and their city. The article works with notions of fluid “folded” relationships between city space and denizens, suggesting that these are not discrete entities interacting with each other according to the Euclidean paradigm of container and inhabitants, respectively. Rather, urban subjects are manifestations and products of the space that brings them forth. Any aesthetic practices on the part of urban subjects are recursive actions that modify the urban fabric continuum of which those subjects are a part, thus initiating complex environmental, political, and subjective changes, which can be understood under the rubrics of Lefebvre’s “right to the city” as well as the work of more recent theorists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though academic discourse on graffiti often laments the fact that it is treated as a crime, such arguments neglect how the outlaw status of graffiti has been integrally related to its allure and how it is understood and experienced by “writers” (the preferred term of graffiti artists). Participant observation and formal and informal interviews of members of a midstatus Portland, Oregon graffiti crew reveal how graffiti reflects a particular version of masculinity and at the same time serves as a resource for constructing masculine identity and achieving status and respect among male peers. Partly because of its outlaw status, graffiti is a domain of visual art that reinforces, rather than undercuts, a version of masculinity that values daring, risk, rebelliousness, ingenuity, commitment, and sacrifice, as well as a flamboyant and edgy set of aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An A-B-A design was adopted to test the effectiveness of different types of contingency-nonspecific stimuli in the prevention of bathroom graffiti in a college setting. The three stimuli examined in this study have been frequently used to prevent bathroom graffiti in South Korea and they were: (a) "Please do not write, draw, or mark on these walls;" (b) a mirror; and (c) "Courteous people keep public places clean." No graffiti was observed when the first and second stimuli were presented. In contrast, a notable increase in bathroom graffiti was observed when the third sign was presented. The results suggest that a contingency non-specific stimuli posting intervention can be effective in the prevention of bathroom graffiti only when appropriate stimuli are used. The practical implications, including cost-effectiveness, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, ethnographic research developed within the graffiti community of Lisbon is the starting point for a reflection regarding the social condition of the young members of this community. The graffiti writers live between two social and cultural universes, building complex strategies to manage identity and everyday life. Graffiti represents for many young people a ground for struggle and transgression, a chance to reject the law and hegemonic normatives, an arena where they experiment excitement, risk, heroic conduct and sometimes painful sanctions. In a security-prone society, danger becomes a space for freedom, where young writers challenge the limits of life and normative boundaries. This is often why there is a feeling of release and autonomy and of escaping the disciplinary control of social norms and worldly habits. This is why the nature of their exploits appears to be endowed with greatness and heroism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper invokes the categories of the masculine that have been discursively constructed in the historical and social context of hip hop and graffiti culture. The production and performance of graffiti(ed) masculinities are the result of a complex mix that samples notions of class, race, violence, space, commodification, gender, resistance, and violence. Graffiti culture embodies the colonizer's ideals of a masculinity that is dangerous, aggressive and takes risks, while giving men a medium with which to tell their stories and allowing them to express their emotions. The article argues that graffiti(ed) masculinities are composed of seemingly disparate and complex components that shadow the masculine ideals of the colonizer, of hegemonic masculinity, as well as borrowing from notions of subordinate and resistive masculinities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the cultural significance and interpretative potential of graffiti left by Soviet conscripts at Kummersdorf, a former military base in the German federal state of Brandenburg. The graffiti is framed as war art and its typology, distribution and content is studied in detail. In this way opportunities for further research are highlighted, as well as the potential for the graffiti to contribute to interpretative and conservation strategies. We demonstrate how the graffiti embodies multi-level interpretative narratives which can help to reveal hidden aspects of Soviet conscript life and cultural practices whilst alluding to global events and Soviet and Russian military policy. More generally, the article aims to promote the potential of graffiti and other forms of what is traditionally considered vandalism to contribute to the cultural significance and interpretation of heritage sites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the research on the impacts of violence experience on children and adolescents in Ingeniero Buge in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It mentions that violence has become opportunities for conversation inside the classroom. It adds that asking them to draw their likes and dislikes show that they like to play and dislike gunshots and fights. Moreover, walls outside schools are sprayed with graffiti, depicting the feeling of children in their neighborhood.

The article offers information on the relationship of criminal law and the unmodified word or image in public space. It discusses a study related to criminological research which include criminal aspects of everyday life and investigation of cultural practices known as graffiti and street art, It further mentions about judgment of laws of illegal act.