THE RIGHT TO THE SURFACE IS THE RIGHT TO THE CITY
I wrote this text to reflect on my workload in Higher Education, seven weeks into Term 1 of 2019-20. I hope friends in similar situations add their voice, while friends in better situations and students become fully aware of the following example (here, mine). If nothing more, getting this down on paper was a meaningful …
Continue reading "I adore my work, yet I consider quitting every day: this is teaching"
Join me in Manchester on 12 and 13 October 2019 for a free weekend of talks, street projects, workshops and film screenings on city life and its appropriations. I will be hosting the programme of talks for the weekend, with a bunch of great people who think about and do things in cities. From the …
Continue reading "Social Surfaces +0161"
I am taking part in the Nuart festival of public art in Aberdeen between 18-21 April 2019. My talk is part of the Nuart Plus series that complements the artworks produced during the festival. The title is "Mended Matter and Layered Politics – The Challenges of Researching Urban Surfaces" - and the content will cover …
Continue reading "Mended Matter and Layered Politics: Talk at Nuart Aberdeen 2019"
I am taking part in the CityStreet3 conference in Beirut between 31 October - 3 November 2018, with a paper on Venetian surface semiotics. The paper is entitled "This way to San Marco: A semiotic examination of vernacular signage in Venice" and will be presented as part of a conference track on communication, visualisation and …
Continue reading "Venice surface semiotics paper at CityStreet3 conference in Beirut, Lebanon"
"Selling streetness as experience: the role of street art tours in branding the creative city" is now free to access on the Sociological Review Journal website. Particularly relevant for anyone interested in Bourdieu, Becker and the sociology of art, and also in how the street art world becomes established as a part of the creative …
Urban Walls: Political and Cultural Meanings of Vertical Structures and Surfaces is out now with Routledge. The volume is edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm and contains an essay I wrote, alongside many brilliant contributions by scholars I so deeply admire! Mubi Brighenti's first edited volume on walls, The Wall and the City, …
Continue reading "Urban Walls book is out with Routledge"
I am teaching a weekend course on art, architecture and the right to the city at the Royal Academy of the Arts in London on 21-22 July 2018. The course is an introduction to the analysis of urban environments, urban creativity and how they have shaped the style and politics of the city. We examine …
My essay "To Occupy, to Inscribe, to Thicken: Spatial Politics and the Right to the Surface" was just published in the wonderful independent, free journal lo Squaderno. The essay is part of a special issue edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, which is dedicated to Surfaces & Materials. This publication is doing a lot to …
Continue reading "To Occupy, to Inscribe, to Thicken: Spatial Politics and the Right to the Surface"
UPDATE: Guardian Cities released a new article on 7 January 2015 following from the Graffiti Sessions conference: Is urban graffiti a force for good or evil? Read the piece by Athlyn Cathcart-Keays here. I feel exhausted, grateful and anxious about the great responsibilities we were left with after the Graffiti Sessions event, both as a team …
Continue reading "Graffiti Sessions"
