Graffiti

More than ever education students are required to study the social context of youth culture in order to understand and design meaningful, motivational curiculum. There is a need to bridge the gap between theory and practice and to address the critical issues which confront the education of youth today. In studying hip-hop graffiti, the author explores a crucial but neglected area in the contemporary training of youth workers and educators.

Youth Crime and Youth Culture in the Inner City offers an interpretive account of juvenile delinquency within the modern inner city, an environment which is characterized by a long history of social deprivation and high rates of crime. A wide range of topics are explored, such as young people's motivation for, frequency of and attitudes towards a variety of illegal behaviors, such as street robbery, burglary, theft, drug use, drug selling, and violence. Why do young people commit these offences? Who do they commit them against? How do they feel afterwards? This book attempts to answer these important theoretical questions, utilizing ethnographic research collected over a seven year period and based around the London inner city borough of Lambeth.

Art, value, law - the links between these three terms mark a history of struggle in the cultural scene. Studies of contemporary culture have thus increasingly turned to the image as central to the production of legitimacy, aesthetics and order. Judging the Image extends the cultural turn in legal and criminological studies by interrogating our responses to the image. This book provides a space to think through problems of ethics, social authority and the legal imagination. Concepts of memory and interpretation, violence and aesthetic, authority and legitimacy are considered in a diverse range of sites, including: * body, performance and regulation * judgment, censorship and controversial artworks * graffiti and the aesthetics of public space * HIV and the art of the disappearing body * witnessing, ethics and the performance of suffering * memorial images - art in the wake of disaster.

Cultivating Minds is a ground-breaking unification of the ideas of Simmel and contemporary perspectives in cultural psychology. The theoretical framework proposed is based on an integration of core philosophical, sociological, and psychological ideas from the intellectual traditions of pragmatism, socioculturalism, constructivism, and transactionalism.The primary focus of this work is on cultivation as a metaphor for identity formation. According to this idea, each and every human agent is an active producer of its own development and identity. The cultivation model expands existing sociocultural perspectives by elaborating further how an individual's cultivation of the sociocultural environment is mediated through artefacts and objects, a concept exemplified by the identity processes demonstrated by graffiti artists. The idea of the cultured mind has profound implications not only for cultural psychology but also for theories of identity and, of course, development. It affects the way we understand the formation of the self and, in the end, the growth of the person. The result is a theory which captures the convergence between identity, culture and development in new and far-reaching ways.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, young people in New York City radically altered the tradition of writing their initials on neighborhood walls. Influenced by the widespread use of famous names on billboards, in neon, in magazines, newspapers, and typographies from advertising and comics, city youth created a new form of expression built around elaborately designed names and initials displayed on public walls, vehicles, and subways. Critics called it "graffiti," but to the practitioners it was "writing." Taking the Train traces the history of "writing" in New York City against the backdrop of the struggle that developed between the city and the writers. Austin tracks the ways in which "writing" -- a small, seemingly insignificant act of youthful rebellion -- assumed crisis-level importance inside the bureaucracy and the public relations of New York City mayoral administrations and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for almost two decades. Taking the Train reveals why a global city short on funds made "wiping out graffiti" an expensive priority while other needs went unfunded. Although the city eventually took back the trains, Austin eloquently shows how and why the culture of "writing" survived to become an international art movement and a vital part of hip-hop culture.

Rock-art - the ancient images which still scatter the rocky landscapes of Europe - is a singular kind of archaeological evidence. Fixed in place, it does not move about as artefacts as trade objects do. Enigmatic in its meaning, it uniquely offers a direct record of how prehistoric Europeans saw and envisioned their own worlds. European Landscapes of Rock-Art provides a number of case studies, covering arange of European locations including Ireland, Italy, Scandinavia, Scotland and Spain, which collectively address the chronology and geography of rock-art as well as providing an essential series of methodologies for future debate. Each author provides a synthesis that focuses on landscape as an essential part of rock-art construction. From the paintings and carved images of prehistoric Scandinavia to Second World War grafitti on the German Reichstag, this volume looks beyond the art to the society that made it.The papers in this volume also challenge the traditional views of how rock-art is recorded. Throughout, there is an emphasis on informal and informed methodologies. The authors skilfully discuss subjectivity and its relationship with landscape since personal experience, from prehistoric times to the present day, plays an essential role in the interpretation of art itself. The emphasis is on location, on the intentionality of the artist, and on the needs of the audience.This exciting volume is a crucial addition to rock-art literature and landscape archaeology. It will provide new material for a lively and greatly debated subject and as such will be essential for academics, non-academics and commentators of rock art in general.

This first cross-national book-length study of street art as political protest and communication focuses on art forms traditionally used by collectives and state interests in the Hispanic world--posters, wallpaintings, graffiti, murals, shirts, buttons, and stickers, for example. Professor Chaffee examines the motives behind the use of street art as propaganda and seeks to explain how it is effective. Using field research and a sociopolitical approach, he assesses contemporary street art in Spain, the Basque country, Argentina, and Brazil. He shows how street art is a barometer of popular conflicts and sentiments across the political spectrum. This comparative analysis is intended for students, teachers, and professionals in the fields of communication, political science, history, and popular culture.