Taking stock of the scholarly study of graffiti and street art

The streets, utility poles, and back alleys of large urban centers in most big cities are epicenters for all manner of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Handbook-Graffiti-International-Handbooks/dp/0367335972/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1696680828&sr=1-4-6b4f25f7-bce0-4ed2-87fc-46a0e037e36a" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">graffiti and street art</a>. Predictably this activity engenders lots of responses. Notwithstanding the longstanding desire by property owners, ghost buffers, and moral entrepreneurs to deter this activity and remove this work from the surfaces upon which it has been placed, one of the more prominent reactions has been attempts to understand it. But how does one go about comprehending <a href="https://jeffreyianross.com/tag/graffiti-and-street-art/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">graffiti and street art</a> that goes beyond “common sense” explanations, and ones that are simply anecdotal, impressionistic, and unsystematic? The answer is probably conducting and producing <a href="https://jeffreyianross.com/tag/scholarship/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">academic research</a> in a way that not simply makes sense of graffiti and street art, but has analytic teeth. Thankfully, over the past half century a growing number of experts from practitioners to scholars, from different academic disciplines, have tried to understand and explain graffiti and street art. That’s why a fledgling social scientific approach to graffiti and street art (sometimes labelled Graffiti and Street Art Research Studies -GSRS) has developed. Although this method od understanding and explaining this important type of urban art has produced numerous peer-reviewed articles that have been published in scholarly journals and chapters in academic books, books (from sole-authored to encyclopedias) published by scholarly presses, and the creation of two academic journals specifically devoted to graffiti and street art, in many respect the field is still in its infancy. <a href="https://jeffreyianross.medium.com/taking-stock-of-the-scholarly-study-of-graffiti-and-street-art-6e80bb155b06">Website</a>