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Tag Archives: Graffiti

The ritual graffiti of Burton-Judson

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

People who aren’t familiar with the Regenstein Library have asked me whether writing graffiti there is some sort of student ritual. I’ve assured them it isn’t– it’s just a manifestation of student stress and boredom, and/or perhaps a small creative outlet, that takes place in the building where a lot of students study. But these [...]

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F(l)AGS ARE G(r)AY: socially acceptable homophobia

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

In the 1960′s, before the Regenstein Library was built, racism wasn’t hard to find in the graffiti written in Harper Library and elsewhere on campus. Today, it has been driven into the “private” space of men’s bathroom stalls, along with a number of other comments that would likely be censured by other graffiti-writers, if not [...]

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Don’t discuss politics in polite company (go to the bathroom)

Sunday, March 21, 2010

I was tipped off to a men’s bathroom in Harper– a building with a number of classrooms, the adviser offices, and an all-night study space– that was covered in graffiti, and with the help of some male door-guards (my awesome coworkers Ifeanyi Okonma and Avi Schwab), I was able to hit up all the men’s [...]

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Berkeley library graffiti: violence, identity, and vaginas

Thursday, March 4, 2010

About a month ago, with the help of a friend I got into Doe Memorial Library at UC Berkeley on a busy Saturday afternoon, where I proceeded to photograph all the graffiti I could find in unoccupied study carrels. The resulting data set, while small, is markedly different from the UChicago graffiti corpus in a [...]

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The decline and fall of the B-level men’s room

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

It’s been about a month since I last wrote about the B-level men’s room (first post can be found here, last month’s update here, though I’ve been back a couple times since). The decline has begun: philosopher wordplay has descended into more penis drawings and an attempt to turn an anti-gay slur into a pun. [...]

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