Cities are increasingly becoming vessels of consumption, while various opportunities for production of space and public expression are taken away from the city's inhabitants. New architectural interventions often disregard a site's previously developed character and further aid in wiping away memories closely related to a city's cultural past. Banja Luka, the second largest city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has been an important cultural center, even through years of unrest. Within the city's main plaza stands an unfinished concrete structure (Fig. 3), built with pre-war conceptions of a hotel. The structure's location within the city of Banja Luka has provided for a close connection with the city's inhabitants and has allowed them to relate to it directly on a daily basis. The city's youth has left traces of artistic expression on this structure; its interface with the countercultures of graffiti artists and skateboarders has created a unique testament of time which desires continued narration. With the post-war privatization of most properties within the city, and the increasing desire to live within the city center, construction cranes are appearing throughout the city's core, providing new residential towers and a high increase in places for consumption. The opportunities for production of space, for places where memories are preserved and created, are decreasing and threaten to affect the thesis site. Completion of the project as initially envisioned would disregard the existing interactive relationship established between the city's inhabitants and the structure. The beauty of artistic expression cultivated upon the structure longs to be preserved and augmented in order to enable the structure's autonomy. Recognition of the value of the existing built elements and the site's overall character is essential and requires purposeful evaluation in the unification process of the new and existing elements. The redefined space will become a monument to the activities which have echoed at the site through some of the toughest times the city's youth had to endure. "...the notion of monument I have sought to put forward here is bound up with the lingering resonance of poetry after it has been heard, with the recollection of architecture after it has been seen." (Solà-Morales Rubió, Ignasi and Sarah Whiting. Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 71.) The old and new will become individual halves of one self, united as they continue to play.

Various researches across the world have established that graffiti writing is a universal social practice. The actual occurrence or manifestation of graffiti is however far from being universal cross-culturally. It varies based on a wide array of social variables. This research therefore set out to interrogate the occurrence of graffiti writing as a unique social practice in Zimbabwean urban areas. Three Zimbabwean urban areas (Harare, Chitungwiza and Gweru) were specifically sampled for the collection of graffiti inscriptions on various surfaces which included toilet walls, durawalls as well as road signs. Graffiti data collected from the various surfaces was complemented by reader feedback contributions from The Herald and Newsday. Focus group discussions provided a third tier of data aimed at establishing participants’ multiple reactions towards the practice of graffiti. Analysis of data was done based on three significant sections of participants’ attitudes towards graffiti, urban street protest graffiti as well as educational graffiti collected from various toilet surfaces in urban areas. Participants’ attitudes towards graffiti revealed varied reactions towards the practice of graffiti. The reactions were partly influenced by the participants’ ages as well as levels of education and maturity. Age and maturity proved to be predictors of the extent to which participants were willing to be pragmatic in so far as the appreciation of graffiti writing is concerned. Older and more experienced and mature participants were thus willing to look past the ‘deviant’ nature of graffiti writing to consider the various pressures that force writers to take to the wall. Urban street protest graffiti is a term coined in this research to capture the unique type of graffiti that is written on various surfaces along streets in urban areas. This highly textual graffiti is drastically different from the post-graffiti commonly found in Western urban cities and is aptly referred to as street art. Urban street protest mainly manifested itself in Zimbabwean urban areas in two main themes of protest inscriptions directed towards the operations of Zimbabwe’s electrical energy supplier (commonly referred to by its former name of the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority - ZESA) as well as through political inscriptions. Political inscriptions expose a high degree of nuances that have not been hitherto discussed in literature on political graffiti inscriptions. The research analysed how graffiti writing can be employed for both pro-hegemonic and anti-hegemonic purposes. Inscriptions in high schools and tertiary institutions highlighted a differential construction of discourse on a gendered basis. Inscriptions in female toilets indicated a tendency of graffiti writers to perpetuate dominant educational, health, traditional and religious discourses which assert male dominance. The inscriptions show a major preoccupation with restricting or policing of female sexuality by fellow students mainly through the discursive usages of social corrective Shona labels such as hure (prostitute) and gaba ([big] tin). These are labels that are virtually absent in graffiti inscriptions in male toilets which is suggestive of a situation whereby female inscriptions are conservative. A consequence of such conservatism in inscriptions in female toilets is that no new sexualities are reconstructed and negotiated through discourses in discursive spaces provided by the inherently private nature of toilets in general. Thus, cultural and religious normative expectations are regarded as still weighing heavily on female high school writers in the construction and negotiation of sexuality and gendered behaviours, attitudes, norms and values through discourses constructed through graffiti. In contrast, male inscriptions highlight a major subversion of dominant discourses on abstinence and responsible sexual behaviours and attitudes. Corrective social labels such as ngochani (gay person) are mainly employed to pressure males into indulging and engaging in heterosexual behaviours. Discourses constructed through graffiti inscriptions in male toilets also demonstrate how sexuality is constructed through debate on the appropriateness of marginalised sexualities such as masturbation and homosexuality. / African Languages / D. Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

This study explored the content, tone and amount of graffiti produced in South African bathrooms in KwaZulu-Natal. Raw graffiti was collected during 2008 from „institutions of higher education?. One of the primary aims of this study was to investigate if gender identities continue to operate in private, anonymous contexts. Politeness theory is utilized as a theoretical framework to generate hypotheses about the direction of influence gender may exert on graffiti if it continues to operate in private contexts. Inscriptions were written down in books. Thematic analysis was then applied, which led to the generation of content categories in content analysis on which chi-squared statistical procedures were applied. The categories were analysed in terms of amount, dominant content and tone, and were stratified in relation to gender. Ecosystems theory was used in an attempt to more holistically understand our sample within the context in which it was created. This study has found that gender had a significant influence on the amount, content, and tone of the graffiti produced. It was found that males dominantly produced tags and political graffiti content, and were more likely than females to produce neutral and negatively toned graffiti. Females produced significantly more graffiti than males and dominantly produced interpersonal content. We hypothesised that our findings were due to gender roles being internalised and continuing to operate in private contexts, especially in contexts where gender is salient, like a bathroom. We argued that the cognitive representation of an inscriber?s gendered audience influences them to behave in gendertypical ways, and in this behaviour their gender is performed, even in the private, anonymous context of the bathroom. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sci.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2018-11-21T08:59:56Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Lais Claro Oliveira.pdf: 1675452 bytes, checksum: 5d9278c5f6a3912ae694f27b3abefd93 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-11-21T08:59:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Lais Claro Oliveira.pdf: 1675452 bytes, checksum: 5d9278c5f6a3912ae694f27b3abefd93 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-09-28 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / The phenomenon of inscriptions made on the walls dates since the cave times, when man recorded with images and symbols his daily life, therefore the history of civilization. In ancient times, graffiti has started to characterize and compose complaints, resistance and subversion movements. Widely spread throughout the world, graffiti was decriminalized in 2011 in Brazil by Law 12408 which differed it from vandalism. However, even after the effervescence of urban interventions and the inclusion of new connotations such as leisure and work, the production is still considered marginalized and carries various stigma to those who draw graffiti, specially in regions far away from large urban centres. In Paraíba Valley, in the countryside of São Paulo, a study carried out in 2015 allowed to observe that even in the face of regulatory and territory exclusion aspects, the practice of graffiti essentially led by young people has personal and social transformation power. Thus, in order to better understand the process of building the identity expression of the youth who resists and creates new ways of being in the contemporary urban context, the present study sought to respond: “How does the process of identification, resistance and creation of the young graffiti draftsman happen given the sociocultural identity policies of the territory of Paraíba Valley?”. The study is supported by the contributions of Critical Social Psychology and social constructs of the Identity analytical category proposed by Antonio da Costa Ciampa (1987). The technique of life history narrative was privileged as instrument, analyzed in the light of the Identity-Metamorphosis-Emancipation Syntagma (1987), according to the usual procedures of the identification studies in the category. The use of interviews with informants, field records and photographs of the productions of young draftsmen of Paraíba Valley was adopted to assist in the field characterization and its main issues. It has been understood that the practice of graffiti is permeated by the institutional commercial imprisoning logic of the territory, which influence the experiences and senses attributed by young people. Nevertheless, given that social space and metamorphosis intercalate, it was understood that creativity reveals to be a strategy of coping with the present contradictions and identity policies involved. It is expressed over youth by different artistic modalities and contexts, as well as in the organisation of independent collective events and actions, which retain communicative and critical capacity, and expand the possibilities of emancipatory movements / O fenômeno das inscrições feitas nos muros data desde os tempos das cavernas, quando o homem registrava com imagens e símbolos sua vida cotidiana, e com isso, a história da civilização. Na Antiguidade o grafite passou a caracterizar e compor movimentos de denúncia, resistência e subversão. Já amplamente difundido por todo o mundo, no Brasil o grafite foi descriminalizado em 2011, por meio da Lei nº 12.408 que o diferenciou do vandalismo. Entretanto, mesmo diante disso, da efervescência de intervenções urbanas e da inclusão de novas conotações como de lazer e trabalho, a produção ainda é tida como marginalizada e carrega diversos estigmas a quem o faz, em especial, nas regiões mais afastadas dos grandes centros urbanos. No Vale do Paraíba, interior de São Paulo, observou-se em estudo realizado em 2015 que mesmo diante dos aspectos regulatórios e de exclusão do território, a prática de grafite essencialmente protagonizada pela juventude tem potência de transformação pessoal e social. Dessa forma, a fim de compreender melhor o processo de construção e expressão identitária do jovem que resiste e cria novas formas de ser no contexto urbano contemporâneo, o presente estudo buscou responder: “Como se dá o processo de identificação, resistência e criação do jovem grafiteiro frente às políticas de identidade socioculturais do território vale paraibano?”. O estudo é sustentado pelos aportes da Psicologia Social Crítica e constructos da categoria analítica de Identidade propostos por Antonio da Costa Ciampa (1987). Privilegiou-se como instrumento a técnica da narrativa de história de vida, analisada à luz do Sintagma Identidade-Metamorfose-Emancipação (1987), em acordo com os usuais procedimentos dos estudos identitários da categoria. Adotando ainda o uso de entrevista com informantes, registros de campo e fotografias das produções de jovens do Vale do Paraíba grafiteiros para auxiliar na caracterização do campo e suas principais questões. Entendeu-se que a prática do grafite é permeada pelas lógicas institucionais e comerciais conservadoras e aprisionantes do território, que influem nas vivências e sentidos atribuídos pelos jovens. Contudo, visto que o espaço social e as metamorfoses intercalam-se mutuamente, compreendeu-se que a criatividade revela-se como estratégia de enfrentamento as contradições presentes e políticas de identidade implicadas. Expressa no trânsito da juventude por diferentes modalidades artísticas e contextos, bem como, na organização de eventos e ações coletivas independentes, que conservam a capacidade comunicativa, crítica e expandem as possibilidades de movimentos emancipatórios