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Special issue on Street Art’s Politics and Discontents

AIAS Fellow Tijen Tunali is editor of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies Special Issue on ‘Street Art’s Politics and Discontents’.

Image: Special Issue cover.

The special issue in the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies entitled ‘Street Art’s Politics and Discontents’ examines how street art, with its subcultural character, has been looked upon for its potential for social aesthetic and political dissidence. While some accounts have diverted attention to street art’s utopia with its creative dissidence and regenerative potential, others have insisted that street art has already been coopted by the aesthetic and institutional order of the neo-liberal economy. Street art has been both a product of and a response to the unequal distribution of resources and visibility in the city.

A dialectical study that investigates both sides of the coin showing art’s aesthetic, spatial, social and political situation in the changing neo-liberal urban landscape is needed. Analysing simultaneously the hegemonic restructuring of the urban environment and the growth of counter-hegemonic resistance on the streets requires taking into account the plurality and complexity of the links between the urban environment, society and arts. This thematic journal issue offers a multi-geographical and interdisciplinary perspective to analyse how street art, as an aesthetic dispositive, functions dialectically as both resource and resistance in the sociopolitical make-up of the urban landscape.

More about the special issue

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/jucs/2020/00000007/f0020002;jsessionid=6h9jbadssamq8.x-ic-live-02#Supp

Contact

Tijen Tunali, Postdoc, AIAS-COFUND Fellow
tijen.tunali@aias.au.dk

Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, AIAS
Høegh-Guldbergs Gade 6B 
DK-8000 Aarhus C
Denmark