Voices 07: Caitlin Bruce on Graffiti Culture and Urban Institutional Attunement

In this episode, we speak with Caitlin Bruce.

Caitlin is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. Originally trained through Northwestern University’s renowned PhD programme in rhetoric and public culture, her research focuses on the politics and possibilities of urban public art, in settings including the United States, Germany, Colombia, and France. But one place Caitlin’s work has taken her for longer and more immersive durations is Mexico, which has been the basis for two book-length projects exploring the localisation of global graffiti practices in situated contexts. 

Our discussion centred on Caitlin’s more recent book project, Voices in Aerosol: Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement, and Graffiti in Urban Mexico. It is a book which explores how the city government of León, in central Mexico, went from fighting a war on graffiti in the early 2000s to a much different approach ten years later, when it turned towards sanctioning and valuing it. And, it seeks to understand how young people, engaging in such artistic practices, navigated these shifting conditions.  

We discuss the book’s origins as a research project, as well as its historical and global contexts – from Mexican muralism to American hip-hop culture – before moving on to its unique anchoring in a kind of sonic or aural perspective on graffiti and more broadly visual culture. We also end by discussing Caitlin’s recent efforts in social-engaged research, bringing the work with Leónese graffiti writers into contact with Latinx and other contemporaries in US urban contexts.

This interview, which was recorded on 28 October 2024, is Episode 7 within the Voices podcast series for Mediapolis Now, the podcast channel of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. In the Voices series, we interview thinkers and practitioners about their work at the junction of cities, culture and media.

A readable version of the interview has also been published simultaneously as part of the The Mediapolis Q&A series.

Opening and closing music: ‘Mediapolis Now Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)