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Update your browserI’m currently working a lot with creative methods in cities and I love developing new ways of documenting and communicating about the visual cultures of urban environments. I photograph walls and surfaces and try to capture the traces left behind by protesters, graffiti removal workers, and graffiti writers, to understand their contributions to urban experiences. Photography teaches me how to see – and advocating for visual literacy in cities is a passion that will probably never leave me.
It was 2013 and I was half way through my PhD at University College London, when I received an invitation to attend a one day workshop in Melbourne called “Competing Urbanisms”. This was organised by Prof Alison Young, who would go on to become one of my career-long mentors and colleagues. I had never travelled so far and I managed to cobble together some funding for the flight, which allowed me to attend and present at this workshop. Most people I met that day have had a huge influence on my career and so did the place – that week I spent in Melbourne planted the seeds for my move here 10 years later. A single day with a huge impact that I could never have anticipated at the time.
If you are between fields, don’t be afraid to carve out your area and name it! I now call myself an urban visual scholar, which is a field that is tangential to other humanities and social sciences disciplines, including communication and cultural studies, geography, visual cultures, and legal studies. The lesson for me has been to speak to scholars across all these disciplines and let the work drive the connections. When I published my book and said I wanted “Urban surfaces” as part of the title, the publisher almost refused it on account of it not being SEO-friendly enough. Two years later, I am convening an Urban Surfaces Research Network with close to 100 members from all over the world, because I went out and found my people.
Dr Sabina Andron is an interdisciplinary urban scholar working on the visual cultures of cities. Her work describes the material, semiotic, and legal qualities of public images such as graffiti and advertising, to understand their role in urban experiences. Sabina is currently a Postdoc Fellow in Cities and Urbanism at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cities, after teaching and receiving a PhD from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Her first monograph, Urban surfaces, graffiti, and the right to the city was shortlisted for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Award. She recently co-founded the international Urban Surfaces Research Network (USRN). She is the Chair of the Australasian Early Career Urban Researchers Network (AECURN) and a co-editor of Visual Studies.
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