An Exploration of Graffiti on University’s Walls: A Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis Study

Abstract

Graffiti have received a great attention from scholars as they have been considered a vital cultural phenomenon for many years (Trahan, 2011;Divsalar & Nemati, 2012;Zakareviciute, 2014;Farnia, 2014;El-Nashar & Nayef;. Although there are extensive contemporary researches on graffiti in many disciplines, such as linguistics, cultural studies, politics, art, and communication (Pietrosanti, 2010;Farnia, 2014;Oganda, 2015), there are few studies exploring graffiti on classrooms' walls in higher education milieus (Farnia, 2014). To the best knowledge of the researchers, very few studies were done on the Jordanian context (e.g. Al-Haj Eid, 2008;Abu-Jaber, et al., 2012) and none was done on the Jordanian universities. Therefore, this study aims at analysing the content and communicative features of writings found on universities' classrooms' walls, corridors, and washrooms and their relation to the socio-cultural values of the society in order to explore how universities help students voice their attitudes and thoughts. The linguistic features that characterise these writings were also examined. Graffiti-writings, which were collected from the University of Jordan and the Hashemite University, were coded and analysed using the thematic content analysis technique (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995). The analysis of the data has shown that graffiti serve different communicative language functions related to personal, social, national, religious, political, and taboo matters. The most salient linguistic features of these graffiti are simplicity and variation. It can be concluded that graffiti are distinctive and silent ways of communication, particularly in students' society. The study will be of great importance to linguists, sociologists, educators, administrators, teachers and parents. It is enrichment to the available literature on linguistic studies.

Writing on Tents and Caravans in Al-Zaatari Syrian Refugee Camp of Mafraq, Jordan: A Sociolinguistic Analysis

“…As shown in Table ( 1), it is obvious that the most significant message in the collected data is expressing patriotism and homesickness. This common occurrence is due to the camp dwellers 'allegiance and adherence to their country, Syria, though being long away from it for years and new generations were born.…”

Contents and the language used in graffiti: A case of Kathmandu Valley

“…Thematic content analysis of graffiti helps us to analyze the graffiti images from different themes based on their content. It is useful for the researcher to classify the "raw" data in meaningful concepts and then group them into relevant all-encompassing categories in order to examine the main prevalent themes and contextual meanings of graffiti (Al-khawaldeh, Khawaldeh, Bani-Khair and Khawaldeh, 2017). While analyzing the representation of graffiti from its content, different linguists reveal some specific themes.…”

Graffiti Discourse Analysis in Bontoc, Mountain Province: A Corpus-Based Study

“…It is also termed as "street art" as mentioned by Alexiou (2017); Bloch (2017); Bianchi and Viti (2017); Ferrel (2017); Iverson (2017); and Ulmer (2017). Blume (1987); Al-Khawaldeh, et al, (2017);and Young (2017) extends the term's definition as any unwanted graphic or written inscriptions by typical anonymous people in several public surfaces with no authorized formation is completed. Graffiti have been considered as a diagram of a frank illustration of reality as well as an evolutionary means that has made people reveal on their cultural identity using imaginative and communal styles of expressions as mentioned by Sheivandi et al, (2015) cited from the study of Al-Khawaldeh, et al, (2017).…”

“…With the latest research on graffiti by Al-Khawaldeh, et al, (2017), they mentioned some the classification of graffiti that are considered hilarious, traditional epigraphy, or historical. One of them is the latrinalia, a graffiti characteristic termed by Dundes (1966) referring to the restrooms' graffiti which Haslam (2012) pointed out as written taboo ideas and highlighted images inside public restrooms by anonymous graffitists who freely use specific types of language to express sentiments and outlooks in their everyday social life.…”