The Campus Graffitists' Identity Construction

Being treated as vandalism, crime or art, the graffiti never lose its appeal in the eyes of the researchers since its birth to nowadays. In general, the majority of studies deal graffiti as art or vandalism. Relatively small portion of essays investigate the nature, content, space of distribution, and even some explore the psychological motivations of the graffitists. Contrary to the popular belief that graffiti are vandalism or art. However, a group of researchers went even much further, probing into the communicative function of graffiti. Gach(1973) maintains that graffiti are, “frequently overlooked form of communication”. Similar studies also carried out by Bruner and Kelso(1987), Cole(1991), Gross(1993) and Omoniyi(2000), Burlo(2003), etc. However, graffito is not only a form of “written words to communicate”, but also is “an inextricable part of their identity” and “the desire to gain recognition is their passion” Brown(1978). Indeed, some papers have written on the subject of identity through graffiti, however, researches of campus graffitists' identity construction are scarce. Therefore, the present study continues that focus, viewing graffiti as communication for campus students. Firstly, it looks into how the students communicate by wall conversations. Secondly, the study aimed to reveal the implied identities constructed in the students' graffiti communication.Based on Harvey Sack's(1972a, b, 1992) Membership Categorization Analysis(Henceforth MCA) and Kress and Van Leeuwen's(1996, 2006) Visual Grammar(Henceforth VG), this thesis analyzes the visual construction of campus graffitists' identities through the interactions on the campus walls. The MCA approach is applied to analyze the word-based graffiti, and the VG is used to reveal the identities hidden in the image-based campus graffiti. In tall 435 pieces of graffiti were collected on campus by photographing, 350 word-based graffiti and 85 image-based graffiti. The essay analyzes the most representative 37 word-based and 14 image-based graffiti. The outcome reveals that the campus students' graffiti communication has its unique lexical, syntactic, extra-linguistic characteristics through wide application of cartoons, symbols, etc., which is similar to net speech. Digging further, some positive identities have been constructed through foregrounding of key factors as the application of such variables as demand, perspective and distance, etc. To be more specific, the campus graffitists are constructed as graduates, advise-provider/seekers, romance/friendship seekers, patriot, knowledge pursuer, dream pursuer, idolater and environmentalist, and so on. However, some negative identities are still discovered on the context of campus graffiti, for instance, the campus graffitists are constructed as ONS-seeker, complainer and humiliator. In all, the overall identities discovered in the thesis correspond with the fact that the campus graffitists' identities are diversified. Whether the identities are positive or negative, they reflect the instability of the campus students in that they are standing right in the stages of growing-up to mature man.