Dr Alba Griffin

Profile

I graduated from Manchester University in 2010 with a BA (Hons) in Modern Languages, from Newcastle University in 2013 with an MA in Latin American Interdisciplinary Studies and completed my ESRC-funded PhD in 2019 also at Newcastle University.

I have previously worked in the arts and publishing sectors, as well as in project management. From 2022-2023 I worked Dr Derek Edyvane on the AHRC-funded project ‘Ordinary Citizenship’. I am currently working with Dr Madeleine Le Bourdon and Professor Anne Tallontire on the ISF project ‘Fostering transformative pedagogies in global education partnerships at the University of Leeds’. I also work at Newcastle University at the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. 

Twitter and Instagram: @agriffbag

Research interests

My research explores violence, power and inequality in the everyday, with a focus on popular culture and representation.

My first monograph, Reading the Walls in Bogota: Graffiti, Street Art and the Urban Imaginary of Violence (Pitt Press 2023), focused on graffiti and street art practices in Colombia's capital city and their relationships to urban imaginaries of violence and inequality. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the work draws on an ethnographic, reception-based methodological and theoretical framework in order to pay close attention to the perspectives of urban inhabitants, including those producing graffiti and street art as well as those engaging with them as audiences. Such an approach revealed the complex dynamics of violence and the politics of representation, specifically in relation to political violence, structural inequality and social prejudice as they play out through the contemporary trends in graffiti and street art of commemoration, beautification, denunciation and self-expression.