Topic:

Vandalism at schools: The Intersection of Urban and Academic Education?

Vandalism in itself is illegal, whether as a willful damage or defacement of property, as a political statement or a part of modern popular art (as long as there are no official permissions or assignments, of course), and it plays a predominant role in German crime statistics. Especially schools and other public institutions complain about an increase of vandalistic practices like graffiti on walls and tables or the destruction of parts of the building (broken windows, destructed toilets etc). There are different ways of handling these ‘expressive spatial practices’, for instance closing off buildings with fences and walls or intensifying the  monitoring by installing (more) observation cameras. But what do vandalistic practices mean in general and to adolescents, to the academic organization and education? What does vandalism have to do with e.g. street art and Urban education? Does the Urban "flow" into schools or do schools and academic learning avoid creative processes and practices such as graffiti? Deleuze and Guattari describe these processes of transformation as "Unnotched" ("Glättung") and "Notched" ("Kerbung"). So it is interesting to get to know where, when and why do adolescents notch or unnotch academic environment.

There are well-differentiated and useful psychological and pedagogic models and theories to explain vandalistic behavior of adolescents (e.g. theories of deviance) and theories concerning the aesthetic part of vandalism (e.g. art theories, street art) but the (latent) structure of meaning of vandalism has not yet been sufficiently explored. The theoretical framework of this doctoral thesis is composed of the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari and Johan Frederik Hartle and can therefore be allocated in the poststructuralism line.

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