Urban dialogues: The lives and after-lives of political street art images

The aim of this paper is to explore political street art images as sequences in a dialogue that feeds from, and extends to, wider political discourse. The paper argues for the centrality and predominance of the visual in the way everyday political discourse is negotiated and in the process through which space is produced in the city. The images are conceptualized through sociocultural psychology as intervention tools that are used by different social actors in response to different political dialogues in public discourse. A longitudinal methodology is used to follow the transformative social lives of those images as they borrow from, and respond to, one another. A longitudinal series of images will be presented from one wall in the area of Tahrir Square during and after the Egyptian revolution of 2011, images which were made by different social groups in response to political and social changes, and which thus demonstrate contested political dialogue in the form of inscribing and re-inscribing the recent history of the revolution.