Sabina Andron

Sabina Andron

IVSA Board Member

Sabina Andron is a cities scholar specializing in creative and transgressive public cultures, with a specific interest in the semiotics of urban walls and surfaces. Sabina’s research focuses on the surfaces of cities as spatial typologies, by examining their material, visual, and legal dimensions. Her areas of expertise include graffiti and street art, public writing and city signage; urban visual culture and geosemiotics; the right to the city, spatial justice and the urban commons; legal geography and urban property regimes; and deviance, disorder and crime as forms of urban citizenship.

Her first monograph, Graffiti, spatial justice, and the city: the surface commons establishes a research field of surface studies, looking at how surfaces are inscribed, regulated, and valued, and how they articulate cultures of control and resistance in cities. The book will be published with Routledge in 2023.

Sabina is a Faculty of Arts Postdoc Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cities. She previously taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where she received her Architectural History PhD in 2018. Her teaching includes subjects such as “Insurgent cities”, “Representations of cities”, “Surface city”, as well as survey courses on architectural history and the London built environment.

Sabina was a UCL Grand Challenges grantee and organiser of the international Graffiti Sessions conference in 2014, as well as a British Council fellow at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016. She is the recipient of the 2020 Prosser award for outstanding work in visual methodologies, awarded by the International Visual Sociology Association, and co-directed the IVSA annual conference in 2022.

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    If it’s far away, it’s news, but if it’s close at home, it’s sociology.

    James Reston

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    The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.

    Pierre Bourdieu

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    There are dignified stupidities, and there are heroic stupidities, and there is such a thing as stupid stupidities, and that would be a stupid stupidity not to have a camera on board.

    Werner Herzog

  • You try your hardest to give people their space, but at moments you know you’re capturing their image in ways they may or may not be okay with. It’s that rocking back and forth between respect and betrayal that I feel like is at the heart of the film.

    Kirsten Johnson

  • We never really know what’s around the corner when we’re filming – what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.

    Barbara Kopple

  • Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology – looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

    George Lucas

  • Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that ‘language’ themselves (just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs). Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way

    Howard Becker

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    One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language.

    Lisa Kristine

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    Every photograph promises more than it delivers and delivers more than it intended.

    Steve Harp

  • I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

    Errol Morris

  • Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing.

    Henry Rollins

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    The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.

    Zygmunt Bauman

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    Visual culture is now the study of how to understand change in a world too enormous to see but vital to imagine.

    Nicholas Mirzoeff

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    For any picture, ask yourself what question or questions it might be answering. Since the picture could answer many, questions, we can decide what question we are interested in.

    Howard Becker

  • Give us adequate images. We lack adequate images. Our civilization does not have adequate images. And I think a civilization is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it doesn’t develop an adequate language for adequate images.

    Werner Herzog

  • So it is my firm belief, that if you want nowadays, to have a clear and distinct communication of your concepts, you have to use synthetic images, no longer words.

    Vilém Flusser

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    Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must change.

    Bertolt Brecht

  • If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.

    Salman Rushdie

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    Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

    William S. Burroughs

#Visualsociology

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