Graffiti as public pedagogy: Cross-institutional collaboration for student expression, healing, and transformation

Abstract

Higher education in South Africa has been widely critiqued for privileging Eurocentric epistemologies that marginalise local knowledge systems and distance learning from the socio-political realities students inhabit. Such dynamics constrain students’ capacity to critically engage the historical and structural forces shaping identity, belonging, and wellbeing. Responding to these concerns, this study examines how a collaborative, arts-based pedagogical strategy centred on graffiti can advance more inclusive and socially responsive teaching practices for diverse student populations. Grounded in critical pedagogy and decolonial theory and informed by the group psychoanalytic concept of the social unconscious, the study conceptualises a graffiti installation as a participatory archive through which students explore the intersections of identity, power, place, and collective memory. A qualitative, participatory design was employed with 12 postgraduate students (7 psychology and 5 design students) across 2 private South African institutions. Through a series of facilitated workshops, participants engaged in critical dialogue, collaboratively created a graffiti installation in a public campus space, and reflected on the meanings embedded in the evolving artwork. Data were generated through the visual artifact, transcribed discussions, participant reflections, and facilitator notes, and analysed using iterative thematic and visual analysis. Findings indicate that the collaborative process enabled students to articulate complex experiences of identity, belonging, and mental health while situating these within broader socio-historical dynamics. The installation functioned as a dialogical and multimodal learning space that supported diverse forms of expression, legitimised experiential knowledge, and uncovered both visible and silenced tensions. The chapter’s original contribution lies in demonstrating how participatory visual methods can operationalise intellectual decolonisation in practice while advancing inclusive teaching strategies that engage cognitive, affective, and spatial ways of knowing.