Stefano Bloch
Stefano Bloch is an American author and professor of cultural geography and critical criminology at the University of Arizona.[2][3]
Stefano Bloch | |
|---|---|
| Born | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Alma mater | University of Minnesota (Ph.D.) UCLA (M.A.) UC Santa Cruz (B.A.) |
| Institutions | University of Arizona Brown University |
Main interests | Cultural geography, cultural criminology, gangs, graffiti, social theory, gentrification, autoethnography |
Notable ideas | Los Angeles graffiti styles, "Going All City," urban autoethnography |
Influences
| |
Bloch is the author of Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture[4][5] and appears in the documentaries Bomb It and Vigilante Vigilante: The Battle for Expression.[6][7] Bloch is credited with "changing the conversation about graffiti in LA."[8]
Dr. Stefano Bloch is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development and Environment in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and faculty member in the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory.[9][10]
Dr. Bloch provides expert testimony on legal cases focusing on gang activity and identity.
Education and career
Bloch was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Brown University Cogut Center for the Humanities,[11] and Presidential Diversity Fellow and a Senior Research Associate in the Urban Studies Program at Brown University.[12]
Bloch worked under the preeminent socio-spatial theorist, urbanist, and co-founder of the Los Angeles School, Edward Soja. As a graduate researcher in the Department of Urban Planning within the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Bloch collaborated on Dr. Soja's My Los Angeles[13] and Seeking Spatial Justice.[14]
Bloch is a graduate of the University of Minnesota (Ph.D.), UCLA (MA), the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA), and Los Angeles Valley College (AAS).
Bloch is a member of the American Association of Geographers, the American Society of Criminology, the UA Center for Latin American Studies,[15] the Institute for LGBT Studies,[16] and is an executive board member of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory at the University of Arizona.[17]
In 2020, Bloch's master seminar "Researching and Writing an Autoethnography of the Street" was convened by Tricia Rose at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.[18]
Bloch's writing on gang member identification appeared as an op-ed in The New York Times[19] and his work on police shootings involving pet dogs co-authored with sociologist Daniel E. Martinez appeared in Slate.com.[20]
In 2021, Bloch was awarded an "Early Career Scholars Award" for excellence in research, service, and teaching at the University of Arizona,[21] and was awarded a College of Social and Behavioral Sciences "Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award."[22]
Scholarly writing and publications
Professor Bloch's research on policing, carcerality, race, and displacement has been published in academic journals including Antipode (journal) (2021) with Enrique Alan Olivares-Pelayo,[23] Geography Compass (2021),[24] Critical Criminology (journal) (2020),[25] Progress in Human Geography (2020),[26] in Urban Studies (journal) with anthropologist Susan A. Phillips,[27] and in other scholarly venues.
In a 2018 article published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Bloch coined the term "place based elicitation" to describe interviewing techniques that allow for reflexive, in-situ expression by members of criminal subcultures.[28]
In a 2019 article on gentrification and gang injunctions in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, published in Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, Bloch and co-author D. Meyer coined the term "implicit revanchism".[29]
In 2020, Bloch co-authored with University of Arizona sociologist Daniel E. Martinez,[30] "Canicide by Cop: A geographical analysis of canine killings by police in Los Angeles," published in the journal Geoforum.[31]
In 2021, Bloch published an article in Environment and Planning C: Politics & Space [32] on the concept of aversive racism – a concept theorized by psychologists Samuel L. Gaertner and John F. Dovidio. A 2021 version of the paper appears as an op-ed for the London School of Economics Phelan Center under the title "How surveillance technologies and neighborhood watch apps are capturing and reflecting communities' prejudices."[33]
In 2021, Bloch won the American Society of Criminology Journal Article of the Year Award for "Broken Windows Ideology and the (Mis)Reading of Graffiti."[34]
Bloch's 2022 article "For Autoethnographies of Displacement Beyond Gentrification: The Body as Archive, Memory as Data" appeared in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.[35]
In 2022 the Wiley (publisher) journal Geography Compass published Bloch's "Gangs, Gang Members, and Geography."[36]
Praise for Going All City
Linguist and activist Noam Chomsky hails Going All City as "a vivid autoethnography and a shattering account of life in the LA 'gang hoods – and the warmth and companionship that somehow survive the horrors.'" Writing:
Bloch provides a remarkable picture, presented with insight and sympathetic understanding."[37]
Luis J. Rodriguez, former poet laureate, Chicano activist, and author of Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., writes:
Bloch knows how dangerous art can be for aerosol warriors: their imaginations arrested and expressions pathologized. He also elucidates the undeniable brilliance exploding on walls, utility poles, and underpasses.[38]
Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2020, Ryan Gattis, author of All Involved"[39] stated:
Stefano Bloch is the ultimate insider in an outsider subculture, a legend for his productivity and tirelessness... Few works explore L.A. with the depth that Going All City accomplishes—and, at 240 pages, so economically—while also touching on the importance of art, the difficulties of family, and the struggle to belong. . . It is a work not simply of insight and gravity, but also of unflinching wisdom regarding those deemed to be the least of society."[40]
According to author and cultural criminologist Jeff Ferrell, writing for Times Higher Education:
Page after page of this tensely engaging memoir documents Bloch's elaborate, daily remapping of streets, blocks and neighbourhoods along shifting coordinates of physical access, subcultural status, public visibility and the daily dangers offered up by street gangs and the police."[41]
Chaz Bojorquez, the "god father of Chicano graffiti,"[42] calls Stefano Bloch "the first true graffiti writer scholar, tagging his story and name on the walls inside your mind."[43]
Susan A. Phillips, noted anthropologist and author of Wallbangin', Operation Flytrap, and The City Beneath states:
Going All City is an amazing read that is impossible to put down. A cutting-edge geographical exploration of under-examined Los Angeles landscapes, this poignant, insightful book is unique within graffiti scholarship and expansive in our understanding of the city. Depicting the pain of a childhood spent in poverty, the ambiguity of race, and the subjective experience of policing and gangs, this is the remarkable story of just one of thousands of young people who have found power in the clandestine practice of graffiti.[44]
The Minneapolis Star Tribune states that "Stefano Bloch's memoir about growing up in 1990s Los Angeles, is a surprising and intimate look inside the life of a graffiti writer."[45]
According to the Times Literary Supplement in London:
Stefano Bloch offers a riveting, eye-opening insight into the formative years of Cisco, one of the most prolific taggers in Los Angeles during the 1990s. These days Cisco is better known in the rarefied circles of academia: Cisco is Bloch himself, now a distinguished ethnographer and professor of cultural geography. As a teenager, however, he was obsessed with the phrase that lends the book its title. To go all city is to saturate visible surfaces with one's tag throughout a conurbation – a challenging but effective way of gaining the admiration of other graffiti writers (aka "bombers" or simply "writers") and even the tacit respect of hostile gangs…a valuable and enlightening means of better understanding the dynamics behind tagging.[46]
Writing for KCET, Mike Sonksen states:
Bloch's autoethnography is not only one of the most compelling books ever written about writing graffiti, it is one of the best memoirs of someone growing up in the San Fernando Valley.[47]
For Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing:
Bloch unflinchingly peels back all the layers of artifice, hype, and sensationalism to reveal a stark portrait of struggling to survive and make meaning in a landscape of disorder and deprivation.[48]
As written in a featured review of Going All City in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers in 2020:
It would be difficult to find an author better credentialed than Bloch to write about subverting urban geography. As a graffiti artist, he was writing in the landscape, and as chance would have it, he has become a geographer who writes on the landscape, now teaching at the University of Arizona. . . . Going All City is a refreshing piece of modern geography, and an excellent addition to the still growing conversations on spatial justice in the United States.[49]
In Hyperallergic, critic and art historian Bridget Quinn calls Going All City "that rarest text, both a gripping memoir of life on the street, as well as an academic treatise."[50]
Personal life
As stated in his 2019 memoir, Going All City, Bloch attended North Hollywood High School. Under his pseudonym, Cisco, Bloch is a member of the Los Angeles-based CBS graffiti crew and former writing partner of Mear One.
In a 2021 interview with the Los Angeles Lakers on NBA.com titled "The Streets with Stefano Bloch,"[51] Bloch discusses graffiti in LA and the Lakers' impact on the street art scene, crediting the Lakers organization and its players with bringing some sense of unity to an otherwise racially and economically divided city.
As Cisco, Bloch is widely credited as an innovator of 1990s-era graffiti writing styles including "topless letters" and "top-to-bottom freeway silvers,"[52][53] and is known as "one of LA's most prolific (and, in some circles, legendary) graffiti writers" according to Times Higher Education.[54]
Bloch lives with his family in Los Angeles, California and Tucson, Arizona.
Works
- Bloch, Stefano (2019). "Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture". Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226493442
References
- ^ "Jeff Ferrell – Google Search".
- ^ "Stefano Bloch". University of Chicago Press. Retrieved April 11, 2020.
- ^ "Stefano Bloch". June 11, 2019.
- ^ Going All City.
- ^ "No One is Nothing: On "Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture"". February 14, 2020.
- ^ Bloch, Stefano (November 2019). Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-49358-9.
- ^ Harvey, Dennis. "Variety Reviews "Vigilante, Vigilante: The Battle for Expression"".
- ^ "'Going All City': How a UA Professor is Changing the Conversation About Graffiti in LA". February 11, 2020.
- ^ "Stefano Bloch". June 11, 2019.
- ^ "SCCT Faculty | Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory".
- ^ "Past and Present Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows | Cogut Institute for the Humanities | Brown University".
- ^ "Presidential Diversity Postdoctoral Fellows 2015–2017 | Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity (OIED) | Brown University".
- ^ Soja, Edward W. (March 2014). My Los Angeles by Edward W. Soja – Paperback – University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-28174-5.
- ^ "Seeking Spatial Justice".
- ^ "Stefano Bloch". August 30, 2019.
- ^ "Affiliated Faculty of the Institute for LGBT Studies". July 7, 2019.
- ^ "Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory | Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs".
- ^ "researching-and-writing-autoethnography-street" "Upcoming Events | Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America | Brown University".
- ^ Bloch, Stefano (February 4, 2020). "Opinion | Are You in a Gang Database?". The New York Times.
- ^ "Cops Are Also Shooting Pets in Black and Brown Communities at Much Higher Rates". July 6, 2020.
- ^ "SBS Faculty Receive Prestigious University Awards for Research and Teaching". June 9, 2021.
- ^ "Congratulations to SBS Teaching Award Winners, Spring '21". May 12, 2021.
- ^ Bloch, Stefano; Olivares‐Pelayo, Enrique Alan (2021). "Carceral Geographies from Inside Prison Gates: The Micro‐Politics of Everyday Racialisation". Antipode. 53 (5): 1319–1338. doi:10.1111/anti.12727.
- ^ Bloch, Stefano (2021). "Police and policing in geography: From methods, to theory, to praxis". Geography Compass. 15 (3). doi:10.1111/gec3.12555. S2CID 233897432.
- ^ Bloch, Stefano (2020). "Broken Windows Ideology and the (Mis)Reading of Graffiti". Critical Criminology. 28 (4): 703–720. doi:10.1007/s10612-019-09444-w. S2CID 151186127.
- ^ Bloch, Stefano (2020). "Policing car space and the legal liminality of the automobile". Progress in Human Geography. 45: 136–155. doi:10.1177/0309132519901306. S2CID 213131608.
- ^ Bloch, Stefano; Phillips, Susan A. (2021). "Mapping and making gangland: A legacy of redlining and enjoining gang neighbourhoods in Los Angeles". Urban Studies. 59 (4): 750–770. doi:10.1177/00420980211010426. S2CID 236550571.
- ^ Bloch, Stefano (2018). "Place-Based Elicitation: Interviewing Graffiti Writers at the Scene of the Crime". Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 47 (2): 171–198. doi:10.1177/0891241616639640. S2CID 146912741.
- ^ Bloch, Stefano; Meyer, Dugan (2019). "Implicit revanchism: Gang injunctions and the security politics of white liberalism". Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 37 (6): 1100–1118. doi:10.1177/0263775819832315. S2CID 150509940.
- ^ "Daniel E. Martínez". October 14, 2019.
- ^ Bloch, Stefano; Martínez, Daniel E. (May 1, 2020). "Canicide by Cop: A geographical analysis of canine killings by police in Los Angeles". Geoforum. 111: 142–154. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.02.009. S2CID 213643037.
- ^ Bloch, Stefano (2021). "Aversive racism and community-instigated policing: The spatial politics of Nextdoor". Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. 40: 260–278. doi:10.1177/23996544211019754. S2CID 236424992.
- ^ "How surveillance technologies and neighborhood watch apps are capturing and reflecting communities' prejudices". September 10, 2021.
- ^ Bloch, Stefano (2020). "Broken Windows Ideology and the (Mis)Reading of Graffiti". Critical Criminology. 28 (4): 703–720. doi:10.1007/s10612-019-09444-w. S2CID 151186127.
- ^ Bloch, Stefano (2022). "For Autoethnographies of Displacement Beyond Gentrification: The Body as Archive, Memory as Data". Annals of the American Association of Geographers. 112 (3): 706–714. doi:10.1080/24694452.2021.1985952. S2CID 245168692.
- ^ Bloch, Stefano (August 2022). "Gangs, gang members, and geography". Geography Compass. 16 (8). doi:10.1111/gec3.12651.
- ^ "Stefano Bloch: Life and death in LA's graffiti subculture". February 20, 2020.
- ^ "Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture (Hardcover) | Turning the Page Books".
- ^ Kakutani, Michiko (April 29, 2015). "Review: 'All Involved' by Ryan Gattis is Set in the Days After the Rodney King Verdict". The New York Times.
- ^ "No One is Nothing: On "Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture"". February 14, 2020.
- ^ "Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture, by Stefano Bloch". November 14, 2019.
- ^ "Chaz Bojórquez: The Godfather of Graffiti | DOPE Life". September 12, 2017.
- ^ Going All City.
- ^ "PRESS".
- ^ "Don't miss: 'Going All City,' by Stefano Bloch". Star Tribune.
- ^ "In Brief: Going all City by Stefano Bloch book review | the TLS".
- ^ "Seven Books to Help Understand Judith Baca's Great Wall of Los Angeles and L.A. Itself". June 30, 2020.
- ^ Bloch, Stefano (November 14, 2019). Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture. ISBN 978-0-226-49344-2.
- ^ Brasdefer, Thomas (2020). "Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture". The AAG Review of Books. 8 (2): 66–67. doi:10.1080/2325548X.2020.1722458. S2CID 216209854.
- ^ "A Gripping Memoir Dives into LA's Graffiti Subculture of the '90s". January 6, 2020.
- ^ "In the Paint Newsletter – Full Article – September 2021". NBA.com.
- ^ "In Brief: Going all City by Stefano Bloch book review | the TLS".
- ^ "Going All City: An Interview with Cisco".
- ^ "Stefano Bloch: Life and death in LA's graffiti subculture". February 20, 2020.