Graffiti in local politics: Students shifting perspective of their communities

A growing number of social science programmes are wrestling with how to introduce undergraduates to qualitative and interpretive research methods, especially when those courses are fully online and asynchronous. In this article, I take up that challenge by sharing how I used a graffiti‑inspired fieldwork assignment in an online state and local politics course at a small regional university. I explore two guiding questions: (1) how political science can benefit from incorporating humanistic and artistic fieldwork practices, and (2) what it looks like to build fieldwork skills when students never share the same physical classroom. Drawing on work in experiential and community‑engaged learning alongside scholarship on graffiti, street art and urban surfaces, I walk through a multistage assignment that asks students to read their own communities – graffiti, corporate advertising, signage, monuments and their absences – as claims to space and expressions of sustainability, belonging and exclusion. I then reflect on where the assignment worked well and where it fell short, including the difficulty of sustaining attention to visual politics and social sustainability in a dispersed, asynchronous setting. I close by offering some takeaways for instructors who want to bring interdisciplinary, fieldwork‑inflected methods into online courses and to help students see the political textures of their everyday surroundings in new ways.