While especially interested in name-writing from Romantic times, this call welcomes submissions on tagging from all eras, including today.

The Tag Conference thus continues its long-standing goal of fostering dialogue between the scholarly spheres of historical and contemporary graffiti.

This call explicitly welcomes non-scholars.

Abstract Submission

Deadline: 2 June 2025.
Send your applications to thetagconference@gmail.com.

Submissions must include an abstract of no more than 1,500 characters, links to related research, a brief description of the author’s research background, and a few low-resolution images (under 5MB total) illustrating the subject.

Abstracts must be written in English. Presentations will also be delivered in English. Each presentation will be allocated 30 minutes, including time for Q&A.

Alternative presentation formats — such as panel debates, artist discussions, photography or video — will be considered. Remote presentations will only be considered under special circumstances.

Participation in the conference is free. The organisers are unable to cover travel or accommodation expenses for applicants to the Call for Papers.

Accepted abstracts will be announced by 16 June 2025.

Name-Writing in Public Space

Informal name-writing in public spaces is a time-honoured practice, likely as old as writing itself.

From children and anonymous labourers to renowned authors, politicians, and archaeologists, people of all kinds have felt the urge to symbolise their existence in a particular place and time by leaving a personal trace for others to see.

This practice has taken on particularly visible roles at different points in history, such as in Ancient Rome or Romantic-era Europe. It has served as a cartographic tool, a way to track movement through unknown landscapes, and a symbolic weapon in times of war. In the last century, it gained unprecedented intensity and became the central feature of several fully fledged folk cultures worldwide.

The most sophisticated of these is the graffiti tradition that emerged in the subways of New York City in the 1970s, and later spread to cities across the globe. By influence of this movement, informal name-writing is now widely known by the slang term “tagging.”

The Tag Conference seeks to foster dialogue on the nature, meaning and history of tagging across all eras, as well as the diverse tagging cultures that exist or have existed. It welcomes anthropologists, art historians, archaeologists, philosophers, geographers, urbanists, calligraphers, artists, and other thinkers or aficionados with an interest in the field.

Topics

The Tag Conference encourages presentations on the following range of topics:

Cultures & Histories

Modern tagging cultures: Aesthetic, historical, or anthropological enquiries into traditions such as New York graffiti and its global interpretations; North America’s “monikers” and their global interpretations; Brazil’s “pixação” and “xarpi”; Madrid’s “flecheros”; Mexico’s “ganchos” and “trepes”; the punk and hooligan tagging of The Netherlands; the “placasos” of LA and Central American gangs.

Tagging through history: Especially in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Romantic era.

Collective tagging: Systematic writing of political party and union names, slogans, band names (e.g. 1970s–80s Argentina and Uruguay); writing by football ultras, especially where it intersects with graffiti culture.

Slogan-based tagging: As seen in 1970s Brazil with taglines like “Celacanto Provoca Maremoto” or “Gônha Mó Brêu”.

Name-writing figures: Studies of individuals from established tagging cultures; studies of outsider name-writing figures like Joseph Kyselak, Restif de la Bretonne, Arthur Stace, Tsang Tsou Choi, Peter-Ernst Eiffe, Profeta Gentileza, Pray, Al Jolson, Toniolo, Melina Riccio, Oz, @rtist, and Alain Rault.

From Aesthetics to Geography

Tagging as a calligraphic act: Tools, materials, surfaces, methodologies, styles, graphic references; custom or DIY instruments adapted to surface, reach, or permanence.

Tagging as a spatial and time-based act: The series of tags as a network across space and time; Ferrell’s “spot theory”; tagging as related to architecture and the built environment; territorial control in gang cultures.

Symbolism & Function

Tagging as cartographic tool: Marking movement across large territories (e.g. Daniel Boone, El Morro, Signature Rock); inscriptions by shepherds, early hobos, hitchhikers, and other nomads.

“I was here”: fleeting relation to place: Mountaintops, caves and catacombs, routes and paths, tourist sites, and other symbolically charged places; bus stops, public toilets, waiting rooms, and other mundane places.

Tagging as symbolic weapon in wars: From “Kilroy was here” to inscriptions at Tutankhamun’s tomb and the Reichstag.

Tagging as rite of passage: Spanish “quintos” and university “vítores”.

Sustained relation to place: Inscriptions in military bases, prisons, workplaces, schools, gyms.

Representation & Meaning

Tagging and other forms of public graphic identity: Tags as reflections of advertising and official writing in public space; Baudrillard’s “semiological warfare”; related imagery-based forms like stencils, stickers, paste-ups, and graffiti-vigilante paint patches.

Representations of tagging: In film, album covers, comics, literature, and popular culture (especially pre-1970s).

Tagging and technology: Use of computing, databases, and robotics in tagging research. ●