Dr Chandra  Morrison

Dr Chandra Morrison

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Latin America and Caribbean Centre (LACC)

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Languages
English, Portuguese, Spanish
Key Expertise
Street Art, Latin American Cities, Urban Ethnography, Urban Culture

About me

Dr Chandra Morrison is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow working on the project New Muralism and the Politics of Erasure: A Study of Public Culture in Peru. Prior to joining the LSE, Chandra completed postdoctoral research at the Institute of Latin American Studies in the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and she received her PhD from the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge.

Chandra’s research examines public art practices and their relation to transformations of urban space and public life in contemporary South American cities. As an urban and visual ethnographer, she is involved in long-term ethnographic research on graffiti art and urban culture in São Paulo, Brazil and Santiago, Chile. This is the subject of her first book manuscript, Metagraffiti: Graffiti Art and the Urban Image in Latin America. Previously, she conducted fieldwork on street art in the context of post-2001 Buenos Aires, Argentina, and on the social impact of drought in Canindé, Ceará in the Brazilian northeast.

Her current research centres on muralism and the cultural politics of erasure in Lima, Peru, and is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. This project builds on an interest in urban policy and cultural debates connected to recent episodes of public art removal taking place across the region, a theme Chandra has written about in relation to both Santiago and São Paulo.Her research in this area explores shifting power dynamics between urban artists, the public, and the state and how this informs larger questions of public culture in Latin America.

Chandra contributes to the Sensorial Methods project funded by the British Academy and hosted at LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre. She is also a founding member of the Fieldwork and Modern Languages Research working group at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London.

Expertise Details

Graffiti Art; Muralism; Latin American Cities; Public Space; Urban Culture; Youth Studies; Urban Ethnography; Visual and Multimodal Methods