This three-week intensive course explores street art as a form of cultural expression, political intervention, and urban storytelling in Paris and across the Francophone world. Beginning with the question “What is street art?”, students will examine how graffiti, rap and hip-hop, photography, murals, and other forms of public visual and sonic culture challenge conventional boundaries between art and vandalism, center and periphery, visibility and erasure, and authorized and unauthorized uses of public space.

Paris will serve as both classroom and archive. Morning seminars will introduce students to key scholarly debates about street art, graffiti writing, hip-hop culture, the banlieue, language, migration, race, policing, public space, photography, and institutionalization. Afternoon fieldwork will extend these discussions into the city through street-art walks in Paris and its banlieues, visits to cultural institutions, photography centers, hip-hop spaces, artist encounters, and workshops. Students will learn to read walls, neighborhoods, songs, photographs, and performances as cultural texts and to consider how urban environments shape—and are reshaped by—artistic practices.

While the course is centered on France, it approaches street culture through a broader Francophone and diasporic framework. Readings and cultural works from places such as Algeria, Senegal, and Québec will allow students to examine how hip-hop and street art circulate across linguistic, national, and postcolonial contexts. Particular attention will be paid to the ways artists use language, sound, image, and public space to negotiate questions of identity, belonging, citizenship, inequality, memory, migration, and cultural authority.

The course also asks what happens when cultural practices associated with streets and marginalized communities enter galleries, museums, festivals, and other institutions. Through case studies including the work of photograffeur JR, students will investigate the tensions between transgression and recognition, ephemerality and preservation, artistic autonomy and commercialization.

Through daily field notebooks, photographic documentation, collaborative site briefings, close analysis of hip-hop, and a final creative-critical project, students will develop both analytical and experiential approaches to studying urban culture. By the end of the course, students will be able to understand street art not simply as an artistic genre, but as a contested practice through which individuals and communities claim visibility, produce meaning, and negotiate who has the right to speak, represent, and occupy public space.

No prior knowledge of French is required. French-language songs, films, and other materials will be accompanied by English translations or subtitles as appropriate. Rather than treating language proficiency as a prerequisite, the course teaches students to attend closely to rhythm, sound, voice, repetition, visual form, spatial context, and translation as essential components of cultural analysis.

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This course is 3 Rice credit hours.

No

Yes, students will receive D1 credit for this course.

Priority Deadline: December 9, 2026
Final Application Deadline: February 15, 2027

For details on these two deadlines, please navigate to the How to Apply section of the Program Information & FAQs page.

For questions regarding the course content, please contact the course instructor (see below).

For questions regarding the program (budget, application process, financial aid, global awards), first read through the Rice Global Paris Summer Program Information and FAQs page on our website. If you cannot find the answer to your question, email us at globalowls@rice.edu.