Stefano Bloch

Stefano Bloch is an American author, urban criminologist, graffiti artist, and professor of cultural geography at the University of Arizona.[2][3]

Bloch is the author of Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA's Graffiti Subculture[4][5] (University of Chicago Press) and appears in the documentaries Bomb It and Vigilante Vigilante: The Battle for Expression.[6][7]

Before the University of Arizona, Bloch was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Brown University Cogut Center for the Humanities,[8] and Presidential Diversity Fellow and a Senior Research Associate in the Urban Studies Program at Brown University.[9]

While in the Department of Urban Planning within the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Bloch worked under the preeminent socio-spatial theorist, urbanist, and co-founder of the Los Angeles School, Edward Soja. As a graduate researcher Bloch collaborated on Dr. Soja's My Los Angeles[10] and Seeking Spatial Justice.[11]

Professor Bloch's research entitled "Policing car space and the legal liminality of the automobile" was published in the journal Progress in Human Geography in 2020.[12] In 2020, Bloch co-authored with University of Arizona sociologist Daniel E. Martinez,[13] "Canicide by Cop: A geographical analysis of canine killings by police in Los Angeles," which was published in the journal Geoforum.[14] In a 2019 article on gentrification and gang injunctions published in Environment and Planning, Bloch and co-author Meyer coined the term "implicit revanchism".[15] 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 honest expression by members of criminal subcultures.[16]

In his 2019 review of Bloch's Going All City, linguist and social activist Noam Chomsky wrote that Bloch provides "a remarkable picture, presented with insight and sympathetic understanding.”[17] Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2020, Ryan Gattis, author of All Involved"[18] stated ""[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."[19]

Chaz Bojorquez, the "god father of Chicano graffiti,"[20] calls Stefano Bloch "the first true graffiti writer scholar, tagging his story and name on the walls inside your mind."[21]

On February 21, 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.[22]

In 2020, Bloch's writing on gang member identification appeared as an op-ed in The New York Times.[23]

Bloch is a member of the American Association of Geographers, the American Society of Criminology, the UA Center for Latin American Studies,[24] and is an executive board member of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory at the University of Arizona.[25]

He lives in Los Angeles, California and Tucson, Arizona.