Stuck Up, Peeled Off, Covered Up, Shared and Scribbled Out: Doing Ordinary Politics with Political Stickers

Abstract

Stickers are pervasive, if often small and subtle, tools of political activism. Despite their enduring popularity, stickers do not fit into popular models of political action that presume either a spectacle of protest or formal institutions and debate. In this paper, we argue that stickers enable and facilitate public interchange as a process of sociomaterial claims-making. However, in order to recognise how stickers are used to do politics, there is a need to shift from semiotic interpretations of stickers as representational signs in favour of an action-oriented, pragmatist approach that examine stickers in action in people’s lives and shared worlds. Connecting with recent calls in geography to reconceptualise political and communicative action as lively, emergent, and materially-mediated, we tour through the sticky, peeling, covered, shared, and scribbled geographies of stickers in everyday, ordinary political action.

Key Words:

• expressive space
• materiality
• ordinary politics
• protest practice
• stickers.

INTRODUCING POLITICAL STICKERS

You encounter a protest in the street. Not a chanting, banner-waving crowd, but a small sticker on a lamppost. “Stop the patriarchy!” it might say, maybe it condemns some organisation you’ve never heard of. Maybe it sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory. You roll your eyes; you move on. People pass by stickers all the time. Sometimes they give them a glance, a read, a bit of attention. Sometimes, though, they feel called to make more of a response.

Although political stickers offer smaller, subtler, seemingly more ignorable political claims than spectacular events such as protests, they are a pervasive method of resistance employed by activists from across the political spectrum. Political stickers are a cheap, easy, and low-risk way to express an opinion or make a demand in public space. While there is increasing acknowledgment of the significance of political stickers to political cultures and public space, and particularly of their role as resources for public expression by vulnerable and marginalised communities (Awcock 2021; Awcock and Rosenberg 2023), the majority of existing studies of political stickers adopt a broadly semiotic approach in their analyses of a politics of stickers (see Reershemius 2019; Vigsø 2010). By describing these studies as “semiotic,” we mean to highlight their reliance on a shared “vision of language” as a system of signs which refer to, signify or correspond with specific meanings or things, a system in which communication is fundamentally conceptualised as a matter of representation (Moi 2017, 1-7). Within such an approach, political stickers are taken to be symbols with essentially transparent meanings and political intents and effects, such as persuasion. In this article, however, we aim to advance the emerging scholarship on political stickers by shifting attention to practices of stickering and the ways in which individual stickers’ meaning or meaningfulness is negotiated through the activities people get up to with and in response to them—as well as the material traces of past activities which stickers make public. We link our analysis with recent interest in the alternative vision of language developed by Philosophers of Ordinary Language (see Cavell 1999; Laugier 2020; Moi 2017) which ties questions of meaning to use and the work a word, sentence or—we might add—sticker “does in the specific circumstances in which it has been uttered” (Moi 2017, 34). This approach has informed recent work within geography interested in “ordinary politics” (Barnett 2017; Bodden 2022), and our analysis draws these discussions into dialogue with GeoHumanities’s interests in the politics of visual culture and the spatialities of creative expression.

There are countless practices involved in the life cycle of political stickers, including designing, making, and distributing them. While often treated as incidental to the semiotic “content” of a sticker-as-symbol, an appreciation of the range of practices through which people engage with stickers is necessary to understand how people do politics with stickers—how they express, contest and comment on political issues within everyday public landscapes. In this article, we investigate what people do with political stickers in public space—how they stick stickers within the physical fabric of urban life, but also how they remove, cover, share, or alter them—to inform an expanded understanding of the geographies of everyday political expression. While seemingly ephemeral, stickers and stickering practices constitute intricate landscapes of “ordinary” political expression (Barnett 2017, 43), through which claims are made, tested, and contested. Like other protest objects (Crossan et al. 2022, 2), the practices through which stickers are “used, shaped, produced and re-worked” constitute “part of the ongoing work and labour of producing democratic political cultures” by local communities. Stickers share similarities and differences with other counter cultural urban phenomena such as graffiti and street art (Bloch, 2019; Iveson 2016), fly-posting (Gerbaudo 2013), and yarn bombing (Mann 2015). Despite their differences in materiality, method, and form, they all appropriate and subvert intended functionalities of objects in public space, and therefore reveal the creative and radical potential of urban spaces to be something other than what they currently are (Mould 2019). As such, it is not just the message that the tag, poster, yarn bomb, or sticker may convey which carries political implications, but also the object itself and the actions surrounding its creation and, as we discuss below, removal. Studying political stickers in action, as lively landscapes of everyday political expression, can thus contribute to a GeoHumanities project to understand the process of human meaning-making in and about lived environments.

The empirical material from this article is derived from two sources. Hannah Awcock has been photographing political stickers in public space since 2014, resulting in an archive of more than six thousand images from more than sixty-two locations.¹ Hannah has also developed a significant collection of images of stickers that have been shared on social media, particularly X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram. Shawn Bodden’s academic interest in stickers stems from participatory-ethnographic fieldwork with activist groups and community spaces in Budapest, Hungary. Stickers littered the walls in these places, but they were also distributed at bars, passed between protesters at demonstrations, and stuck up around the city—and abroad. Stickers became a way for the names, ideas, and demands behind these spaces to circulate beyond their walls. From such vast source material, it can be difficult to choose which examples to highlight in analysis. The stories and images we selected for this article were chosen because they both illustrate and enable us to analyse the broad variety of practices involved in stickers and public space. They are illustrative of the many other interactions with stickers that take place in public space every day, but they also remain unique moments that will never be repeated in quite the same way.

This article draws together archival and ethnographic approaches to shed light on the practices that animate stickering as a form of political activism. This methodology attempts to respond to the ephemeral, spontaneous form that much everyday activism takes (see Baker and Clancy 2020, for another approach to this challenge). In the following sections, we place geographic literature in conversation with ordinary language philosophy to justify moving beyond a semiotic interpretation of stickers, before exploring how stickers can contribute to discussions about “everyday” politics and political “speech.” We then turn to the empirical analysis of three ethnographic stories that illustrate different practices of stickers. People stick stickers up, but they also scribble on, cross out, cover up, and tear them off. These practices should not be treated as incidental or peripheral to the visual content or political work of stickers as media: they are themselves expressive practices that make political judgments, evaluations, and commentaries public and hence subject to response. By separating the stories and the analysis in this article, we have attempted to emphasise the significance of the practices themselves and the contexts in which they took place. Adopting this perspective gives insight into an interactive political geography of political stickers through which often abstract and distant political concerns are negotiated and deliberated here-and-now.

Stickers and Semiotics

Most of the small number of existing studies on stickers focus on the semiotic characteristics of stickers and their material properties (Conley 2020; Kryger 2018; Merrill 2020; Ritchie 2019). Reershemius (2019) spent six months analysing stickers of all types on a single street in Birmingham, categorising them, exploring their linguistic practices, and situating them as part of a broadly defined transgressive discourse because of their illegality. Vigsø (2010) analyses stickers as a form of political communication, studying their use of rhetoric and the reasons they are favoured by what he describes as “extremist organisations.” Analysis of stickers should not be confined to narrow semiotic understandings of meaning as representation or signification, however. Awcock (2021) has investigated the geographies of political stickers, arguing that they allow those who lack influence and resources to contribute to public debates and proposing some avenues for future research, including further investigations into the practices of stickering. Awcock and Rosenberg (2023) have explored practices of trans-positive stickers as a form of everyday activism and non-normative trans representation. This article further responds to this call by interrogating the practices of political stickers in order to position stickers as part of a politics that is worldly, ongoing, and (inter)active.

Thinking through the political action of stickers in terms of spaces of encounter helps draw attention to their longer and dynamic “social lives” (Appadurai 1986), which exceed the mere act of ‘sticking’ as passers-by, and allied and rival stickerers alike, respond to the objects and messages they encounter. By giving priority to the practices, responses, and interactions of stickering, we can draw attention to the “lively” processes of meaning-making that are taken for granted within semiotic interpretations of stickers as vehicles for more-or-less stable political messages. Within geography as well, the analysis of visual and material media has been heavily influenced by semiotic approaches, contributing to narrow understandings of “the politics of meaning” in which “politics is understood to turn on the differential capacity of social groups to make meanings stick, but the name of the game is still a battle between different actors to realize their own clearly defined interests” (Barnett 2004, 45). Efforts to revise and reimagine how semiotic meaning functions have largely projected this vision of communication to a deeper “subconscious” level, as in the so-called “a-significatory semiotics,” which proposes to study meanings communicated “infra-sensibly below the level of subjective representation” allowing meaning to “slip past” subjective awareness and “bypass subjective perception and consciousness” (Bissell and Fuller 2017; Keating 2022, 7; for a fuller critique of cultural theories of “unconscious” meaning, see Barnett 2020b; Leys 2018). By staying with the practices that animate stickering life-worlds, we aim instead to tune in to meaning-making as an active and public political enterprise, and one mediated not only through the visual “content” of a sticker, but also through the affordances for expression enabled by their sticky—but also, for instance, their portable, concealable, shareable—material qualities. People encountering a political sticker do not simply “receive” an encoded message. They actively make sense of its intent as a situated, socio-material object. Put differently, stickers are more than vehicles for information because those who encounter stickers can—and frequently do—respond to political stickers in ways that exceed “passive” reading. They act on stickers in various ways to formulate an equally public reply.

The space of encounter enabled by stickers is therefore characterised by a degree of reciprocity and exchange: rather than communicating in one direction, stickers also become occasions for comments, retaliation, or scratching-off. Political stickers enable transactional spaces of public expression. As developed within the tradition of philosophical pragmatism, the notion of transactional space aims to convey a “holistic,” processual, and ethological understanding of communication situated in and conducted through environments, rather than suspended abstractly between individuals (Barnett and Bridge 2013; Bridge 2020; Leys 2018). It emphasises the situated locations and embodied processes of communication through which publics form around issues that might, in other accounts, sound purely abstract (Barnett and Bridge 2013, 1031; Barnett 2008).

In a pivot away from the prevalent interpretation of political stickers as chiefly semiotic or symbolic representations of political beliefs, we examine political stickers in action to understand their role as public expressions subject to response and materially vulnerable to contestation. In so doing, we shift attention from the practices of active speaking and purportedly passive reading that semiotic accounts prioritise. In their place, we examine a range of other publicly observable and recognisable “moves” that members of the public can, and routinely do, take within a “language game” of political stickering (Laurier and Philo 2004). Here to describe such practices as a “game” is intended to shift attention to their worldly, situated use in exploring and testing the limits of political community in everyday life (Cavell 1999; Pugh 2017). This borrows from Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP) and a broader pragmatist perspective on the geographies of political life (Barnett and Bridge 2013, 1027-1031; Laugier 2020; Ogborn 2020) rooted in the “formation of democratic publics” through an agonistic process of “plural communicative transactions.” Practices of sticking, tearing off, covering, sharing, and altering stickers are not epiphenomena accompanying the semiotic political “content” of a sticker, but are themselves expressive and durative acts that constitute an ongoing, public ecology of political deliberation. They’re sometimes sticky, sometimes peeling, sometimes subtle, sometimes provocative techniques used by people to test political claims and questions amongst and against local others.

Ordinary Politics in Public Space

Although geographic imaginations of contestive politics retain a “romantic preference for performative models of assembly and demonstration and protest” (Barnett 2017, 9; 2012), considerable attention has also been given to the “politics of the everyday” and the mundane, often overlooked practices and spaces that contribute to political life beyond the spectacle of protest and political institutions (Chatterton and Pickerill 2010; Hankins 2017; Wilson 2011, 2017). Such studies have challenged statist, gendered, and ableist assumptions about the content of politics and the “predetermination of form that particular actions or actors must assume to constitute resistance” (Hughes 2020, 1142). At the same time, as Pugh (2017) argues, the turn to the “everyday” has involved numerous distinct and at times incompatible approaches to conceptualising the ways everyday spaces and practices can become political.

In geography, appeals to “the everyday” often stress the plurality and complexity of everyday life as a means of challenging “metaphysical” theories of political power and authority (Pugh 2017, 37). Frequently drawing on influential accounts by de Certeau (1984) and Lefebvre (1991), these approaches describe the everyday as a site of contestation and resistance to top-down, hegemonic political projects that seek to regulate and order life in particular ways (cf. Hughes 2020, 1146; Giraud 2019, 18). Pugh (2017, 37-38) suggests the work of Stanley Cavell (1999) as a useful point of contrast, however, which retains greater interest in the “sceptical problem of other minds” and “uncertainty in human sociality”: he notes that, “for Cavell, the turn toward the everyday is not only about leaving the ivory tower and abstract theorising for the messiness and performative practices of the streets; it is also … [about] how scepticism is quite ordinarily and naturally woven into the social fabric of everyday life.” The “rough ground” of the everyday, in this sense, does not offer the basis for new-found theoretical authority with which to articulate the “real” meaning of political concepts and ideals, but rather describes “the fields of conflict in which disputes over the meaning of concepts such as democracy actually take on their full significance” (Barnett 2017, 44). This is a sense of the everyday that attends to the uncertain, tragic, and agonistic dimensions of the plurality of human life and experience or, as Barnett (2020a, 281) suggests, the “problems of cooperation, coordination and organisation as problems … [and] the normative practices of evaluation, judgement and verification through which different ways of proceeding are assessed, warranted and contested” (see also Barnett and Bridge 2013; Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). Such an approach insists on staying with the vulnerability and uncertainty of human relations to understand what is “at stake” in the claims, actions, and decisions that constitute social life (Das 1998, 184; Laugier 2020, 35; Pugh 2017, 43-44) and the practical, political problem of how to “get on together” with others (Massey 2005, 142).

Barnett (2014, 2017, 266-267, 2018) argues that such an understanding of politics calls for a “prioritization of injustice” within critical theory, a conceptual move that locates “the practical and normative forces of democracy … in the public processing of claims of injustice and demands for justice.” Drawing on the feminist analyses of Iris Marion Young (2011), Barnett argues that ideals of justice and democracy develop “dialogically” through “pluralistic modes of expression … in which embodied, partial, passionate modes of expression are made central to forms of engagement that acknowledge the concrete experiences of other subjects” (2017, 268). Claims of injustice are expressions of felt injustice, but as assertions they are also claims on the attention of others “subject to a democratic test” through public practices of debate, deliberation, judgment, and evaluation (Barnett 2017, 269, 2018, 324). The feminist philosopher of Ordinary Language Sandra Laugier (2020, 40) echoes this focus by distinguishing between the development of “theories of practice”—which set out to define and articulate models of how everyday practices “count” as political—and the investigation of “ordinary theories” that are assembled and communicated emergently within ordinary practices, “the intelligence these practices contribute to their own realization.” Drawing on the work of OLP scholars like Cavell, Wittgenstein, and Austin, Laugier (2020, 43-57) develops a programme of inquiry into the vulnerability of “expressiveness” and “validity of women’s voice,” what she describes as the work involved in finding “one’s own voice” as a means of negotiating the contours of political community. Following the ordinary politics of claims-making and political expression thus focuses less on the “content (objective, semantic, or empirical) of propositions” and more on the “fortunes and misfortunes of ordinary expression” (Laugier 2020, 44) as a means for finding and expressing one’s voice in a community and one’s stance on an issue of public concern. This everyday or “ordinary” sense of politics points to the public processing of “claims to community” that can be and often are queried, disputed, or which simply fail to connect (Barnett 2017, 61; Cavell 1999, 20).

By calling attention to the negotiation of political expression in everyday interaction and communication, an “ordinary” sense of politics as advanced by these authors helps to recognise the ways in which political stickers, as modes of public expression, exceed the limited purview suggested by analyses of their semiotic content or a priori assumptions about their purpose as, for instance, persuasive devices. Political stickers make assertions public, but they do so in different ways in different circumstances. They make claims on the attention of those passing by and, in so doing, subject those claims to public evaluation, judgement, and response: political stickers test the local limits and feelings of community, and through their methods of response and evaluations passers-by contest, promote, revise, or otherwise alter these claims. Political stickers constitute a scattered and peeling landscape of everyday political deliberation by mediating public processes of exchange and confrontation. Taking political stickers as “expressions” helps to locate them within the open-ended and lively process of thinking and feeling with others animated through embodied exchanges of judgments, assertions, opinions, and emotions (Barnett 2017, 240-241; Zerilli 2016, 261). This is an atelic process of exchange that turns on the ordinary reasoning of those involved in making sense of others’ public assertions and responses (Zerilli 2016, 4). Despite, or, as we will come to discuss, because of their often inconspicuous and ephemeral location in public space, political stickers become sites of political deliberation as passers-by undertake a range of actions like sticking, scratching, ripping, and scribbling as expressive, public claims-making. They enable subtle, but nonetheless highly public forms of “localized political activity” (Featherstone 2008, 181-182; Massey 2005) which negotiate the terms of shared space, time and again, here and there.

Studying the lived and expressive space of political stickers is thus one way to contribute to renewed interest in expanding understandings of the political geographies of speech and the range of forms of political deliberation (Awcock 2021, 525; Barnett 2017; Ogborn 2020). By recognising their role in a public process of lively and passionate reasoning, political stickers cling to the possibility of and the search for alternative modes of expression beyond those sanctioned by official institutions or powerholders. By emphasising the passionate and responsive nature of political stickers, we call attention to the way stickers can challenge convention and rules about how and where to do politics: stickers themselves can be seen as “passionate utterances” (Cavell 2005). As Pugh (2017, 39; see also Laurier 2011, 143) explains, Cavell uses the concept of passionate utterances to refer to the “limits of social convention” and the possibility of failure in our relationship with others when there is no clear way to bring about a desired effect. For Pugh, this offers a way to challenge accounts “over-focused upon the disciplinary power of social conventions, institutional powers and forces” by attending to the “weaknesses brought about by scepticism as a lived experience” (2007, 39). As public assertions, political stickers situate a process of “continuous, conjoint, intersubjectively anchored inquiry” (Barnett 2017, 269) about the nature and limits of a local community, and the standing of particular claims in and about it. This exceeds the simple image of political stickers as a form of resistance against hegemonic forces of power (Barnett 2005, 10) by insisting on the importance of uncertainty, inquiry, interpretation, and reflection in everyday sociality (Barnett 2020a). As an everyday landscape of public expression, political stickers are put to use in many ways, through practices of sticking up, but also scratching out, writing on, and covering up, to make claims and queries about a local community.

Political stickers are important material sites of everyday negotiation, reflection, and deliberation precisely because they enable new lively and contested geographies of public expression: an analysis of stickers must consider not simply the “message” or “content,” but also the ways stickers are used to express and interpret meaning in the world. As we discuss in the following sections, passers-by use and respond to stickers’ materiality along with its semiotic content, and these responses are themselves public evaluations. As recognisable, recognisably intentional practices, embodied interactions with political stickers mould the legibility of a sticker—and its political claims—as a social object by giving expression to passionate responses, conditions, and alternatives from passers-by.

In the remainder of this paper, we analyse five public practices of political stickering: sticking up, tearing off, covering up, sharing with, and adding to. In each case, we show how political claims are made with stickers through their situated use. Across the cases considered, we demonstrate how these political claims exceed the semiotic “content” of a sticker as they are accomplished and “processed” publicly: stickers are mobilised as a form of everyday politics by publicly testing claims to and about community, and thereby learning about the places we inhabit and the people we share them with.

STORY 1: A HOMOPHOBIC LABEL

In 2019, Shawn is volunteering in the community garden of Auróra, a community centre in Budapest, Hungary, as part of a participatory ethnographic research project about the everyday activities of local activist groups to make and sustain community spaces. The garden is the Auróra community’s latest project to make the space appealing for a diverse range of people. Today in the garden, volunteers are enjoying the sun, building planters, and re-organising the tool shed. Auróra’s director suggests they bring some newly donated shovels out from the café, and Shawn joins a small group of volunteers to gather the tools—but they stop short when they step out of the garden and spot an unusual gathering in front of Auróra’s front door.

A boy wearing a suit is delivering a monologue while another records a video on his phone. They’re flanked by a boy wearing a Hungarian folk-dancing outfit and another holding a flag: the Auróra volunteers recognise the logo of a fledgling far-right political party founded the previous year. The boy in the suit turns toward the door and smooths a sticker atop a paper sign which lists Auróra’s updated opening hours (Figure 1). Then he steps out from in front of the camera to get a clear shot.

Figure 1 An offensive sticker, one stuck up to cause offence (Source: Shawn Bodden).

“What are you doing?,” Auróra’s director calls out and approaches the group of boys, who quickly gather their things and retreat down the street (Figure 2). The sticker, it turns out, is a homophobic message to “stop homosexual propaganda”: Auróra is the home of Budapest Pride and an outspoken supporter of LGBTQ+ rights in Hungary, and this advocacy has left them a regular target of vandalism and threatening messages from far-right groups. By sticking their message up on Auróra’s door—directly beneath, in fact, a rainbow flag hung above the doorway—the group of boys do more than assert their political opinion in public: they direct that assertion at Auróra’s community and its work, but also at themselves. As part of their small spectacle, sticking up a homophobic sticker in this way marks Auróra out as something that needs to be “stopped,” and allows the boys to make themselves out as people willing to stop it. Their videos and photos will show their sticker—and them sticking it up.

Figure 2 Confronting the group of boys (Source: Shawn Bodden).

Watching the boys retreat down the street, Auróra’s director pulls out her phone to report the incident to the police. She steps over to the door, scratches her nail under a corner of the sticker, then peels it off carefully in one go. She checks that the paper sign is intact, then crumples the sticker in her fist. There’s no trace left on the door: she removes the slur, but also counteracts the public act of insulting Auróra that the boys aimed to accomplish. Seeing Shawn with his phone out, she asks him to share the video he recorded of her breaking up the flash-mob. Later, the video appears in a brief news story about the sticker altercation: the boys use their sticker to make public claims about Auróra and their own group, but Auróra’s director makes use of the sticker in her own way by tearing it down as a public act. Tearing the sticker off without leaving a trace becomes a way to dismiss, mock, and move past the boys’ flash mob—a way for Auróra’s community to continue making a kind of public space where such claims are kept at bay.

Sticking and Peeling

That a sticker sticks is not incidental. It is a fundamental aspect of how public expressions are made through stickers, as are, if perhaps more subtly, a sticker’s other printable, pocketable, scratchable qualities. Sticking up a sticker in public constitutes a very particular kind of political action because the sticker—and its message—sticks around. Because stickers must be stuck somewhere (Awcock 2021), they enact situated communicative utterances (Ogborn 2020) which gain their meaning contextually in and as part of a space. The stuck up presence of a sticker asserts that its message is sayable here; it comments in and, quite literally, on a space. While stickers can be used in this way to mark out a group’s ‘territory’ or local identity (Gerbaudo 2013), they can also—as in the case of the homophobic sticker stuck to Auróra’s front door—be used to intrude, challenge, or undermine a malleable sense of place. While Auróra’s rainbow flag and pro-LGBTQ+ stickers assert its reputation as an accepting “safe space,” sticking up a homophobic sticker in such a place serves as a method for making claims against the community centre’s values public.

As the boys’ peculiar outfit and ceremony evidence, it is not just the sticker’s message, but the act of sticking it up that they aim to use to make a political statement about themselves, about Auróra, and about Budapest. While their call to stop “homosexual propaganda”—bigoted and vacuous as it is—reads as a straightforward statement, the point here is to recognise that the force with which that claim is made in the public space remains open-ended and subject, as a claim, to response (Barnett 2018, 324). Rather than examining the sticker as a straightforward, “linear” form of political action as semiotic accounts tend to—where a sticker is roughly seen as a vehicle for delivering a message or, at most, changing an opinion—the importance of seeing the sticker as a materially-mediated act of public claims-making reveals how the force of its message develops “emergently” as it is processed and responded to by passers-by (Hughes 2020). It may be useful in this case to think of such public claims in terms of their ability to provoke action or speech (Norris 2017, 122-23), as a means to invite—or incite—encounter with both other political ideas, but also sociomaterially-mediated acts in progress (Bodden and Ross 2021; Swanton 2016).

A shift away from analysing the “content” of the sticker to the act of sticking it up helps make clear what is at stake in the call to respond to it as a claim: when Auróra’s director confronts the boys, she does not peel off the sticker any old way, but rather takes care to remove the sticker without a trace, to interrupt the boys’ ceremony of sticking up, and to secure video evidence of her own enacted response. Here it becomes clear that the act of peeling off the sticker is put to use as a public claim beyond the basic fact that the boys’ offensive slogan is thereafter absent from the space. The public peeling off of a sticker can be done in such a way as to evaluate, comment on, and respond to the act of sticking up. The shredded traces of white paper that many peeled stickers leave behind might deliver the public message that someone opposed a particular message, but in this case the careful and clean act of peeling off is something to be recorded and shared by Auróra’s volunteers as a way to render the initial claim infelicitous (Ogborn 2020, 1126)—something that carries no force, no trace, and no value. Sticking up and peeling off stickers are likely the two most obvious and conventional activities one might do with them, but slowing down to consider the details of how these actions are taken in context by activists like the gang of far-right boys and the Auróra volunteers helps to make clear a broader point about the significance of thinking about political stickering in terms of their “live” force as claims, provocations, and responses: the subtle and seemingly ephemeral lives of political stickers belie a complicated form of public interchange through which political claims are ventured, evaluated and addressed. In the following sections, we turn to consider some of the less conventional actions through which stickers are used to mobilise political claims-making in public.

STORY 2: ANTI-RACIST CAT

At some point before 10:16 am on 21^st November 2020, an unknown person sticks a handwritten sticker to a lamppost or similar piece of street furniture on the High Street in Gateshead in north-east England. Some time later, another unknown person sticks a second sticker over the first. After another indeterminate period of time, Twitter user @Reebbeebee takes a picture of this interaction. They then use their iPhone to upload that photo to the social networking app, with the caption “Gateshead high street you’ve outdone yourself.” (Figure 3). At some point after 10:16 on 21^st November, Hannah is scrolling through her Twitter feed on her phone. Whenever she finds a tweet relating to political stickers, Hannah “bookmarks” it, saving it so it can easily be returned to at a later date. She bookmarks @Reebbeedee’s tweet, adding it to a digital archive. Early in the process of drafting this article, Hannah returns to the tweet as an ideal example of two distinct acts of stickering. One is that of the unnamed individual who covered up the “racist shite,” and the other is @Rebbeebee’s act of taking a photograph of the two stickers and sharing it on Twitter.

Figure 3 A sticker designed specifically for covering up racist stickers and material. It was photographed and shared on social media in Gateshead in 2020 (Source: X [formerly Twitter], @Rebbeebee).

Political stickers are normally created to promote an issue, to publicise a political point or opinion. However, the sticker in this example was created specifically to do the opposite; to obscure or counter a particular set of opinions. Most of the encounters between Hannah and stickers take place in physical public space, on the streets of predominantly urban areas. Stickers can also be encountered in online spaces however, in the form of images of stickers (for example stickerspotters, political_stickers and lamppoststickers are Instagram accounts dedicated to stickers), or websites where stickers can be downloaded or bought. Browsing Twitter, this tweet caught Hannah’s attention, and not just because of the goofy cat picture. Whilst it is not uncommon to see stickers used to cover up others, it is atypical to see one specifically designed for this purpose. By declaring “There was some racist shite here, so I covered it with a pic of a cat,” the sticker itself draws attention to the act of covering up another sticker, and it gives a voice to the anonymous stickerer. Unusually, the viewer is given a clear explanation of the intended purpose of the act.

Covering and Sharing

Just as stickers are stuck to surfaces, stickers are stuck to other stickers. In particularly popular places—a club’s toilet stall, a prominent high-street lamp post—thick, palimpsestic layers of stickers cling together, offering an abstract and chance collage of the people and groups who have passed by. However, as this example shows, in certain cases a sticker is deliberately placed over another—occluding the original message and even responding to it. This is another method of interacting with political stickers, in which the stickerer uses the act of covering a sticker to issue public claims, evaluations, and correctives. In many cases, as with the stickers in a club’s toilet, the overlap could be incidental or minorly mischievous. The anti-racist cat, however, makes of this specific overlap an observable activity of confronting racism: passers-by arriving even after the stickering event are directed to see from-here/here-and-now the matter of racism and the possibility of countering it. Thus, this political feline does not simply obstruct our vision of the message underneath. By observably obstructing the message and categorising it, the passer-by is recommended to see “No __________ GS AND _______ ‘S” as an act of here-and-now racism. In contrast, “No *cat face* GS AND *cat face* ‘S” demonstrates that racism can be, and is being, countered and condemned. This is not to say that all viewers of this interaction will be persuaded that racism is “shite,” but that they would recognise it as a conflict, and therefore understand racism as something that should be, and is being, challenged.

The majority of scholarship on stickers focuses solely on their existence in physical space. However, this example demonstrates that stickers also circulate through digital virtual space, largely in the form of images. This means that certain stickers are encountered in very different ways to the highly-localised interactions typical of encounters in physical space. The audience of the sticker is potentially much larger, but the image often lacks the physical context of the sticker’s location (Jarbou 2017 discusses this process in relation to political graffiti). This may, however, be replaced with a different kind of context, in the form of captions, commentaries, and hashtags. This digital context allows new meanings and interpretations to be ascribed to the images (Merrill 2020). Considering the characteristics and impacts of these digital encounters are beyond the scope of this article, but they are worthy of note and further study (Blommaert 2016). What we are concerned with is @Rebbeebee’s act of photographing the sticker and sharing the image on social media.

The text which @Reebbeebee composed to accompany the image implies that they approve of the act of covering up. However, even if there were no text, @Reebbeebee’s decision to photograph and share the sticker, amplifying it beyond the immediate physical location to the social networks of Twitter, demonstrates that they felt their encounter with the sticker was noteworthy. @Reebbeebee attributed the act of covering up the racist sticker in a humourous and explicitly anti-racist way to a physical location, Gateshead High Street, rather than an individual or group. This highlights how the act of stickering can be territorial, claiming space for a specific cause or perspective (Gerbaudo 2013; Vigsø 2010). @Reebbeebee’s act of photographing and sharing their encounter with and response to this sticker has amplified the territorial claim that Gateshead is anti-racist. Social media is used by activists and social movements to call attention to their cause from distant people and places, and sharing a photo of a sticker is just one example of practices which blur the boundaries between online and offline activism (Bonilla and Rosa 2015). Sharing an image of a sticker extends the deliberation started by the placement of the sticker in public space into a new forum, a different kind of public space. This highlights the messy, complicated, simultaneous way in which political deliberations occur through the everyday.

STORY 3: STAND WITH Hong Kong/JUSTICE FOR MURDERED WOMEN

South Bridge is a busy street in central Edinburgh, lined with shops and restaurants. It is on multiple bus routes, so the pavement is often packed with pedestrians dodging crowds at bus stops and outside the most popular shops. In December 2019 Hannah visits Edinburgh for a few days. The city is crowded with tourists and Christmas shoppers and South Bridge was chaotic, but as Hannah weaves along she starts to notice a series of bright yellow stickers on bus stops, lamp posts, and traffic lights. They all have the same text, calling for solidarity with the ongoing pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. The protests were sparked by a proposed Extradition Bill that would allow suspected criminals to be moved to other parts of China for trial and punishment. On closer inspection of the stickers, it turns out that some of them have been altered (Figure 4). The original text has been crossed through, and ‘JUSTICE FOR MURDERED WOMEN’ written underneath. Hannah stops to take a picture of one of the altered stickers, attempting not to disrupt the flow of pedestrians on the pavement as she does so. Hannah has followed events in Hong Kong closely, so is aware of the context of both the sticker and the intervention, but she knows this is not necessarily the case for most passers-by. The intervention relates to the events which led to the Extraction Bill. In February 2018, Hongkonger Poon Hui-wing was murdered by her boyfriend whilst on holiday in Taiwan. He returned to Hong Kong before he could be arrested, and the Bill would have made it possible to transport him back to Taiwan to face trial. Protesters in Hong Kong believed that the case was used an excuse, arguing that main purpose for the Extradition Bill was to enable the Chinese government to extradite political prisoners to mainland China, which has a poor reputation in terms of the protection of human rights and the independence of the justice system compared with Hong Kong. The sticker presents the situation as simple—anyone who believes in “freedom” should “stand with Hong Kong” and support the protesters. Whoever altered the stickers in South Bridge is complicating the issue by emphasising that this is also a story about violence against women and the challenges of bringing the perpetrator of that violence to justice.

Figure 4 A political sticker calling for solidarity with the protesters in Hong Kong in 2019. Someone has written on the sticker, referring to the legal case that originally sparked the protests. This sticker was photographed in Edinburgh in 2019 (Source: Hannah Awock).

Writing On

The final form of sticker practice that we identified is altering, amending, or annotating stickers, by removing or crossing out and replacing certain words and letters, or by writing on them. This makes it possible to dramatically alter the message of the stickers or suggest an opposing argument. It allows more complex opinions, attitudes, and debates to be expressed than removing or covering the sticker does. Rather than simply expressing opposition to the protests in Hong Kong, the writing on the sticker in Figure 4 gives an indication as to why the demonstrations should be opposed. By writing on the sticker rather than covering it or removing it, the alterer was able not just to express opposition to the protests in Hong Kong but explain their reason for that opposition too. Often when a sticker is altered or annotated, the original message remains legible. This is unlikely to be the case when a sticker is removed or covered up. As such, these interactions feel more like a discussion or a debate than the others do; the viewer is able to see two (or more) sides of the story. This is, we argue, a clear example of how politics is negotiated, deliberated, and contested in the everyday.

This story emphasises how reading stickers is not a passive or universal experience; different readers will have different knowledges to decipher or decode messages and symbols. For example, some people will be able to recognise anti-fascist (or indeed, neo-fascist) symbols, others will not know these associations. Symbols are a way for protest groups and movements to create and sustain collective identities (Awad and Wagoner 2020), but they can also exclude those who do not know how to interpret them. In other cases, readers will have different levels of contextual knowledge; not everyone would know the link between the Hong Kong demonstrations and gendered violence, for example. As such, a sticker may be more or less “legible” to different readers depending on their contextual and symbolic knowledge. In this way, even reading stickers is an active and subjective practice, creating a transactional space of interaction between the sticker and the reader (Barnett and Bridge 2013; Bridge 2020; Leys 2018).

CONCLUSION

By analysing these examples of political stickering in action, we have aimed to shift understandings of political stickers away from a predominately semiotic or representational imaginary in favour of a conception attuned to the lively and passionate interchange of claims, provocations, responses, and remediations made possible between disparate members of the public through the material qualities and social acts of stickers stuck, peeled, covered, shared, and amended. Adopting a practice-oriented style of analysis to examine ordinary practices of political meaning-making, we can recognise that stickers and other similar materials, for example political bumper stickers and posters, are themselves public acts of political deliberation, claims-making, and response through which both any possible message and the fact of an object’s having been stuck up are processed by others.

Such a pivot may contribute to recent calls in geography for a “reexamination of the relationship between words and the world” in which the act of “speaking” and “listening” exceed situations of direct conversation and interaction (Ogborn 2020, 1134), and they contribute to a reconsideration and expansion of narrow understandings of what practices comprise “deliberation” (Barnett 2017, 202-203). Due to narrow and deterministic accounts of the “form” of resistance and political activity in geography (Hughes 2020), the everyday, street-side political activity of stickers has rarely been given a place within the two most influential imaginaries of political action—the image of crowds, protests and the “spectacular” on the one hand, and the image of institutions, formal debate, and law-making on the other. Our account endeavours to show that political stickering plays an important part in the lively processing of political claims in public life in everyday urban spaces, expanding the geographies of political expression, interpretation, and confrontation.

Analysing the scattered worlds of stickers and stickerers presents one way to unsettle presumptions about the ordinary materialities and spatialities of everyday politics and to broaden our understanding of how people seek to do politics in the world—leaving their words, claims, and markings behind for others to find and to respond to. The example stickers and stickering practices that we have examined in this paper recommend a broader research programme investigating how local cultures of stickering communities form, perhaps giving more focus on the interactive processes of designing and distributing stickers. Likewise, further research exploring the mundane and marginalised public spaces where stickers congregate, as illustrated in Figure 5, could provide valuable insight into how political claims are expressed, shared, and revised spatially through ordinary interactions with others and material things (see Bodden 2022, 103-106). We may walk right by a sticker. We may stop to read it—or even scratch it out. But whether we ignore, refuse, or approve, living in a stickered world means facing scattered, gathered, proudly posted, subtly hidden, frequently unexpected, sometimes confusing, and at times – when giving voice to marginalised concerns and communities – even life-affirming claims on our public cultures and spaces.

Figure 5 Berlin, March 2019. Stickers show up everywhere, but often they concentrate in particular places (Source: Hannah Awcock).

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The authors report that there are no competing interest to declare.

Additional information

Funding

Part of this research was funded through a Principal’s Career Development Scholarship for PhD researchers at the University of Edinburgh.

Notes on contributors

Shawn Bodden

SHAWN BODDEN is a Research Associate in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. His research drawns on ethnomethodology and theories of “the ordinary” to study the everyday politics of community and the projects people work on to make space for political action in the world.

Hannah Awcock

HANNAH AWCOCK is an Academic Skills Adviser in the Department of Learning and Teaching at Edinburgh Napier University, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests relate to political, cultural, and historical geographies of urban resistance, most recently through the lens of protest stickers. She is also interested in student wellbeing, engagement, and how universities can best support students in their learning.

Notes

1 Many of the images in Hannah’s archive can be viewed at TurbulentIsles.com.