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.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

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

Notes

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

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.