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.