Journal of Visual Political Communication - Current Issue

Anthropogenic climate change is disrupting ecological balance more than ever. Germany, being the second of 23 developed countries that are responsible for half of all historical CO2 emissions, has a substantial impact on global warming. In this study, I look at what until recently was a small German village called Lützerath and is now being excavated by the largest polluter in Europe, RWE AG. As Lützerath acts as a symbol for the 1.5-degree objective of the Paris Agreement in the German environmental discourse and was occupied by climate activists, I investigate its semiotic landscape as a highly rural, local space that has become globally relevant. The specific signs I consider are stickers. Being easy to produce, distribute and use, stickers are a common resource in public space, yet studies on them are rather scarce. Building on previous works, this study aims to contribute to the field by introducing stickerscapes and particularly investigating stickers as a dynamic bottom-up practice enabling citizens to express themselves by emplacing their voices in public space. Applying a multimodal social semiotic approach to Lützerath’s stickerscape, I explore stickers as a semiotic practice of environmental activism.

This article explores the typographic articulation of stickers in urban spaces of the Ruhr Area, Germany. Drawing on a data set of 5156 geo-referenced self-authorized stickers, it investigates their occurrence, languages and geographic locations, as well as their graphic means and typographic particularities. The study employs a multi-method approach, combining quantitative and qualitative analysis of image data with interviews. It examines how stickers differ from other signs in urban space and analyses the themes negotiated on stickers, focusing on politics, football and identity of place. The article demonstrates how typography and graphic design are used to communicate visually and support linguistic messages effectively. It highlights the role of typefaces in conveying ideology, the use of graphic citations for intertextual meaning-making, and visual strategies for the creation of place identity. The findings show that stickers are a unique medium in linguistic landscapes, reflecting social structures, political tensions, territorial marking and local self-representation through (typo)graphic elements.

As ephemeral and mobile signs, stickers have extremely diverse functions. While they have been used since the 1970s for primarily political reasons, stickers are a common sign to be found in a range of places and contexts, such as bathrooms, car bumpers, lampposts and laptop covers (to name a few), and are imbued with informal regulatory and commercial purposes as well as artistic value. The form, function and aesthetic value of stickers have increased so much in recent years that scholars such as Cecilia Schøler Nielsen and Hannah Awcock acknowledge stickers as a contemporary form of street art that is equipped to multimodally and semiotically display sociocultural and political–economic issues democratically.

The immense popularity of the sticker is due to its flexibility, both in relation to its mediacy and its rhetorical possibilities. But while stickers are used by a variety of senders, they are shunned by the mainstream political parties in Scandinavia (at least). This is puzzling, as political parties generally have been eager to pick up all means of communication to reach different segments of voters. In this article, I make a theoretical analysis of what exactly is the sticker’s mediacy (its way of being a medium) and what its rhetorical affordances are – meaning its potentials for fulfilling various functions in communication – and discuss these in relation to the role of the (mainstream) political party. Stickers can be used for all sorts of messages; they can include pictures, graphics and text; they are tactile and can use three-dimensional features and they can be used for any rhetorical purpose. Furthermore, they can be placed practically anywhere in private or public spaces (legally or, most often, illegally). They can be disseminated without any indication of the sender, and their distribution is left to individuals who may or may not belong to an organization. The question I address here is how this can affect the usability of the sticker for political parties in a Scandinavian context. I discuss these possibilities and constraints from the theoretical point of view of multimodal semiotics and rhetoric but also from a more pragmatic position of strategic political communication, assessing the potential use of stickers across the political field. The suggestion is to consider a new aspect – rhetorical liabilities – to describe the adverse effects of using a particular medium for political communication.