The formal features of protest slogans as an element of symbolic struggle in Serbia's faculty blockades (2024-2025)

This paper examines the visual and formal characteristics of student protest slogans that emerged during the wave of university blockades and mass demonstrations in Serbia that played a pivotal role in shaping Serbia's socio-political landscape from late 2024 through 2025. As a continuation of previous research focused on slogan content, this study shifts the analytical focus to the visual dimension of protest communication. The analysis is based on a dataset of 929 photographs of protest banners collected between December 2024 and February 2025 across 35 faculties at five universities in Serbia. Using a deductive coding approach, the study explores features such as script type, language, text-image interplay, and the distinction between internal and external banners. Findings show that most slogans were written in Serbian and predominantly used Cyrillic script, often combining text with visual elements to enhance symbolic impact. The use of national script functioned both as an identity marker and as a strategy of symbolic resistance. Visual stylisation, multimodal composition, and emotional vocabulary played a crucial role in shaping public perception and internal group solidarity. Protest slogans thus operated as multimodal forms of symbolic struggle, linking visual design with political critique in a context of shrinking democratic space.