Analysing political activism from below: A study of stickers in the Swiss semiotic landscape

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.