Small is beautiful!?: Investigating stickers and stickerscapes

Abstract

This editorial introduces a Special Issue dedicated to the study of stickers as communicative artefacts within semiotic landscapes. Once limited mainly to commercial use, stickers have evolved into versatile tools for identity expression, political stance-taking, and grassroots activism. Despite their ubiquity in both urban and rural settings, stickers remain understudied in semiotic landscape research. The authors advocate for a more nuanced, multimodal, and linguistically informed approach to sticker analysis – one that considers their textual brevity, visual elements, emplacement, and discursive functions. Challenging conventional classifications of stickers as inherently urban or transgressive, the editorial proposes the term ‘self-authorized’ to describe signs emplaced without institutional sanction. The authors also reflect on methodological challenges and biases in current research practices, such as the neglect of ‘authorized’ stickers representing regulatory or infrastructural discourses – even though these can sometimes dominate a given sticker-scape. Accordingly, the authors encourage the development of comprehensive inventories and critical categorization. The Special Issue, comprising empirical studies from various geographic contexts, seeks to reposition stickers as legitimate and rich objects of interdisciplinary inquiry.

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