Peeling Back the Layers

A Study of Political Sticker Clusters and Semiotic Resistance in Heidelberg

Abstract

Urban public spaces are increasingly shaped by informal visual practices beyond official signage, with stickers functioning as politically charged interventions in the urban linguistic landscape. This study examines political sticker clusters in Heidelberg, a university town characterised by a high concentration of politically engaged students, to explore how public space is contested through visual and linguistic means. Drawing on the concepts of emplacement and transgressive signs (Scollon and Scollon 2003), the paper analyses sticker clusters as layered, polyphonic visual texts (Reershemius 2019), with particular attention to multimodal meaning-making (Bezemer and Jewitt 2018). Building on Awcock’s (2021) understanding of stickers as tools of everyday resistance, the study situates sticker placement within broader contexts of youth-led political discourse. The data consists of photographs of sticker clusters collected in central Heidelberg during the summer of 2025, focusing on sticker-dense locations in public and university-adjacent spaces. Qualitative analysis shows that sticker clusters function as semiotic hot­spots in which political ideologies are performed, contested, and renegotiated through practices of layering and covering. Rather than operating as isolated messages, stickers form dynamic, spatially anchored texts that contribute to grassroots, bottom-up public discourse in student-dense urban environments.