Holding on to Protest: Functions and Folklore of Handmade Signs

Most protest gatherings, by design, lack the political weight needed to make large-scale change on their own, thanks to respectability politics, event permitting, and state surveillance. Nevertheless, many people in the U.S. still hold firmly to historical protest traditions. But why? Specifically, why do people still make protest signs by hand? What about the process of creating an original poster or cardboard sign is important to people? Based on existing scholarship, digital research, and semi-structured interviews with ten central Pennsylvania residents ranging in age from 24 to 72, I argue that protest sign making is a form of folkloric expression that serves psychological, emotional, and social functions for participants. In particular, these functions include coping, catharsis, identity anchoring, group cohesion, and community building. In addition to their implicit aims and outcomes, handmade signs are often explicitly designed to convey interpersonal solidarity, raise public awareness, and encourage others to take defined political action. I conclude that the process of sign making reveals underlying values that are shared among protesters, regardless of politics.

Files

Metadata

Work Title Holding on to Protest: Functions and Folklore of Handmade Signs
Access
Open Access
Creators
  1. Samantha M. Moore
Keyword
  1. protest, folklore, protest signs, resistance, crafting, protest art, folk art, Women's March
License CC BY 4.0 (Attribution)
Work Type Masters Thesis
Publication Date May 2022
Deposited May 04, 2022

Versions

Analytics

Collections

This resource is currently not in any collection.

Work History

Version 1
published

  • Created
  • Updated
  • Added Creator Samantha M. Moore
  • Added S.Moore-Functions&FolkloreofHandmadeSigns-May2022.pdf
  • Updated Keyword, License Show Changes
    Keyword
    • protest, folklore, handmade signs, resistance, crafting, protest art
    • protest, folklore, protest signs, resistance, crafting, protest art, folk art, Women's March
    License
    • https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
  • Published
  • Updated

Version 2
published

  • Created
  • Deleted S.Moore-Functions&FolkloreofHandmadeSigns-May2022.pdf
  • Added S.Moore-Functions&FolkloreofHandmadeSigns-20May22.pdf
  • Published
  • Updated