
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.
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Work Title | Holding on to Protest: Functions and Folklore of Handmade Signs |
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License | CC BY 4.0 (Attribution) |
Work Type | Masters Thesis |
Publication Date | May 2022 |
Deposited | May 04, 2022 |
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