Stickers are a frequent sight on city streets, adorning street furniture and walls around the world. They serve a range of purposes, including advertising, graffiti, and street art. Many stickers, however, are dedicated to resistance; they promote protest marches or rallies, radical or subversive opinions, and protest groups and social movements. Small, self-adhesive pieces of paper, vinyl, or plastic, protest stickers range from the hand drawn to the professionally printed. Cheap to produce and easy to distribute, they are a common tactic in the repertoires of activists across the Global North. Despite their ubiquity, protest stickers have been overlooked by academics from across the social sciences and humanities. Using methodologies connected to both material and visual cultures, this paper utilises analysis of an archive of more than 5,000 photographs of protest stickers taken over six years in 53 locations to argue that protest stickers should be significant tools in attempts to understand the geographies of resistance, public space, and the right to the city. This paper explores what protest stickers are, the purposes they serve, how they communicate their messages, where they are located, and how they circulate. Finally, I propose a future research agenda including four key areas that should be pursued in order to better understand the relationships between protest stickers, public space, and the geographies of resistance.

Over the last 20 years, the study of the history and historical geography of resistance has drawn on trends within the disciplines of history and geography to develop into a subfield known as “new protest history.” The geographical background and approach of many of the scholars in the field means that “new protest historical geography” would be a more accurate, if less eloquent, descriptor. This article defines new protest history and explores its contributions to understandings of the geographies of resistance using three key themes: gender, practice, and materiality. In the process, I identify three avenues for future research: intersectionality, taskscapes, and activist historical geography.

A key aim of much climate activism is to enhance climate ambition and hold local and national governments, as well as global governance forums like the United Nations (UN), to account for the ways in which they implement and monitor climate policy across society to reverse long-term climate change. In recent years new local forms of climate activism, particularly at the urban scale, have taken a more prominent role in this. Although place-based, such local forms of climate activism are at the same time multi-scalar in orientation and strategic focus. This is particularly true in the UK where climate activism has prompted a number of local councils to declare climate emergencies, providing a mechanism by which they can become locally accountable in the delivery of their climate action plans, whilst at the same time holding national government to prior and future commitments to global climate governance. Using interview data with experts working on climate emergency declarations research across the UK, we critically discuss four key themes that have underpinned and catalysed the changing geographies of civil-state relationships within the climate emergency and what this may mean for future global climate governance under the UNFCCC Conferences of the Parties (COP). We argue that decision-makers at COP26 need to take greater heed of the significance of this new broader urban climate activism and its role in geopolitically mobilising more equitable, democratic and inclusive forms of climate governance which give citizens and civil society more credence within global climate policy decision-making processes that have been up to now, dominated by national state discourses.

On 23 July 1866, a protest took place in Hyde Park, London, which provides a lens through which to analyse historical struggles over access to, and control of, public space. What began as a protest in favour of manhood suffrage became a conflict over the character and purpose of the park. It sparked public debates about which groups of people could access Hyde Park, and what activities were acceptable within it. These debates raise questions about who was entitled to make such decisions and the impact of these decisions on London's radical culture. This article uses newspaper articles and parliamentary debates to explore the dispute which unfolded both before and after the Hyde Park Railings Affair. In doing so, it furthers our understanding of the geographies of protest and the ongoing negotiation of public space.

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