Itineraries of protest signage

Lou, Jackie Jia; Jaworski, Adam

doi:10.1075/jlp.15.5.06lou

Cited by 32 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…I argue that crowd cohesion conditions the likelihood of concessions by making protesters’ demands more comprehensible . A protest is a text, insofar as it conveys a set of meanings—via phrases written on signs, slogans shouted through megaphones, and an array of subtler messages in the “semiotic landscape” of music, dress, and facial expressions (Lou and Jaworski 2016). Text includes public discourse, not just printed words (McNamara and Magliano 2009, 302).…”

Section: Theory: Cohesion Comprehension and Persuasionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Framed as a text, a protest lends itself to analysis using tools from computational linguistics. Although interpretive research has long recognized the semantics and semiotics of contentious politics (e.g., Kasanga 2014; Kim and Jang 2020; Lou and Jaworski 2016), I operationalize this notion of protest‐as‐text by employing word2vec as an innovative way to measure the cohesion of rank‐and‐file protesters, improving on conventional measures that capture the demands only of protest leaders and spokespeople (Burstain, Einwohner, and Hollander 1995, 282).…”

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Crowd Cohesion and Protest Outcomes

Mueller

2022

American J Political Sci

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Amidst an unprecedented swell in global protest, scholars and activists wrestle with the question of why protests succeed or fail. I explore a new answer: more cohesive crowds, where protesters agree on their demands, are more likely to win concessions than less cohesive crowds. Drawing on psychology and linguistics, I theorize that cohesive demands are more comprehensible and thus persuasive. I test this theory with a multimethod approach. First, I use cross‐national data from 97 protests to estimate the relationship between crowd cohesion and subsequent concessions, applying natural language processing to measure cohesion in participants’ self‐reported motivations. Second, a survey experiment in South Africa tests the causal effects of crowd cohesion and assesses comprehensibility of demands as the mechanism driving concessions. Third, case studies of two British protests demonstrate the theory in real‐world settings. My findings suggest that activists can improve their odds of success by coordinating around a common goal.

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Section: Theory: Cohesion Comprehension and Persuasionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Crowd Cohesion and Protest Outcomes

Mueller

2022

American J Political Sci

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“…Interestingly, despite an early call by Shohamy and Waksman (2009: 315) to 'draw attention to the sphere of the cyberspace where again boundaries between "private" and "public", "real" and "virtual", "space" and "place" lose their original meanings as they converge and overlap' , there is still relatively little work on the digital world and, even when such scholarship indeed discusses how to conceptualize and analyse online data from an LL perspective (e.g. Berezkina, 2018;Kallen, Ní Dhonnacha & Wade, 2020;Yao, 2021), it tends to analyse digital data without relating it to the physical LL, thus risking maintaining rather than disrupting the boundary between online and offline spaces (see however Blommaert and Maly (2019); Lou and Jaworski (2016) and Vuorsola (2020) for notable exceptions).…”

Section: Theorizing Online-offline Relationships In Relation To Gentr...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Language, translocality and urban change

Nielsen

Järlehed

Milani

et al. 2022

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This article addresses the role of translocal interconnectedness between offline and online spaces by examining the varied presence of language displays in such spaces. Quantitative findings on language presence in the offline public spaces of four Gothenburg neighbourhoods are contrasted with the online presence found in three Swedish search portals, and the differences are interpreted in light of the broader socioeconomic processes of gentrification and segregation. The comparison between online and offline presence allows us to give a more holistic picture of the neighbourhoods; it reveals, among other things, the presence of semi-public spaces, with a multilingual presence of commercial enterprises and civil society organizations, and points out that some super-diverse neighbourhoods have more online than offline presence on search portals. Thus, the often-stereotyped mental picture of these neighbourhoods as being passive, static, ‘segregated’ and ‘problematic’ is challenged.

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“…The most relevant work to date to have investigated protest signs in Hong Kong in the tradition of semiotic landscapes is Lou and Jaworski (2016). Employing the notions of itineraries (Scollon, 2008) and re-semiotisations (Iedema, 2003) in their study of the protest signage used during the Umbrella Movement, Lou and Jaworski (2016) argued that these transgressive signs have the potential to "insert new voices and alternative narratives into the fabric or urban spaces" (p. 612) and alluded to the "emergence and reinforcement of a 'new' Hongkonger identity" (p. 609). What this new identity, or rather identities, is/are and how they are realised semiotically in transgressive signs, however, is beyond the scope of their study.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding the identities of Hong Kong people through transgressive signs

Lam¹

2022

Linguistic Landscapes in South-East Asia

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A small city in South-East Asia, Hong Kong has made the headlines in international news in recent years when hundreds of thousands of people expressed their views on political and social matters time and time again through territory-wide protests. Ever since the change of sovereignty from Britain to China more than two decades ago, Hong Kong has experienced substantial social and political changes, which challenge, transform and cement the identities of its citizens.Despite that Hong Kong has long been a hotspot for linguistic landscape research, little scholarly work has specifically focused on the relationship between the linguistic landscape of the city and the identities of its people. Like many studies in the field in general, previous attempts at understanding the use of language and/or other semiotic resources on signs in the territory have tended to be based on institutional or commercial signs, that is, conventional signs that are in the right place, produced and permitted by the authority concerned. Signs which are more unorthodox or even occasionally subversive in nature, by contrast, have largely been overlooked in a city where such items were rarely found in the past. However, the increasingly common large-scale social and political events and activities in various forms and settings taking place in Hong Kong in recent years have afforded a unique opportunity to examine how its people collectively voice their stances and in turn express their identities through unsanctioned banners, posters, sticky notes and other artefacts in lived experiences in the cityscape. Such unexpected and unauthorised signs, which can be subsumed under Scollon and Scollon's (2003) category of transgressive signs, provide an intriguing window into the ways in which identity, lived experience and linguistic landscape interact.

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Itineraries of protest signage

Cited by 32 publications

References 18 publications

Crowd Cohesion and Protest Outcomes

Crowd Cohesion and Protest Outcomes

Language, translocality and urban change

Understanding the identities of Hong Kong people through transgressive signs

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