Stickers: diverse functions and changing geographical emplacement at the “online/offline nexus”

© Dr. des. Marta Rodríguez García

The Sticker Research Platform is a transdisciplinary and inter-university initiative based at the University of Bern. It explores stickers as ephemeral, mobile, and multimodal semiotic signs that play an important role in how public and digital spaces are used, negotiated, and made meaningful.

While stickers have historically been associated with political expression, their functions have expanded across diverse contexts—from car bumpers and lampposts to laptops and social media. Within today’s visual economy (Poole 1997), stickers circulate rapidly across physical and digital environments, embodying both commercial and collective communicative functions.

The platform aims to investigate these dynamics within what Androutsopoulos (2024) calls the “offline–online nexus”, beginning in Switzerland and eventually expanding internationally.

Aims

  1. To establish a much-needed dialogue among scholars and students at the University of Bern and beyond who research stickers from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives, fostering collaboration and best practices for both offline and online sticker analysis.
  2. To engage in research-led teaching and develop a large, multilingual Swiss Sticker Corpus (SSC), to be made publicly available online in the project’s third year.
  3. To publicize the SSC as an open-access database for future research, allowing comparative studies across discourse types, multilingual usage, production processes, and geosemiotic perspectives.
  4. To prepare a draft proposal for SNSF funding in 2026.

The members of the platform are working with the Lingscape electronic application, designed by Prof. Christoph Purschke and coordinated by the University of Luxembourg.

Coordination

Dr. Kellie Gonçalves, Department of English (Bern)
Prof. Dr. Yvette Bürki, Department of Spanish (Bern)

Members of the plattform

Prof. Dr. Gertrud Reershemius (Aston University) (Expert)
Prof. Dr. Florian Busch, Department of German (Bern)
Dr. Marta Rodríguez García, Department of Spanish (Bern)
Prof. Dr. Sandra Schlumpf, Seminar für Iberoromanistik (University of Basel)

Administrative support

Federico Erba