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Baréin
In the social and political act of protesting, signs carried by protesters are mediational means to clarify demands and express feelings and, thus, add to physical action such as demonstration, sit-ins, chanting and barricades. Taking as a case in point the “Arab Spring” revolution, triggered by the successful popular uprisings in Tunisia, then Egypt, in early 2011, and, for comparative purposes, a few examples of similar mass protests elsewhere, I show, through a semiotico-textual analysis of these mobile signs, the significance of code choice and the symbolic meaning of these artifacts. Mobile signs are texts resulting from a judicious code choice in relation to multiple target audiences – local, regional and foreign. Code choice is also examined for symbolic meanings which reveal the power of signs to mediate action, their intersection with, their role and their embedding in, the act of protesting. Pregnant with discourse, signs are a powerful tool for giving cultural and political meaning to protest. The inclusion of mobile signs in the study of the linguistic landscape scholarship challenges the notion of territoriality as a fixed place.
