A Contribution to the Study of Banners as a Contemporary Folklore Genre

Résumé

The paper analyzes the banners collected during the student protest marches in Užice in 2024-2025, whose authors are students of the Faculty of Pedagogy in Užice and are part of the researcher's personal archive. The banners and their content are analyzed as a contemporary folklore genre, a form of vernacular expression, and a part of social protest folklore, which has recently attracted growing interest among folklorists, and has been the subject of special journal issues and other scholarly publications. In this research, we rely on the understanding of folklore as a communicative process, the concept of material folklore, and on mimetic folklore research. We explore the semantic properties of the banners, relating their messages, or slogans, to the study programs that the creators attend, within the context of the folklore of a specific group that is simultaneously socially determined (as students, who are both a transitional category and part of the academic community) and professionally defined (as future educational professionals). It is observed how the themes, motifs, and patterns change and adapt to the current social and political context. In this regard, particular attention is paid to intertextuality, referentiality, and the use of humor in the corpus. The analysis also takes into account the fact that the material was collected by insiders who were both the creators of the banners and participants in student blockades.