Symbolic Objects in Contentious Politics is an ambitious and wide-ranging edited collection in which the editors, Benjamin Abrams and Peter Gardener, highlight the importance of paying attention to a distinctly undertheorized field. While contentious politics have been extensively theorized, the role that objects play in these contexts has been markedly less so – the editors attest, for example, that there is currently very little literature on the role of placards in mass protests despite their ubiquity, visibility and relevance in such contexts. When theorizing this absence, Abrams and Gardner explain that their approach holds ‘three central properties…that the “stuff” to be considered be symbolically important, physically manifest, and appear in the context of contention.’ (32). This framing allows for the inclusion of a breadth and depth of contributions to the volume, in terms of disciplinary background, methodology, empirical context and object(s) of study. One of the volume’s greatest strengths is in working with multifaceted and rigorously theorized definitions for both ‘symbolic objects’ and ‘contentious politics’. This conceptual framing, put forward by Abrams and Gardner both in the introduction and in the first substantive chapter, allows for fascinating parallels and connections to be drawn between a notably wide range of research contributions. Abrams and Gardner contend that symbolic objects come in all shapes and sizes – from a signature or badge to a statue or a street. They can be human or inanimate, specifically created for contention or not, banal or ‘highly charged’ (21). What defines a ‘symbolic object’ then, is that it has both material and symbolic properties, that it is ‘neither a symbol nor an object alone’ but ‘both at once’ (23). It is the intersection of these properties, Abrams and Gardner argue, that affords these objects ‘the many distinctive roles that they play in processes of contention around the world and across history’ (23). This conceptualisation of a ‘symbolic object’ is made more productive by Abrams and Gardner’s understanding of ‘contentious politics’, which ‘includes but is not limited to social movements’ and can be ‘found across the totality of situations in which there is something at stake that cannot be resolved without transgressing or superseding existing power structures, whether those situations intensely involve governing authorities, or include them only as passive bystanders.’ (14).  This definition is broad in both its understanding of ‘contention’ as practice and ‘the political’ as context. When combined with the theorisation of a ‘symbolic object’ (as an item in which materiality and semiosis intersect), a valuable theoretical lens emerges. The productive potential of this multifaceted theoretical and conceptual formulation is demonstrated throughout the collection in its entirety. One clear benefit of this conceptual understanding is the range of empirical contexts and objects that can be studied, theorised, and placed into conversation with one another. In their opening and closing chapters, for example, the editors refer to a range of contexts that may seem dizzying in their difference – a non-exhaustive list includes: milkshakes thrown at politicians, the toppling of statues, the wearing of various items (shoes, headdresses, lapel pins), everyday items (spoons, coathangers), as well as weapons (AK-47s, machetes), the creation and use of placards in street protests, the street itself as object of protest, parts of the bodies of humans and animals, the body itself as an object of protest during the act of self-immolation, and different types of flags in a range of global locations. Abrams and Gardener do not theorize these objects separate from their contexts– either spatially or temporally – and so they also pay attention to how objects are produced, as well as to how they might be changed or transformed in various ways, and to how they might themselves be part of processes of transformation. Objects are thus theorised in relation to how they might emerge, be (re)used and/or remembered in a range of contentious political contexts. This vastness in the variety of objects, contexts and processes referenced by Abrams and Gardener is managed skilfully and effectively, because of the valuable conceptual framing that they put forward. This skilfulness in conceptual framing is also reflected in the organisation of the chapter contributions, which are thoughtfully separated into three sections concerned with the ‘creation’, ‘potency’ and ‘legacy’ of symbolic objects in turn. These sections are well balanced – there are four chapters within each. The depth of the research conducted by the contributing authors complements the breadth of empirical cases referenced by Abrams and Gardener – each contributing chapter examines a smaller range of objects through a more focused empirical, theoretical and/or methodological lens. Objects and empirical contexts covered by contributors are global in their scope – from the feathered headdress in a US context of settler colonialism (Dobroski, Chpt.5), to representations of self-immolation in Tunisia (Zuev, Chpt.9), and Biafran symbolic objects (including flags and war technology) within present-day contention in Nigeria (Atata & Omobwale, Chpt. 12). Methodologies used by contributors vary too: from observation of protests and interviews with actors in Warsaw and Berlin (Ślosarski, Chpt. 1), to a case study analysis of the ‘affective intensity’ (152) of signatures across contexts (Dukes, Chpt. 7), and an approach that ‘braid[s] fragmented social histories from below’ (237) to study the role of the Mekap (a type of shoe) in Kurdish anticolonial movements (Dirik, Chpt. 11). Disciplinary backgrounds and approaches invoked by contributors non-exhaustively include: ‘an anthropology of access’ (55) to theorise martyrdom in Iran (Saramifar, Chpt. 3), the tracing of a 50-year history of ‘the street’ in Portuguese contentious politics (Accornero et al, Chpt. 6), and analysis of mask-wearing in relation to representational politics and Habermasian critique (Thomassen & Riisgaard, Chpt. 13). There is also variety in the specific and intersectional histories and relations of inequality engaged with by contributors, which include: examination of the ‘Western origins of the rainbow flag’ (81) in the context of Lebanese queer activism (Nagle, Chpt.4), the state violence enacted by police in Toronto on protestors with particular ‘bodywork practices’ (Zawilski, Chpt, 8:175), and ‘the ceaseless recuperation, reformulation, and reformation of El Che’  (218) as a contentious political symbol across space and time. (Selbin, Chpt. 10). The four sets of thematic connections drawn here speak to the productive potential of engaging with each of the chapters in depth, as well as reading them in relation to one another and considering the connections and discontinuities that exist between them. Reflecting on the purpose of their text, Abrams and Gardener highlight that the ‘this book does not aim to “fill a gap” […] but rather to help develop a more unified field of study in relation to symbolic objects, and to encourage the cross-fertilization of ideas across disciplines’ (294). The editors achieve these aims through their conceptual framework, the thoughtful inclusion and ordering of such a rich range of contributions, and their synthesis of key themes that emerge from the contributing chapters in their conclusion. Here, they pay attention in turn to questions of ‘impact and potency’, ‘differences of interpretation’, ‘semiotic entanglements’ and ‘transformation’ both of and by symbolic objects (295-303). These themes productively speak to the flexible, adaptive, sometimes unpredictable, often in-flux, and always subjectively experienced nature of symbolic objects in contentious political contexts. The breadth, depth and conceptual understandings put forward by both the editors and contributors of this collection make it a valuable text that holds productive potential for a range of readers with differing disciplinary backgrounds and empirical interests. I look forward to engaging with it further, and particularly to thinking through some of the arguments made in relation to my own empirical research context.

Isabelle Higgins holds a PhD from the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge. Her empirical work explores how children deemed eligible for adoption in the USA are represented and monetized online by a range of digital ‘adoption advocates’, including governments, private adoption agencies and adoptive parents. She draws on insights from the sociology of ‘race’ and racism, decolonial thought and reproductive sociology to explore how the design and everyday use of digital technologies reproduces intersectionally racialised forms of structural inequality. Isabelle has held fellowships at Cambridge Digital Humanities, the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, the New School Institute for Critical Social Inquiry and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. From September 2024 she will take up a Teaching Associate position in Media and Culture and Sociological Theory at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge