Communicating social and religious values through visual arts in the aftermath of a revolution : Historical and contemporary analogies

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to identify the different values that were communicated through the visuals of the Egyptian revolution of January 25th, 2011 with reflections on those that were communicated historically in Germany to highlight how these visuals can act as tools of informal education and social marketing campaigns to citizens of a country. Design/methodology/approach – The current research paper takes a qualitative exploratory approach. The method that was utilized is content analysis , with the sub‐method used to analyze the content of the street visuals being semiotic analysis . Findings – The main social and religious values communicated between citizens in Egypt and Germany were about freedom, peace, unity, and victory. These street visuals help in communicating social and religious values to citizens of a country at the time of the revolution and recording them keeps their messages for future generations to come. Accordingly, these visuals help in informally educating citizens and act as social marketing campaigns from and to the people. Research limitations/implications – The results here should not be regarded as conclusive results as they are of a qualitative nature and should be followed and tested by future quantitative research. Originality/value – The main contribution of this research paper is to fill the gap in literature by blending all the different research domains about informal education research, social marketing, graffiti and street art papers, and the historical revolution accounts. There was no prior research conducted with either a similar aim or under all these previous domains.