Identity and Language in Wartime Ukraine

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture, Room 206. Coffee/tea and cookies at 3:45 pm.

media release: Russia’s full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led to radical changes in Ukrainian citizens’ identities, attitudes, and patterns of language use. With the drastic deterioration of attitudes towards Russia and Russians, most Ukrainian citizens came to see themselves first and foremost of members of the Ukrainian nation fighting against the aggressor. This change in perceptions of Self and the Other was accompanied by a change in language use marked by an impressive shift toward Ukrainian, particularly in public communication. Based on the results of four nationwide surveys and two series of focus group discussions which were conducted before and after the full-scale war, Volodymyr Kulyk analyzes the dynamic of ethnonational identities and patterns of language use among different categories of Ukrainian population.

About the speaker: Volodymyr Kulyk is a head research fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He has also taught at Columbia, Stanford and Yale Universities, Kyiv Mohyla Academy and Ukrainian Catholic University as well as having research fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, Woodrow Wilson Center, University College London, University of Alberta and other Western scholarly institutions. His research fields include the politics of language, memory and identity as well as political and media discourse in contemporary Ukraine, on which he has widely published in Ukrainian and Western journals and collected volumes. His latest book is Movna polityka v bahatomovnykh kraïnakh: Zakordonnyi dosvid ta ioho prydatnist’ dlia Ukraïny (Language Policies in Multilingual Countries: Foreign Experience and Its Relevance to Ukraine) was published by the Ukrainian publishing house Dukh i litera in May 2021 with the financial support of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the USA. Currently Volodymyr Kulyk is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Political  Science, Columbia University