Natalia Volvach | Stockholm University (original) (raw)
Papers by Natalia Volvach
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2024
This paper aims to make visible the alternative social projects hidden beneath everyday Crimean T... more This paper aims to make visible the alternative social projects hidden beneath everyday Crimean Tatar landscapes. Drawing on audio recordings and field data from interviews and narrated walking tours led by young citizens, it illuminates how these spaces of otherwise emerge and are co-constructed through participants' re-readings of material artifacts, resemiotisation of place semiotics and resignification of communal spaces. Participants navigate among such spaces, negotiating the legacies of historical acts of material, cultural, and linguistic dispossession and disruption as well as the contemporary forms that such acts take. In narrating semiotic landscapes, participants perform acts of Linguistic Citizenship, a concept that recognizes that speakers express agency, voice, and participation through a variety of semiotic means; they engage or disengage with political institutions of the state and advance claims for alternative forms of belonging. This paper thus expands semiotic landscape research through its design as a linguistic ethnography, using interactional data to account for individuals' perceptions of place. It also adds to research on Linguistic Citizenship by foregrounding invisibilized linguistic repertoires and performative acts of meaning-making in a charged political context.
Linguistic Landscape. An international journal
This article aims to illuminate absences in the semiotic landscape of Crimea, resulting from the ... more This article aims to illuminate absences in the semiotic landscape of Crimea, resulting from the erasure of Ukraine after Russia's occupation of Crimea in 2014. By foregrounding what is NOT there, the study expands semiotic landscapes studies and critical sociolinguistic research more generally by interrogating absence and its haunting effects. More than 3,500 photographs of semiotic landscapes collected over two months of fieldwork between 2017 and 2019 together with fieldnotes serve as ethnographic data. The production of absence is interrogated through an analysis of its material effects, that is, voids, holes, and blank walls. It concludes that erasure does not simply negate Ukraine. Instead, pasts remain present, visible, and audible in semiotic landscapes. Absences, as part of a relational ontology of materiality, discourse, and affect, shout about complex invisibilized histories of violence. In this way, they suggest the need to probe traditional approaches in semiotic landscape research that rely on an ontology of presence. (Absence, trace, materiality, ghost, spectre, haunting, Crimea, Ukraine, semiotic landscape, linguistic landscape, interdiscursivity)
Linguistic Landscape, 2022
Building on semiotic landscapes research, the present paper seeks to expand the existing field wi... more Building on semiotic landscapes research, the present paper seeks to expand the existing field with its exploration of protest through the lens of turbulence (Stroud, 2015a). While making visible the fabric of resistance in semiotic landscapes of annexed Crimea, the ethnographic engagement with the interactional and visual data provides insights into small-scale performative acts of protest. It shows that protest evolves as a manoeuvring act across a minefield of possibilities and constraints and manifests itself materially and discursively. More specifically, acts of protest emerge out of an agential intra-action of humans and non-humans, thus revealing the necessity of synergies between people and objects. Such intra-actions create interpretative ambiguity. Protestors deliberately play on this ambiguity to simultaneously conceal and to visibilise dissent. Jointly achieved performative acts of protest, if only temporary, create turbulence and unsettle the status of Crimea as a ‘Rus...
Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, 2021
Protest has become a hot topic in recent sociolinguistic and semiotic landscapes scholarship. Des... more Protest has become a hot topic in recent sociolinguistic and semiotic landscapes scholarship. Despite a growing number of studies, little research has been done on dissent as it is jointly orchestrated by individuals and objects. To fill this gap, this paper builds on previous semiotic landscapes studies (Bock & Stroud, 2019) and offers an analysis of political action as it is produced in the 'nooks and crannies' of everyday life (Besnier, 2009; Scott, 1990). Interrogating participants' memories of dispossession, the paper brings to the fore their experiences of the manoeuvring required to enact dissent. The performative acts that they describe involve situated context-sensitive intentional decisions to protest, both in and out of the public eye. The acts of manoeuvring require thoughtthrough calculation, ongoing readjustment, and reinvention on the part of the protesters as they respond to the calls of their immediate material environment. As interviews and photographic data collected in Crimea illuminate, individuals find recourse to things, but things affect individual actors too, hence suggesting that language and other semiotic markers of belonging come to be experienced as a complex multimodal phenomenon in the everyday manoeuvres of protest.
Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, 2021
This paper aims to make visible the alternative social projects hidden beneath everyday Crimean T... more This paper aims to make visible the alternative social projects hidden beneath everyday Crimean Tatar landscapes. Drawing on audio recordings and field data from narrated walking tours led by young citizens, it illuminates how these spaces of otherwise emerge and are co-constructed through participants' re-readings of material artefacts, resemiotisation of place, and resignification of communal spaces. For Povinelli (2011a: 7), a space of otherwise is a social project in a state of 'indeterminate oscillation' consisting of 'interlocking concepts, materials, and forces'. Participants navigate among such spaces, negotiating the legacies of historical acts of material, cultural, and linguistic dispossession and disruption, and the contemporary forms that such acts take. In narrating semiotic landscapes, participants perform acts of linguistic citizenship (Stroud, 2001, 2018), a concept which recognises that speakers express agency, voice, and participation through a variety of semiotic means; engage or disengage with political institutions of the state; and advance claims for alternative forms of belonging. This paper thus expands linguistic landscape research through its design as a linguistic ethnography (LE), using interactional data to account for individuals' perceptions of lived spaces and spatial practices. It also adds to research on linguistic citizenship by foregrounding invisibilised linguistic repertoires and performative acts of meaning-making in a charged political context.
Still Ukrainian or Already Russian? The Linguistic Landscape of Sevastopol in the Aftermath of Crimean Annexation, 2019
The annexed city of Sevastopol as a part of the Crimean peninsula remains de jure a Ukrainian ter... more The annexed city of Sevastopol as a part of the Crimean peninsula remains de jure a Ukrainian territory for the most of the European countries and beyond. De facto this city is a new subject of the Russian Federation. A case study conducted in November 2017 demonstrates that in spite of its politically contested status, the linguistic landscape of Sevastopol indexes the Russian power. Through the foundational principles of indexicality and emplacement, the study shows how Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar refer to Sevastopol's past, and Russian represents its present and its future.
Thesis Chapters by Natalia Volvach
From Words to Voids: Absencing and Haunting in Crimean Semiotic Landscapes, 2023
This thesis seeks to contribute to the body of ethnographically-oriented semiotic landscape resea... more This thesis seeks to contribute to the body of ethnographically-oriented semiotic landscape research by addressing linguistic and non-linguistic signs in the landscapes of contemporary Crimea. It is based on research conducted in the region back in 2017 and 2019 after the Russian annexation but before the full-scale war against Ukraine, which started on 24 February 2022. It illuminates the ways in which the complex histories of conflict over the Crimean Peninsula are materialized in ‘absenced’ semiotic landscapes, both in the form of material effects in landscapes and as discursively realized in the narrated memories of the study participants. In this way, through a close theoretically informed analysis of absence in semiotic landscapes, this thesis illuminates the interrelationships between overwritten, erased and invisibilized voices.
Each of the four studies in this thesis addresses the effects of different acts of dispossession which have led to the absencing of ethnic, linguistic and national differences in Crimea across time and space. Study I engages with multilingual representations displayed in the city of Sevastopol, illustrating the dominance of Russian discourses of nation and nationalism. Moving beyond the focus on visible signs, Study II sheds light on the invisibilized histories of Crimean Tatar territorial dispossession and displacement. By engaging with the participants’ voices, it illustrates the constructions of a space of otherwise, an indeterminate space full of potentiality and marginality that remains hidden yet persistent in Crimean landscapes. Study III engages to a greater extent with acts of struggle for voice and visibility by attending to memories of citizens’ resistance through the lens of turbulence. Finally, Study IV attempts to disentangle the materially manifested effects of absence in the landscapes. This interrogation goes beyond words and captures voids and their haunting effects on the researcher’s subjectivities.
Overall, this thesis contributes to the study of absencing and haunting in Crimean semiotic landscapes, understanding them as a historically layered and yet temporally dynamic, affective and vibrant social phenomenon. As evident from the emic perspectives presented in the thesis, absenced semiotic landscapes are intricately tied to people and events, and can therefore be treated as manifestations of human displacement and dispossession. Further, an (auto)-ethnographic account shows how embodied experiences of absenced semiotic landscapes matter as they further allow the illumination of memory, space and the production of situated knowledge woven into the individual’s body and subjectivity. In sum, the thesis offers a new lens on semiotic landscapes, one that explores the mutual co-constitution of material-discursive processes hidden behind words and voids. In this way, it opens up an endless web of interconnections that informs the ways in which we make sense of social life.
Annexion oder freiwilliger Beitritt? Kritische Diskursanalyse der ukrainischen und russischen Medienberichterstattung über das Krim-Referendum, 2016
Das Augenmerk der Masterarbeit wurde auf die ukrainische und russische Berichterstattung über das... more Das Augenmerk der Masterarbeit wurde auf die ukrainische und russische Berichterstattung über das Krim-Referendum in ausgewählten Online-Zeitungen gerichtet. Diskursive Dekonstruktion von sozialen Akteurinnen und Akteuren, welche Russland und die Ukraine repräsentieren, Ereignisse, Objekte und Handlungen, die mit der Krim-Annexion in Verbindung gebracht werden, wurden anhand des Diskurs-Historischen Ansatzes der Kritischen Diskursanalyse und der quantitativen Methoden der Korpuslinguistik durchgeführt.
Zwei Diskurse über das Krim-Referendum kreieren zwei antagonistische Realitäten, die nicht miteinander vereinbar sind. Die untersuchten Artikel werden einerseits durch Diffamierungen des „bösen Anderen“ und andererseits durch die Viktimisierungen des „guten Selbst“ geprägt. Sowohl dem russischen als auch dem ukrainischen Diskurs über das Referendum auf der Krim liegen eine argumentativ schwache, undifferenzierte und einseitige Berichterstattung zugrunde. Dies begünstigt die Festigung der Feindbilder und vertieft die Gräben zwischen den Staaten.
Eine solche Medienberichterstattung trägt zur Verschärfung des Konfliktes bei. Mit dem Ausschluss und der Unterdrückung einer kritischen Berichterstattung und der gleichzeitigen Begünstigung eines nationalistischen Diskurses wird die Aufmerksamkeit der Bürger_innen von grundlegenden wirtschaftlichen, sozialen und politischen Problemen im Staat abgelenkt. Die Änderung des Fokus dient dem Schutz der jeweiligen Regierung und der Diskreditierung des Gegners, womit jede Verantwortung abgeschoben werden kann.
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2024
This paper aims to make visible the alternative social projects hidden beneath everyday Crimean T... more This paper aims to make visible the alternative social projects hidden beneath everyday Crimean Tatar landscapes. Drawing on audio recordings and field data from interviews and narrated walking tours led by young citizens, it illuminates how these spaces of otherwise emerge and are co-constructed through participants' re-readings of material artifacts, resemiotisation of place semiotics and resignification of communal spaces. Participants navigate among such spaces, negotiating the legacies of historical acts of material, cultural, and linguistic dispossession and disruption as well as the contemporary forms that such acts take. In narrating semiotic landscapes, participants perform acts of Linguistic Citizenship, a concept that recognizes that speakers express agency, voice, and participation through a variety of semiotic means; they engage or disengage with political institutions of the state and advance claims for alternative forms of belonging. This paper thus expands semiotic landscape research through its design as a linguistic ethnography, using interactional data to account for individuals' perceptions of place. It also adds to research on Linguistic Citizenship by foregrounding invisibilized linguistic repertoires and performative acts of meaning-making in a charged political context.
Linguistic Landscape. An international journal
This article aims to illuminate absences in the semiotic landscape of Crimea, resulting from the ... more This article aims to illuminate absences in the semiotic landscape of Crimea, resulting from the erasure of Ukraine after Russia's occupation of Crimea in 2014. By foregrounding what is NOT there, the study expands semiotic landscapes studies and critical sociolinguistic research more generally by interrogating absence and its haunting effects. More than 3,500 photographs of semiotic landscapes collected over two months of fieldwork between 2017 and 2019 together with fieldnotes serve as ethnographic data. The production of absence is interrogated through an analysis of its material effects, that is, voids, holes, and blank walls. It concludes that erasure does not simply negate Ukraine. Instead, pasts remain present, visible, and audible in semiotic landscapes. Absences, as part of a relational ontology of materiality, discourse, and affect, shout about complex invisibilized histories of violence. In this way, they suggest the need to probe traditional approaches in semiotic landscape research that rely on an ontology of presence. (Absence, trace, materiality, ghost, spectre, haunting, Crimea, Ukraine, semiotic landscape, linguistic landscape, interdiscursivity)
Linguistic Landscape, 2022
Building on semiotic landscapes research, the present paper seeks to expand the existing field wi... more Building on semiotic landscapes research, the present paper seeks to expand the existing field with its exploration of protest through the lens of turbulence (Stroud, 2015a). While making visible the fabric of resistance in semiotic landscapes of annexed Crimea, the ethnographic engagement with the interactional and visual data provides insights into small-scale performative acts of protest. It shows that protest evolves as a manoeuvring act across a minefield of possibilities and constraints and manifests itself materially and discursively. More specifically, acts of protest emerge out of an agential intra-action of humans and non-humans, thus revealing the necessity of synergies between people and objects. Such intra-actions create interpretative ambiguity. Protestors deliberately play on this ambiguity to simultaneously conceal and to visibilise dissent. Jointly achieved performative acts of protest, if only temporary, create turbulence and unsettle the status of Crimea as a ‘Rus...
Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, 2021
Protest has become a hot topic in recent sociolinguistic and semiotic landscapes scholarship. Des... more Protest has become a hot topic in recent sociolinguistic and semiotic landscapes scholarship. Despite a growing number of studies, little research has been done on dissent as it is jointly orchestrated by individuals and objects. To fill this gap, this paper builds on previous semiotic landscapes studies (Bock & Stroud, 2019) and offers an analysis of political action as it is produced in the 'nooks and crannies' of everyday life (Besnier, 2009; Scott, 1990). Interrogating participants' memories of dispossession, the paper brings to the fore their experiences of the manoeuvring required to enact dissent. The performative acts that they describe involve situated context-sensitive intentional decisions to protest, both in and out of the public eye. The acts of manoeuvring require thoughtthrough calculation, ongoing readjustment, and reinvention on the part of the protesters as they respond to the calls of their immediate material environment. As interviews and photographic data collected in Crimea illuminate, individuals find recourse to things, but things affect individual actors too, hence suggesting that language and other semiotic markers of belonging come to be experienced as a complex multimodal phenomenon in the everyday manoeuvres of protest.
Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, 2021
This paper aims to make visible the alternative social projects hidden beneath everyday Crimean T... more This paper aims to make visible the alternative social projects hidden beneath everyday Crimean Tatar landscapes. Drawing on audio recordings and field data from narrated walking tours led by young citizens, it illuminates how these spaces of otherwise emerge and are co-constructed through participants' re-readings of material artefacts, resemiotisation of place, and resignification of communal spaces. For Povinelli (2011a: 7), a space of otherwise is a social project in a state of 'indeterminate oscillation' consisting of 'interlocking concepts, materials, and forces'. Participants navigate among such spaces, negotiating the legacies of historical acts of material, cultural, and linguistic dispossession and disruption, and the contemporary forms that such acts take. In narrating semiotic landscapes, participants perform acts of linguistic citizenship (Stroud, 2001, 2018), a concept which recognises that speakers express agency, voice, and participation through a variety of semiotic means; engage or disengage with political institutions of the state; and advance claims for alternative forms of belonging. This paper thus expands linguistic landscape research through its design as a linguistic ethnography (LE), using interactional data to account for individuals' perceptions of lived spaces and spatial practices. It also adds to research on linguistic citizenship by foregrounding invisibilised linguistic repertoires and performative acts of meaning-making in a charged political context.
Still Ukrainian or Already Russian? The Linguistic Landscape of Sevastopol in the Aftermath of Crimean Annexation, 2019
The annexed city of Sevastopol as a part of the Crimean peninsula remains de jure a Ukrainian ter... more The annexed city of Sevastopol as a part of the Crimean peninsula remains de jure a Ukrainian territory for the most of the European countries and beyond. De facto this city is a new subject of the Russian Federation. A case study conducted in November 2017 demonstrates that in spite of its politically contested status, the linguistic landscape of Sevastopol indexes the Russian power. Through the foundational principles of indexicality and emplacement, the study shows how Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar refer to Sevastopol's past, and Russian represents its present and its future.
From Words to Voids: Absencing and Haunting in Crimean Semiotic Landscapes, 2023
This thesis seeks to contribute to the body of ethnographically-oriented semiotic landscape resea... more This thesis seeks to contribute to the body of ethnographically-oriented semiotic landscape research by addressing linguistic and non-linguistic signs in the landscapes of contemporary Crimea. It is based on research conducted in the region back in 2017 and 2019 after the Russian annexation but before the full-scale war against Ukraine, which started on 24 February 2022. It illuminates the ways in which the complex histories of conflict over the Crimean Peninsula are materialized in ‘absenced’ semiotic landscapes, both in the form of material effects in landscapes and as discursively realized in the narrated memories of the study participants. In this way, through a close theoretically informed analysis of absence in semiotic landscapes, this thesis illuminates the interrelationships between overwritten, erased and invisibilized voices.
Each of the four studies in this thesis addresses the effects of different acts of dispossession which have led to the absencing of ethnic, linguistic and national differences in Crimea across time and space. Study I engages with multilingual representations displayed in the city of Sevastopol, illustrating the dominance of Russian discourses of nation and nationalism. Moving beyond the focus on visible signs, Study II sheds light on the invisibilized histories of Crimean Tatar territorial dispossession and displacement. By engaging with the participants’ voices, it illustrates the constructions of a space of otherwise, an indeterminate space full of potentiality and marginality that remains hidden yet persistent in Crimean landscapes. Study III engages to a greater extent with acts of struggle for voice and visibility by attending to memories of citizens’ resistance through the lens of turbulence. Finally, Study IV attempts to disentangle the materially manifested effects of absence in the landscapes. This interrogation goes beyond words and captures voids and their haunting effects on the researcher’s subjectivities.
Overall, this thesis contributes to the study of absencing and haunting in Crimean semiotic landscapes, understanding them as a historically layered and yet temporally dynamic, affective and vibrant social phenomenon. As evident from the emic perspectives presented in the thesis, absenced semiotic landscapes are intricately tied to people and events, and can therefore be treated as manifestations of human displacement and dispossession. Further, an (auto)-ethnographic account shows how embodied experiences of absenced semiotic landscapes matter as they further allow the illumination of memory, space and the production of situated knowledge woven into the individual’s body and subjectivity. In sum, the thesis offers a new lens on semiotic landscapes, one that explores the mutual co-constitution of material-discursive processes hidden behind words and voids. In this way, it opens up an endless web of interconnections that informs the ways in which we make sense of social life.
Annexion oder freiwilliger Beitritt? Kritische Diskursanalyse der ukrainischen und russischen Medienberichterstattung über das Krim-Referendum, 2016
Das Augenmerk der Masterarbeit wurde auf die ukrainische und russische Berichterstattung über das... more Das Augenmerk der Masterarbeit wurde auf die ukrainische und russische Berichterstattung über das Krim-Referendum in ausgewählten Online-Zeitungen gerichtet. Diskursive Dekonstruktion von sozialen Akteurinnen und Akteuren, welche Russland und die Ukraine repräsentieren, Ereignisse, Objekte und Handlungen, die mit der Krim-Annexion in Verbindung gebracht werden, wurden anhand des Diskurs-Historischen Ansatzes der Kritischen Diskursanalyse und der quantitativen Methoden der Korpuslinguistik durchgeführt.
Zwei Diskurse über das Krim-Referendum kreieren zwei antagonistische Realitäten, die nicht miteinander vereinbar sind. Die untersuchten Artikel werden einerseits durch Diffamierungen des „bösen Anderen“ und andererseits durch die Viktimisierungen des „guten Selbst“ geprägt. Sowohl dem russischen als auch dem ukrainischen Diskurs über das Referendum auf der Krim liegen eine argumentativ schwache, undifferenzierte und einseitige Berichterstattung zugrunde. Dies begünstigt die Festigung der Feindbilder und vertieft die Gräben zwischen den Staaten.
Eine solche Medienberichterstattung trägt zur Verschärfung des Konfliktes bei. Mit dem Ausschluss und der Unterdrückung einer kritischen Berichterstattung und der gleichzeitigen Begünstigung eines nationalistischen Diskurses wird die Aufmerksamkeit der Bürger_innen von grundlegenden wirtschaftlichen, sozialen und politischen Problemen im Staat abgelenkt. Die Änderung des Fokus dient dem Schutz der jeweiligen Regierung und der Diskreditierung des Gegners, womit jede Verantwortung abgeschoben werden kann.