A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• From Words to Voids: Absencing and Haunting in Crimean Semiotic Landscapes

  2023. Natalia Volvach.

  Thesis (Doc)

  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. 

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• Performing politics of difference through Linguistic Citizenship: Constructing “Spaces of Otherwise”

  Natalia Volvach.

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• Manoeuvres of dissent in landscapes of annexation

  2022. Natalia Volvach. Linguistic Landscape

  Article

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• Shouting absences: Disentangling the ghosts of Ukraine in occupied Crimea

  2022. Natalia Volvach. Language in society (London. Print)

  Article

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• ‘Our nation is just trying to rebirth right now’: Constructing Crimean Tatar spaces of otherwise through Linguistic Citizenship

  2022. Natalia Volvach.

  Article

  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 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, and the contemporary forms that such acts take. In narrating semiotic landscapes, participants perform acts of Linguistic Citizenship, 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, 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 non-linguistic meaning-making in a charged political context.

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• Breaking the silence in 'spaces of otherwise'

  2021. Natalia Volvach.

  Conference

  This ethnographic paper sheds light on how various agents use limited resources to create 'alternative spaces' in Crimea in the context of international isolation. The combination of a 'walking tour' technique with the analysis of linguistic landscapes demonstrates how the current state of affairs can be resisted, contested and/or disrupted.

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• Exploring violence and the words that injure: Russian narratives in the contested spaces of Crimea

  2021. Natalia Volvach.

  Conference

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• How not to become a ‘walking target’? Maneuvering the language of protest

  2021. Natalia Volvach.

  Conference

  How can dissent survive under the conditions of territorial occupation? After Crimea has been transforming into a ‘Russian’ entity since March 2014, the public dissent is reported to calm down due to the increased risks of prosecutions. Despite the ongoing sense of isolation, certain voices still articulate desire for social change. Situating this study in a context of the Crimean territorial dispossession, this paper approaches language as means of resistance in semiotic. landscapes (Stroud, 2015; Lou & Jaworski, 2016), where political is produced in the ‘hooks and crannies’ of the everyday life (Scott, 1990). The study draws from the ethnographic data collected between September and October 2019, where participants share their experiences of the everyday semiotic landscapes in interviews and walking tours as they intertwine with their memories of Crimean annexation.

  As I will argue, inhabitants are forced to maneuver in order to enable dissent in conditions of restrained freedom. I demonstrate that the turbulent shifts experienced due to the territorial, and, most importantly, ideological occupation, sharpened the breaches, intensified the visibilities of individuals’ vulnerabilities, and pushed to reconsider own semiotic practices of protest.

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• Manoeuvres of dissent in dispossession

  2021. Natalia Volvach. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies 291, 1-17

  Article

  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 thought-through 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. 

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• Manoeuvring dissent under territorial occupation: Resemiotization of protest in times of multilingual turbulence

  2021. Natalia Volvach.

  Conference

  The wave of mass protests across the world poses many unsettling challenges for sociolinguistics to fruitfully explore. For instance, from the demands from the state authorities for the resignation of Lukashenka in Belarus, to the exemption of anti-liberal laws in Hong Kong, as well as the calls for immediate police resignations and prosecutions in the Black Lives Matter movement in the USA. These protests are remarkable in scale, duration, intensity, and creativity.

  In this paper, the protests under scrutiny are less pronounced, but no less vibrant and laden with power, which, I argue, is on account of enregisterment (Agha, 2007) of semiosis under the label of 'danger' and its on-going resemiotization (Iedema, 2003). This paper focuses on mobile semiosis, which travels from monumental landscapes to kitchens, classrooms, and individual bodies. The dispersed politics of semiosis differs in scale, duration, and agendas from the mobilising movements that have served as a focus of analysis in Linguistic Landscapes (LLs) research so far (Lou/Jaworski, 2016; Rojo, 2014; Goutsos/Polymeneas, 2014; Kitis/Milani, 2015). Further, the spaces of protest discussed here originate from different socio-political conditions relating to the expansive territorial occupation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014, which created a state of shadowy legislation and contesting normativities.

  Overall, this paper aims to contribute to the field of LLS and its interests in semiosis of protest by interrogating how spaces are nurtured through 'turbulent acts of re-signification' (Kitis and Milani, 2015: 269) and are repurposed to live civil disobedience in Crimea. The study provides examples of how spaces of protest are produced through resemiotized interpretative contestation (Wee and Goh, 2020) of monuments and launching of a ‘political kitchen’. In all these spaces of protest, every bodycomes to matter, as they symbolically perform and spatialize resistance under conditions of multilingual turbulence (Stroud, 2015).

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• Ukrainian zombie landscapes: Traces of violence in the contested spaces of Crimea

  2021. Natalia Volvach.

  Conference

  Traces of Ukrainian landscapes are instances of the living dead in the currently ‘Russian’ Crimea. What remains of Ukraine is hardly present, but is still perceivable. This paper has as its goal to revisit and reclaim the Ukrainian landscapes following the call in sociolinguistics more generally, and the semiotic landscapes research in particular, in its attempt to de-centre from the ‘linguistic’ in language (Pennycook, 2017; Thurlow, 2016). As advocated by more critically oriented theorists, the paper turns towards ‘otherwise perceivable signs’ (e.g. Domke, 2018), attempting to create a sense of non-existence (Karlander, 2019), by looking at Ukrainian ‘zombie landscapes’ (Bock & Stroud, 2018)in today’s Crimea.  While keeping the focus on the processes of erasure and negation of claims for Ukrainian statehood in Crimea, this paper also seeks to offer an analysis of performative re-writings of physical spaces of peninsula. It looks at 1) attempts to produce voids through physical deletion and removal of the signs of Ukrainian statehood that go together with 2) the reinsertion of ‘Russian’ meanings that ‘correct’ the ‘wrongs’ of the past. The repetition of these re-enactments across public spaces of Crimea reinvokes the structure of domination (cf. Butler, 2013: 18) and reinscribes a certain image of reality that the inhabitants are forced to adapt to. Closely looking at the instances in semiotic landscapes where the exclusions and insertions are systematically produced, I show that the rewritings do not go unnoticed, but leave haunting traces (Gordon, 2008) of violence. The ‘holed’, ‘shadowed’, ‘faded’, and ‘layered’ traces over-written with new names do not produce a neat image of the new Russian state over-night, but reveal the attempts to violently break with the past. In short, the explorations of this case study reveal failed attempts to use the performative power of language and semiosis by the occupational regime to negate any sign of Ukrainian presence and to re-enact the ‘new’ ‘Russian’ reality in Crimea.

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• When It Is Raining, Sell Umbrellas: The semiotic landscape of a commercial area of Stockholm in times of Covid-19

  2021. Luana Candido Fleury, Marie Fournier, Natalia Volvach.

  Other

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• (Re)inscribing the Crimean Tatar Nation into the Semiotic Landscape as a Way to Remember

  2020. Natalia Volvach.

  Conference

  In geographically, economically and politically peripheral, but at the same, central spaces, individuals rely on certain multilingual practices to create their own normativities and to manifest their own identities. Crimean Tatars, as an ethnic group pushed out to the peripheries of the urban centres, ‘exercise their agency’ and live ‘what is important to them’ (Stroud, 2018: 5) through creating ‘spaces of otherwise’.This paper builds on Linguistic Citizenship (Stroud, 2018) and utilizes the ‘walking tour’ as an inclusive research method within the linguistic landscape tradition (Szabó/Troyer, 2018) to understand space-, place- and sense-making practices and their transformative force during an ethnographic practice. Being primarily introduced by participants as a ‘trip to beautiful places’, the walking tour in this study transforms into a narration about a deep-rooted intergenerational remembrance of loss, pain, and displacement, where the locals demonstrate various strategies of resistance against a larger system of social inequality. The analysis shows the strategies of the locals in exercising ‘individual modes of space reappropriation’ (de Certeau, 1984: 96) in the context of contingent materialities and limited political and cultural capital. Among those strategies are the spatial practices of land squatting, place (re)naming, graffiti spraying, but also resemiotizations of places of national significance in different spatiotemporal frames. Those resemiotizations, especially the ones ingrained with the national symbolism, are experienced by participants as the evidence of Crimean Tatar presence, which resists the nation’s forgetting.In sum, this paper aims at drawing out various dynamic forms of semiosis that are multimodally transferred in the place, imagined and remembered by people and filled with affect and emotion. An examination of material artefacts through the linguistic landscape lens, together with an analysis of participants’ narratives, demonstrate how the interplay of language, place, and memory is lived against the backdrop of the Crimean Tatar history of displacement.

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• ’Our nation trying to rebirth right now’: transformative walking through Crimean Tatar ‘spaces of otherwise’

  2020. Natalia Volvach.

  Conference

  In geographically, economically and politically peripheral, but at the same, central space (Pietikäinen & Kelly-Holmes, 2013), individuals rely on certain multilingual practices to create own normativities and to manifest own identities. Crimean Tatars, an ethnic group pushed out to peripheries of the urban centres since their return, ‘exercise their agency’ and live ‘what is important to them’ (Stroud, 2018: 5) through creating spaces of otherwise.This paper builds on Linguistic Citizenship (Stroud, 2018) and utilizes a walking tour as an inclusive research method within the linguistic landscape tradition (Szabó & Troyer, 2018) to understand space-, place- and sense-making practices and their transformative force during an ethnographic practice. Being primarily introduced by participants as a ‘trip to beautiful places’, the walking tour transforms into a narration about deep-rooted intergenerational sense of loss, pain, and displacement, where the locals use various strategies to resist the larger system of social inequality and injustice. This paper discusses some of those strategies, understood as spatial practices of land squatting, place (re)naming, graffiti spraying, but also shifting of normative functions of certain places, such as cafes or religious sites, (which meet the needs of the community in question in a better way). Examination of material artefacts through the linguistic landscape lens, together with a careful analysis of participants’ narratives during a common walking tour, helps to understand how the locals use their multilingual resources and contingent materialities to create ‘spaces of otherwise’, i.e. differential cultural, religious, and political spaces, in the context of Crimean Tatar layered history of displacement. 

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• Constructing Russian Nationalism in the Cityscape of Sevastopol

  2019. Natalia Volvach.

  Conference

  The annexed city of Sevastopol as a part of a 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 pilot study conducted in November 2017 demonstrates that in spite of its contested status, the semiotic landscape of Sevastopol signals a true and undoubtful alliance with the Russian state. Its public space is instrumentalized as a medium to exercise power, to set the agenda, and to influence the opinions and values of the locals in socio-political issues. Nation-building discourses “top-down” as well as expressions of loyalty to a new regime “bottom-up” co-create a new Russian reality in the region. A number of nationalist discourses realized in various semiotic modes such as language, writing, colour, layout and material have been found since the Crimean annexation in March 2014. The presentation is a part of a larger doctoral research project entitled “Ideologization of Space: Crimean Conflict in the Language and Symbols of the Urban Landscape”. In this project, the ethnographic and discursive approaches are applied to explain the relationship of language, ideology, and power in the post-socialist urban landscape.  By adopting a multimodal approach to the analysis of semiotic landscape, this project goes beyond the solely descriptive quantitative study, what enables an in-depth analysis of different linguistic and visual resources used in the public space. The semiotic resources (Halliday 1978; van Leeuwen 2005) under investigation are advertisement signs, posters, billboards, graffiti, monuments and street names.Following the lead of scholars like Jaworski and Thurlow (2010), Pavlenko (2009) and Sloboda (2009), the dissertation project contributes to the issue of discursive construction of Russianness in the public space in the contested territories. Understanding of how the public space is instrumentalised by specific decision makers or co-shaped by individual actors, sheds light on the established power relations, dominating discourses and imposed ideologies in the affected region. 

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• Erasing the Past, Constructing the Present: Linguistic Landscape of the Russian hero-city

  2019. Natalia Volvach.

  Conference

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• Still Ukrainian or already Russian? The linguistic landscape of Sevastopol in the aftermath of Crimean annexation

  2019. Natalia Volvach. Euxeinos - Culture and Governance in the Black Sea Region 9 (28), 93-111

  Article

  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 be- yond. 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 con- tested status, the linguistic landscape of Sevastopol indexes the Russian pow- er. 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.

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Show all publications by Natalia Volvach at Stockholm University