I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas

• Unsettling vulnerability in the wake of violence

  2024. Natalia Volvach. Linguistic Landscape

  Artikel

  In this essay, I write about the multifaceted dimensions and reverberations of violence (Navaro et al., 2021b) of Russia’s war against Ukraine, spanning from 2014 to the present day. Drawing on previous studies of semiotic landscapes, which emphasize a relational approach to people and places (Peck et al., 2019), I analyze ethnographic materials in the form of field notes collected during research in Crimea in 2019. This is done to reflect on the character of the violence to which people and landscapes become exposed. Three analytical vignettes describe the remnants of violence, which take on various guises of Russia’s war and highlight the vulnerability of both people and landscapes. At the end of the essay, I propose approaching these processes poetically, and viewing them through the lens of mutual vulnerability — a concept that considers the relationality of vulnerability as a phenomenon, encompassing the vulnerability of both people and landscapes.

  Läs mer om Unsettling vulnerability in the wake of violence

• Beyond Words: From Visible Representations to Performativity of Absence in Semiotic Landscapes

  2024. Natalia Volvach. Dynamics of Multilingualism, 19-43

  Kapitel

  This chapter highlights the importance of performativity in and of semiotic landscapes and addresses the role of words and voids in relation to language and state ideologies that shape social realities. After discussing linguistic inscriptions (representations) as the “data” in semiotic landscapes studies, this conceptual chapter exemplifies how absences may be treated as agentive matter or as posthuman(ly) performative. I argue that performative language extends beyond words and encompasses absence, thus also contributing to an assemblage of “language, bodies, objects and the environment” (Frimberger, 2018, p. 13). The chapter concludes by asserting that the performativity of language in its visible and invisibilized forms is fundamental for comprehending social actions as they unfold, are shaped by, and occur in relation to (im)material environments and people. Altogether, it demonstrates that from concerns with representation to the agential realist theory deploying post-human performativity, absences matter. Absences manifest when treated within a relational ontology of semiotic landscapes, emphasizing that they should be approached not in isolation but in conjunction with people, including the researcher.

  Läs mer om Beyond Words

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

  2022. Natalia Volvach.

  Artikel

  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.

  Läs mer om ‘Our nation is just trying to rebirth right now’

• Review of Kosatica (2022): The Burden of Traumascapes

  2023. Natalia Volvach. Linguistic Landscape

  Artikel

  Läs mer om Review of Kosatica (2022)

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

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

  Artikel

  Läs mer om Shouting absences

• Manoeuvres of dissent in landscapes of annexation

  2022. Natalia Volvach. Linguistic Landscape

  Artikel

  Läs mer om Manoeuvres of dissent in landscapes of annexation

Visa alla publikationer av Natalia Volvach vid Stockholms universitet