Giving a Voice to People under Occupation: Media Representations of War in Ukraine
Yuliia Soroka is a sociologist of culture. She holds a PhD in Sociology, and is Professor of Sociology at the N.V. Karazin Kharkiv National University (Ukraine) and a senior researcher in the Human Geography Unit of the Department of Geosciences at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). Her research considers symbolic spaces of Ukrainian society in different empirical fields. Previously, she looked at new independent media from the middle of 1990s, post-Soviet sociocultural transformations, social attitudes toward material wealth, the past, and the recognition of heroes, popular culture and films, and changes in urban symbolic space (i.e., toponyms), among other things. Currently, she focuses on culture and power relations. She asks, how does culture ‘work’ in the reproduction of power relationships in society? She has already empirically applied and justified the concept of ‘cultural mechanisms of power’ in prior research, including that on discourses on Muslims in Ukrainian media, social theater, hate speech, dialog, collective identities in pro-Euromaidan discourses, hostility towards internally displaced persons (IDPs), and standing greeting rituals. Located in Fribourg, Switzerland, Yuliia Soroka is a 2022/2023 non-resident Prisma Ukraïna Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
Giving a Voice to People under Occupation: Media Representations of War in Ukraine
The project analyzes Ukrainian media discourses about occupied Ukrainian territory and people under occupation during the full-scale Russian aggression, which began on 24 February 2022. Specifically, it looks at residents of the occupied territories – Ukrainian citizens and those part of Ukrainian society – who survived the capture of their regions by enemy forces, yet lost (entirely or partially) access to life support resources and information, as well as jobs, property, and a safe space for existence. Although they are technically under the protection of international law, these people are now threatened with various forms of oppression and violence from the occupying authorities. This research asks: How does the media represent people under occupation? Do such representations correspond to the interests and experiences of this group? Which aspects of their social position does the media discourse hide, and which does it construct? And what kind of perception of the rest of society does this discourse cause? The project will collect data from open media resources. Methodologically, it combines Donileen Loseke’s idea of the ‘formula story’ and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s ‘discourse analysis’.
