Prisma Ukraïna
2022/ 2023

Alina Mozolevska

Borders, Maps and Identities: Narrating and Living in the Russo-Ukraine War

Alina Mozolevska is a professor in the Faculty of Philology at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University (Mykolaiv, Ukraine). In 2015, she received a PhD in Linguistics with a major in romance languages from Taras Shevchenko National University (Kyiv, Ukraine). Her research interests include media studies, discourse analysis, and border studies, and she has published on borders and identity in literary and political discourses. Her most recent article, “Construction of Borders and Walls in Contemporary Ukrainian Literature (Analysis of Oleksandr Irvanets’ and Taras Antypovych Novels)”, was published in 2021 in Altre Modernita. Alina Mozolevska was a visiting professor at the UniGR-Center for Border Studies at Saarland University (Germany). Located in Saarbrucken, Germany, she is a 2022/2023 non-resident Prisma Ukraïna Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.

Borders, Maps and Identities: Narrating and Living in the Russo-Ukraine War

Needless to say, the current Russo-Ukraine War is not only an act of physical aggression against a sovereign state; it is also an information war that goes beyond the battlefield and individual experiences and is broadcasted and processed live by millions on social media. As a Prisma Ukraïna Fellow, Alina Mozolevska will focus on multimodal media discourses to define the main narratives that mobilize people in Ukraine and change the way that the Ukrainian nation and Ukrainian identity are thought of and perceived. She will study the mechanism of the medialization of key events of Russia’s war in Ukraine in hybrid media spaces and the ways they are mythologized in Ukrainian society. The project seeks to understand how new war narratives are created, told, and consumed in old and new media, and how stories of displacement, violence, loss, and resistance are transformed into wartime folklore, become a part of national self-identification, and are integrated into the process of coping with the new reality and the recognition of collective trauma. Using methods from literary studies, discourse analysis, and border studies, the project will analyze the relationship between facts and collective imagination in the construction of new myths and their mobilization potential, as well as define the role of these new war narratives in sharing the experience of living through the war.