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.
