One War, Two Displacements: Language Practices and Attitudes of Ukrainian IDPs and Refugees
Date and Time
Location
A lecture by Volodymyr Kulyk, Professor of Political Science at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE)
Moderated by Serhii Plokhii, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History, Department of History at Harvard
About the Lecture
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine forced millions of Ukrainian citizens to leave their homes for safer places in Ukraine or abroad, causing the largest displacement in Europe since World War II. At the same time, indignation at the unprovoked aggression led millions of Ukrainians to fully or partially abandon the Russian language, which they had used either exclusively or in combination with Ukrainian. This process involved not only people who stayed in Ukraine but also those displaced to other parts of Ukraine or abroad. However, these two kinds of displacement were characterized by different social contexts in which people underwent different language changes. Based on data from focus group discussions with IDPs and refugees, Volodymyr Kulyk will discuss recent changes in language practices and attitudes of these two categories of Ukrainians.
About the Speaker
Volodymyr Kulyk is a Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics. Until 2024, he worked for many years at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He has also taught at Columbia, Stanford and Yale Universities, Kyiv Mohyla Academy and Ukrainian Catholic University as well as having research fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, Woodrow Wilson Center, University College London, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and other Western scholarly institutions. His research fields include the politics of language, memory and identity as well as political and media discourse in contemporary Ukraine, on which he has widely published in Ukrainian and Western journals and collected volumes. Professor Kulyk is the author of four books, the latest of which is Movna polityka v bahatomovnykh kraïnakh: Zakordonnyi dosvid ta ioho prydatnist’ dlia Ukraïny (Language Policies in Multilingual Countries: Foreign Experience and Its Relevance to Ukraine) that was published in Kyiv in 2021. Currently, he is a Visiting Fellow at the George Washington University.
This event is organized by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute as part of the Seminar in Ukrainian Studies public event series and the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program.
Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access should contact HURI Programs Manager, Megan K. Duncan Smith, at least two weeks in advance of the session.
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