Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society : Symbols and Narratives of Ukrainian Resistance. Part II. 2025/1 (Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society) (PBO)

This special issue proposes to approach Ukrainian resistance from the cultural studies perspective. It brings together scholars from different disciplines who address different aspects of resilience and resistance focusing on gender, humor, literature, visual representations, and memes.

Contents

Yuliya Yurchuk: Introduction. Understanding the Ukrainian Spirit: Symbols and Narratives of Ukrainian Resistance and Resilience II

Olha Voznyuk: Symbols of Resistance and Resilience through the Prism of Contemporary Ukrainian Anthologies of War Writing.

Svitlana Kot, Alina Mozolevska, Olha Polishchuk and Yuliya Stodolinska: United for Ukraine: Representations of Civilian Resistance in Ukrainian Digital Popular Culture

Ada Krasenko, Tamara Martsenyuk, and Kateryna Dysa: "Girls, Let's Close the Sky*: Gendered Images of Witches in Ukrainian Media and Culture during the Russo-Ukrainian War This special issue searches for the deeper roots of Ukrainian resistance as they are expressed in culture and folklore. During the first days of the invasion, one could witness the proliferation of both visual and narrative expressions of people's emotions and feelings. Images, memes, poetry, songs portraying Ukrainians at war came in their hundreds in the very first days of the invasion. The scale of creativity seemed proportional to the scale of the shock and the horror that the war brought. With three years of atrocities, visuality became more focused on the documentary genre. The articles in this special issue both document and analyze the meanings that stand behind the symbols and narratives of Ukrainian resistance. As products of culture, these symbols and narratives reveal the key traits of the renegotiated identities of the Ukrainian society in the ongoing war.

Julie Fedor is Associate Professor in Modern European History at the University of Melbourne.

Andreas Umland, M.Phil. (Oxford), Dr.Phil. (FU Berlin), Ph.D. (Cambridge), Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs in Stockholm, Senior Expert at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future in Kyiv, and Associate Professor at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.

Yuliya Yurchuk is Associate Professor of History of Ideas at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. She specializes in memory studies, history of religion, and the study of nationalism in East European countries. She is the author of the book Reordering of Meaningful Worlds: Memory of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Acta 2014) and one of the editors of Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective (Routledge, 2022, co-edited with Zuzanna Bogumil). Together with Julie Fedor and Andreas Umland she was a co-editor of the series of special issues of Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society dedicated to the memory and history of the OUN and UPA. Currently she is working on two research projects: one in the field of the transnational intellectual women's history (funded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies) and another in the field of cultural heritage in the context of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war (funded by the Jean Monnet EU Program). Her interests continue to be memory, knowledge production, imperialism, decolonization, and securitization of the past.

Olha Voznyuk is a literary and cultural scholar, lecturer, and translator, specializing in Slavic and Comparative literature studies. Her research focuses on imagology, trauma and memory studies, identity, cinema, and women's studies. She earned her first PhD in Comparative Literature from the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, with a dissertation devoted to the Polish-Ukrainian cooperation in exile after the WWII. Her second PhD in Slavic Studies from the University of Vienna investigated Habsburg Galician literature in Ukrainian, Polish, and German anthologies During her academic career she has been the recipient of numerous prestigious fellowships, including among them UNESCO and the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University. Currently she is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Slavonic Studies at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, where her ongoing research focuses on the transition of Ukrainian identity in the post-Maidan period.

Svitlana Kot is a visiting postdoctoral scholar at Saarland University and a member of the UniGR Center for Border Studies. She is also a senior lecturer at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University (Ukraine). Her research focuses on Border Studies, (Native) American Literature, and Digital Cultural Studies. She holds a PhD in Philology (American Literature) and has been the recipient of several international fellowships, including the Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2022-2023) and the Philipp Schwartz Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2024-2026). Her current projects explore border reconfigurations, refugee writing and child migrant representations in graphic novels, and digital war documentation in Ukraine.

Alina Mozolevska is an associate professor in the Faculty of Philology at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University (Ukraine). She has held research fellowships at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France, 2017) and the UniGR-Center for Border Studies at Saarland University (Germany, 2022). Mozolevska was also a visiting fellow of the VolkswagenStiftung at Saarland University (Germany, 2022-2023). She is a member of the Prisma Ukraïna research group "War, Migration, and Memory" (Forum Transregionale Studien, Germany, since 2022) and the HEPP Research Group (University of Helsinki, Finland, since 2022). Currently, she is an academic guest fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Germany, 2024-2025). Her research interests include media studies, discourse analysis, and border studies, and she has published extensively on topics related to borders and identity in both literary and political discourse.

Olha Polishchuk has a Ph.D. in Literary Theory (Ukraine, 2016). 2017 - 2019 she participated in the research "Writer-Intellectual in the Migration Processes: Challenges for Memory and Identity" (Ukraine). In 2019 she was the head of the scientific project "Memory Model in the Ukrainian Modern and Postmodern Literature" (A grant from the President of Ukraine). In 2022 - 2023 she researched the conceptualization of borders in literary discourses within the project "Borders in Crisis: Discursive, Narrative, and Mediatic Border Struggles in Ukraine, Europe, and North America" (Volkswagen Fond, Germany). Currently, she is a visiting researcher at Saarland University and is involved in the projects "Documenting Ukraine: Digital War Diaries", "Border Chronotopes", and others.

Yuliya Stodolinska is a postdoctoral research associate at the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University, member of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies, and an associate professor of the English Philology and Translation Department at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University in Ukraine. She holds a PhD in Philology. Her research focuses on the multimodal representations of borders and border crossings in American and European digital media, literary, and marketing discourses. Her scientific interests include Border Studies, Discourse Studies, Intercultural Business Communication, Cultural Studies. She is an active participant of the projects "Border Chronotopes in the Digital Age: Memories in Times of Wars" (DAAD Eastern Partnership Program), "Studybridge Ukraine-Saar" (DAAD Ukraine Digital: Ensuring Academic Success in Times of Crisis), and other international projects.

Ada Krasenko holds a B.A. in Sociology; she is Dean of Student Affairs at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Ukraine). Her research interests include gender and military sociology. Since 2022, she has been researching the gendered image of witchcraft, particularly during the Russo-Ukrainian war, and defended a Bachelor's thesis on this topic.

Tamara Martsenyuk holds a Ph.D. in Sociology; she is an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Ukraine). Her research interest relates to gender and social structure, including women's participation in the protests and women's access to the military. Martsenyuk is a member of the International Sociological Association (ISA), the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), and other professional bodies. She authored chapters in Feminist Perspective on Russia's War in Ukraine (2024), Dispossession: Anthropological Perspectives on Russia's War Against Ukraine (2023), Ukraine's Many Faces. Land, People, and Culture Revisited (2023), and other books. Her papers have been published in Women's Studies International Forum, Sexuality & Culture, Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, Problems of Post-Communism, Ukrainian Analytical Digest, and others. In 2023, she received the Emma Goldman Award for outstanding research on feminist and inequality issues.