Operationalizing Cultural Resistance in Ukrainian Scholarly Discourse: Methodological Challenges and Interpretative Opportunities
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17721/2306-3971-2026-01-32-32Keywords:
cultural resistance, postcolonialism, resilience, language practices, symbolic space, identityAbstract
This article examines how cultural resistance is conceptualized, theoretically interpreted, and operationalized within Ukrainian scholarly discourse. Cultural resistance is approached as an analytical category employed to describe processes of transformation in established cultural hierarchies, symbolic orders, and criteria of legitimacy across specific socio-cultural contexts. The study systematizes approaches to cultural resistance found in international sociological and interdisciplinary literature and relates them to selected Ukrainian empirical research. On this basis, it reconstructs: (1) the principal modes of defining cultural resistance in academic publications, (2) the theoretical pluralism shaping its interpretation, and (3) the models of resistance studies applied in the Ukrainian research field. The analysis demonstrates that cultural resistance rarely appears in Ukrainian scholarship as an explicitly named object of inquiry. Instead, it emerges through the study of adjacent empirical phenomena, including language practices, transformations of symbolic space and toponymy, memory politics, and forms of cultural production in digital environments. Within these approaches, cultural resistance is interpreted not as a declared position or form of self-identification, but as a shift in perceptions of cultural acceptability, normativity, and legitimacy. The article concludes by proposing an interpretative framework that enables the analytical identification of cultural resistance across diverse cultural processes. It also outlines the conditions under which empirically observed practices may be convincingly interpreted as manifestations of cultural resistance in the postcolonial context of Ukraine.
References
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (J. B. Thompson, Ed.; G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/2579985
Bourdieu, P. (1998). Acts of resistance: Against the new myths of our time (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Burdin, Y. (2023). Ukrainization of YouTube Content as a Manifestation of Cultural Resistance of Ukrainians in a Course of the Russо-Ukrainian War. Sociological Studios, 2(23), 62-72. https://doi.org/10.29038/2306-3971-2023-02-31-31
Burdin, Y., Salnikova, S., & Sydorov, M. (2025). Street Renaming as Cultural Resistance: Decommunization and Identity in Rural Ukrainian Settlements. Research for Rural Development, 40, 709-716. https://doi.org/10.22616/RRD.31.2025.096
Demchuk, S., & Levchenko, I. (2024). Decolonizing Ukrainian art history. Nationalities Papers, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2024.58
Duncombe, S. (2007). Cultural resistance. In G. Ritzer (Ed.), The Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (pp. 911–913). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosc178
Fanon, F. (2004). The wretched of the earth (R. Philcox, Trans.; J.-P. Sartre & H. K. Bhabha, Introduction). New York: Grove Press.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: Volume 1, an introduction. New York: Pantheon Books.
Gnatiuk, O., & Homanyuk, M. (2023). From geopolitical fault-line to frontline city: Changing attitudes to memory politics in Kharkiv under the Russo-Ukrainian war. Hungarian Geographical Bulletin, 72(3), 239–256. https://doi.org/10.15201/hungeobull.72.3.3
Gnatiuk, O., & Melnychuk, A. (2023). A case study of de-russification of Ukrainian hodonyms: Rigged trial or justice restored? Names: A Journal of Onomastics, 71(4), 41–55. https://doi.org/10.5195/names.2023.2599
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell Smith, Eds. & Trans.). New York: International Publishers.
Grytsenko, O. (2019). Decommunization in Ukraine as a public policy and as a cultural phenomenon. Kyiv: Ivan Kuras Institute of Political and Ethnonational Studies of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Hall, S. (1996). Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies. In D. Morley & K.-H. Chen (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies (pp. 262–275). London, New York: Routledge.
Hall, S., & Jefferson, T. (Eds.). (1976). Resistance through rituals: Youth subcultures in post-war Britain. London: Hutchinson.
Halbwachs, M. (1992a). The legendary topography of the Gospels in the Holy Land. In L. A. Coser (Ed. & Trans.), On collective memory (pp. 193–235). Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1941).
Halbwachs, M. (1992b). On collective memory (L. A. Coser, Ed. & Trans.). Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1925).
Kosmeda, T., & Kovtun, O. (2024). Modeling of axiologically marked meanings of toponyms and their derivatives in Ukrainian linguistic culture: Manifestation of the macroextralingual factor 'war'. Onomastica, 68, 165–183. https://doi.org/10.17651/ONOMAST.68.11
Korablyova, V. (2023). The decolonization of education and research in Belarus and Ukraine: theoretical challenges and practical tasks. Canadian Slavonic Papers, 65(3–4), 478–484. https://doi.org/10.1080/00085006.2023.2274194
Kovalov, M. (2022). When Lenin becomes Lennon: Decommunisation and the politics of memory in Ukraine. Europe-Asia Studies, 74(5), 709–733. https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2022.2078478
Kudriavtseva, N. (2025). New speakers of Ukrainian: Ideologies of linguistic conversion. Language in Society, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404525101711
Kulyk, V. (2024). Language shift in time of war: The abandonment of Russian in Ukraine. Post-Soviet Affairs, 40(3), 159–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2024.2318141
Nahornyi, T. (2023). Toponymic decolonizing in city of Kyiv: a spatial wayfinding approach. Bulletin of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Geography, 1, 65-72. https://doi.org/10.17721/1728-2721.2023.87.4
Nora, P. (1989). Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire. Representations, 26, 7–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928520
Ostash, L. (2024). Echoes of war in the onym space of Ukraine. Scientific Bulletin of Uzhhorod University. Series: Philology, 2(52), 127–139. https://doi.org/10.24144/2663-6840.2024.2.(52).127-139
Parfeniuk, I. (2025). TikTok Activism in Ukraine as a Form of Civic Support and Resistance During the Full-Scale War. Ukrainian Information Space, 1(15), 154–173. https://doi.org/10.31866/2616-7948.1(15).2025.335354
Rabus, A. (2025). Ukrainian linguistic creativity and decolonial resistance: A Twitter analysis. Digital War, 6, Article 7. https://doi.org/10.1057/s42984-025-00103-9
Racek, D., Davidson, B. I., Thurner, P. W., Zhu, X. X., & Kauermann, G. (2024). The Russian war in Ukraine increased Ukrainian language use on social media. Communications Psychology, 2, Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-023-00045-6
Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Salnikova, S., & Savelyev, Y. (2025). The role of political institutions in the religious sphere before and during the Russo-Ukrainian war: national security vs. freedom of religion. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 38(1), 11–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/13511610.2024.2395265
Schenk, G. (2023). Renaming Kyiv’s streets amid the Russian war of invasion: The politics of history between "decommunization" and "derussification". The Journal of V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. Series: History, 64, 140–169. https://doi.org/10.26565/2220-7929-2023-64-07
Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven, London: Yale University Press.
Sokolova, S. (2023). Changes in the attitude of ukrainians to languages against the background of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian language, 1(85), 3–19. https://doi.org/10.15407/ukrmova2023.01.003
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Terentyeva, O. (2025). The right to freedom: State-driven institutionalization of decolonization through memory politics in Ukraine (2022–2024). Global Studies Quarterly, 5(4), ksaf107. https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksaf107
Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Ярослав Бурдін, Світлана Сальнікова
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
