In this talk, I explore reverberations (Navaro et al., 2021b) of the Russian state violence against Ukraine from the beginning of 2014 until the present day. Following on previous work that advocates relational approaches to studies of semiotic landscapes (Peck, Stroud, and Williams, 2019), and drawing on collected ethnographic materials during 2019 and 2017, I reflect on the nature of harm to which people and places become exposed. Given the omnipresence of violence in its various guises, I suggest the concept of mutual vulnerability as a heuristic tool to consider vulnerability relationally and as inherently implicating place. In this way, my talk contributes to the theme of the conference on dis-comforting encounters with violence, in an attempt to grasp their multiple meanings and implications for how we do and think about, but also get affected by, the research settings pierced by violence.

In this talk, I present results of an ethnographic research project with Ukrainian women in Stockholm, conducted over the past six months from September 2024 to February 2025. Foregrounding the individual experiences, the project builds on traditional and creative methodologies (Elliot & Culhane, 2016), such as open-ended interviews and walking tours, language portrait and figure crafting workshops, as well as participants’ multimodal documentation of their lived experiences of language (Busch, 2017, 2020) through images and reflections with QualNotes.

The presentation is intended to initiate a discussion on questions of forced migration due to war, trauma, and multilingualism (Busch & McNamara, 2020; Drozdzewski & Dominey-Howes, 2015). Since one of the project outcomes is an intended art exhibition and a creation of an online archive, the talk also seeks to open up a dialogue surrounding politics and practices of communicating research beyond academia while dualizing creative forms of writing, drawing, and crafting.

In this essay, I write about the multifaceted dimensions and reverberations of violence (Navaro et al., 2021b) of Russia’s war against Ukraine, spanning from 2014 to the present day. Drawing on previous studies of semiotic landscapes, which emphasize a relational approach to people and places (Peck et al., 2019), I analyze ethnographic materials in the form of field notes collected during research in Crimea in 2019. This is done to reflect on the character of the violence to which people and landscapes become exposed. Three analytical vignettes describe the remnants of violence, which take on various guises of Russia’s war and highlight the vulnerability of both people and landscapes. At the end of the essay, I propose approaching these processes poetically, and viewing them through the lens of mutual vulnerability — a concept that considers the relationality of vulnerability as a phenomenon, encompassing the vulnerability of both people and landscapes.

This talk explores multiple forms in which violence of the Russian state-sponsored war against Ukraine reverberates (Navaro et al., 2021b) from the beginning of 2014 until the present day. Following on previous work that advocates for a relational approach to studies of semiotic landscapes (Peck et al., 2019), this paper draws on field notes from the material collected in 2019 to reflect on the nature of harm to which people and places become exposed. Attending to remnants of violence omnipresent in its various guises through three analytical vignettes, this talk proposes the concept of mutual vulnerability as a heuristic tool to consider vulnerability relationally and as inherently implicating people and place. I will conclude my intervention by discussing the place of poetic writing in studies of war memories and violence.

This chapter highlights the importance of performativity in and of semiotic landscapes and addresses the role of words and voids in relation to language and state ideologies that shape social realities. After discussing linguistic inscriptions (representations) as the “data” in semiotic landscapes studies, this conceptual chapter exemplifies how absences may be treated as agentive matter or as posthuman(ly) performative. I argue that performative language extends beyond words and encompasses absence, thus also contributing to an assemblage of “language, bodies, objects and the environment” (Frimberger, 2018, p. 13). The chapter concludes by asserting that the performativity of language in its visible and invisibilized forms is fundamental for comprehending social actions as they unfold, are shaped by, and occur in relation to (im)material environments and people. Altogether, it demonstrates that from concerns with representation to the agential realist theory deploying post-human performativity, absences matter. Absences manifest when treated within a relational ontology of semiotic landscapes, emphasizing that they should be approached not in isolation but in conjunction with people, including the researcher.

This paper aims to make visible the alternative social projects hidden beneath everyday Crimean Tatar landscapes. Drawing on audio recordings and field data from interviews and narrated walking tours led by young citizens, it illuminates how these spaces of otherwise emerge and are co-constructed through participants’ re-readings of material artifacts, resemiotisation of place semiotics and resignification of communal spaces. Participants navigate among such spaces, negotiating the legacies of historical acts of material, cultural, and linguistic dispossession and disruption as well as the contemporary forms that such acts take. In narrating semiotic landscapes, participants perform acts of Linguistic Citizenship, a concept that recognizes that speakers express agency, voice, and participation through a variety of semiotic means; they engage or disengage with political institutions of the state and advance claims for alternative forms of belonging. This paper thus expands semiotic landscape research through its design as a linguistic ethnography, using interactional data to account for individuals’ perceptions of place. It also adds to research on Linguistic Citizenship by foregrounding invisibilized linguistic repertoires and performative acts of meaning-making in a charged political context.

This article aims to illuminate absences in the semiotic landscape of Crimea, resulting from the erasure of Ukraine after Russia's occupation of Crimea in 2014. By foregrounding what is not there, the study expands semiotic landscapes studies and critical sociolinguistic research more generally by interrogating absence and its haunting effects. More than 3,500 photographs of semiotic landscapes collected over two months of fieldwork between 2017 and 2019 together with fieldnotes serve as ethnographic data. The production of absence is interrogated through an analysis of its material effects, that is, voids, holes, and blank walls. It concludes that erasure does not simply negate Ukraine. Instead, pasts remain present, visible, and audible in semiotic landscapes. Absences, as part of a relational ontology of materiality, discourse, and affect, shout about complex invisibilized histories of violence. In this way, they suggest the need to probe traditional approaches in semiotic landscape research that rely on an ontology of presence. (Absence, trace, materiality, ghost, spectre, haunting, Crimea, Ukraine, semiotic landscape, linguistic landscape, interdiscursivity).