In this paper, following the Russian occupation of Crimea in March 2014, I present an analysis of the peninsulaʼs wounded semiotic landscapes and develop an approach of ghost ethnography. Building on my ethnographic fieldwork in the region back in 2017 and 2019—after Qırım-Crimeaʼs annexation but before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine—I trace the signs of massive ideological transformation but also instances of erasure that followed as Russia deprived its public spaces of the Ukrainian present.

By introducing an ethnographic vignette from the field and discussing previous research on absence, place, and affect, I develop an approach to study vibrant voids, affectively charged and haunting traces of violence. Combined with photographs of the semiotic landscapes, residentsʼ insights, and the researcherʼs fieldnote observations, an ethnography of ghosts centres the researcherʼs body that not only records and notices, but also senses the ghosts that outlive vehement acts. In this way, approaching the researcherʼs body as a sensing agent that facilitates ways of knowing in settings where violence enacts absences, a ghost ethnography grasps the phenomena that seem missing, thus shedding light on knowledges that otherwise remain in the shadows.

This book offers a profound interdisciplinary exploration of haunting, absencing, and the violent transformation of words into voids. It argues that the erasure of language is never simple: when words are replaced by silence, not only messages but also entire worlds and histories disappear. Focusing on the Russian occupation of Qırım-Crimea and the ongoing war against Ukraine, the book reveals how linguistic, epistemic, and physical violence intertwine, urging scholars to look beyond words when studying violence in its many guises.

Central to this inquiry is ghost ethnography, a qualitative methodological intervention that foregrounds the researcher’s embodied responses to the haunting effects of violence. By attending to sensations, memories, and affects that exceed language, ghost ethnography recognises the body as a site of knowing and care. It makes visible how absenced semiotic landscapes persist through traces, echoes, and absent presences.

Conceptualising semiotic landscapes as temporally dynamic, Volvach shows that absencing and haunting not only transform meanings, memories, and worlds but also reveal the operations of violence, making clear who inflicts harm and who bears its weight. The book invites readers to listen to ghosts that inhabit wounded places and to sense what lies beyond words. It will be of interest to students and scholars in multilingualism, sociolinguistics, social semiotics, anthropology, and memory studies.

In this paper, I revisit interview materials with four young multilingual adults living in Qırım-Crimea, the Russian-occupied Ukrainian peninsula. Rather than presenting my ‘data’ that ‘describes’ or ‘explains’ participants’ language ideologies, I unpack the very ‘cuts’ that become enacted through interviewing as a method, or, here, seen as a measuring apparatus. In this manner, and inspired by Karen Barad’s agential realism, this paper diffracts language ideological research beyond representationalism and practice-based understandings of language, suggesting instead an assemblage perspective towards language ideologies. Studying language ideologies as participants’ wor(l)ds that become in intra-action, this paper offers a posthumanist approach that captures how language ideologies can re-matter human bodies. In this way, this study, situated within sociolinguistics of potentiality and posthumanist developments in the field, engages with onto-epistemological concerns surrounding the creation and curation of ‘data’. It suggests a critical interrogation of the role of the researcher as an epistemic agent who not simply conveys or presents ‘data’ but who produces the cuts, enabling certain wor(l)ds to appear and affect the reader. 

This Special Issue seeks to expand understandings of space, society, and emotion by studying spectral landscapes as those inhabited by spatiotemporally evasive social figures (ghosts), with meanings emerging and disappearing as they are assigned by and shift together with the viewer (or a senser). Specifically, the studies of spectral landscapes across geographical, geopolitical, and linguistic contexts conducted in Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Zanzibar, Southern Saepmie in Sweden, and Oman and Saudi Arabia contribute to critical sociolinguistics, human geography, as well as other fields that understand place, memory, and people as relationally and affectively entangled. They do this by problematizing the metaphysics of presence in qualitative research, questioning what counts as ‘data’, interrogating the role of the researcher's body in knowledge production, testing out established and new methodologies, and finally, discussing the political and ethical endeavors with which ghosts confront us. While this Special Issue offers sociolinguistic ethnographies of absence in semiotic landscapes, it also joins a productive dialogue in qualitative methodologies that foreground the multisensory and multimodal means of meaning-making through the body, further developing affective, material, and sensorial directions in humanities.

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 the results of an ethnographic research project with ten Ukrainian women residing in Stockholm, conducted over the six months from September 2024 to February 2025 after the participants’ relocation to Sweden.

An analysis of audio-recorded interviews and walking tours, language portrait and figure crafting workshops, as well as participants’ documentation of their linguistic practices over the course of the project reveals how war and war-induced displacement are experienced and navigated in everyday spaces.

While building on traditional and creative research methodologies (Elliott & Culhane, 2016) and foregrounding the participants’ lived experiences of language (Busch, 2017, 2020), this talk adds to the discussion on multilingualism, forced migration, and trauma by centering the voices of those rarely heard in dominant discourses of the Russian war against Ukraine. At the same time, the collected materials offer insights into fleeting moments where new relations of care, solidarity, and resistance emerge due to and despite the violence of the war.

Grounded in ethnographic practice where the production of knowledge is problematized as such that unfolds in embodied encounters of the project participants and the researcher (Volvach & Kerfoot, 2025), this paper seeks to join the conversation on methodological, ethical and political implications of conducting research in conditions of unfolding war (Sereda & Mikheieva, 2025) and more-than-human vulnerability (Volvach, 2025).

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.