Is Ukraine a Multiethnic Country?

Date: 

Wednesday, February 23, 2022, 12:00pm

Location: 

Zoom (registration required) | YouTube

Volodymyr Kulyk, Head Research Fellow, Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Moderated by Emily Channell-Justice, Director, Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program, HURI

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Volodymyr Kulyk Is Ukraine a Multiethnic Country February 23 2022 12pm est

Abstract

The lecture will critically examine the widespread perception of Ukraine as a multiethnic country with clear boundaries between ethnic groups. It will demonstrate that the post-Soviet state discontinued or downplayed most of the institutional mechanisms of the reproduction of ethnic distinctiveness and virtually abandoned the use of ethnic categories in official discourse. While several smaller minorities retained some institutional backing and discursive presence, the once very large group of ethnic Russians ceased to be publicly presented and popularly perceived as clearly distinct from the bulk of Ukrainians.

About the Speaker

Volodymyr Kulyk is a Head Research Fellow 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, University College London, University of Alberta, Woodrow Wilson Center, 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 as well as language policies in multilingual countries across the world. He is the author of four books and more than seventy articles and chapters published in Ukrainian and Western journals and collected volumes. His latest book is Movna polityka v bahatomovnykh kraïnakh: Zakordonnyi dosvid ta ioho prydatnist’ dlia Ukraïny (Language Policies in Multilingual Countries: Foreign Experience and Its Applicability to Ukraine; Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2021).

Moderator: Emily Channell-Justice, Director, Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

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