Natalia Kudriavtseva
Fellow 2023/2024
Anthropology, Sociolinguistics
Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University
Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia
natkudriavtseva@kdpu.edu.ua
Bio
Natalia Kudriavtseva received her MA in Second Language Pedagogy from Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University, Ukraine (2003), and her PhD in Social Theory from Hryhorii Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy, National Academy of Sciences, in Kyiv (2008). She completed her habilitation thesis in Linguistics and Translation Studies, and was awarded the Doctor of Science degree by Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University (2018).
Natalia has recently been a fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (2023-2024), the School for Advanced Study in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris (2023), Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst (2022-2023) and Alfried Krupp Institute for Advanced Study Greifswald (2022). In 2022, she also received Teodota and Ivan Klym Research Grant in Ukrainian Studies from Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (Edmonton, Canada) for her project on language choice and identities in wartime Ukraine. Previously, she has held research fellowships at the University of Cambridge, UK (2013), and the Kennan Institute of Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, USA (2009).
Natalia is currently Professor of Translation and Slavic Studies at Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. Her research focuses on language policies, identities and grassroots language activism. Her recent work explores language practices in wartime Ukraine as well as the transition to Ukrainian among Ukraine’s speakers of Russian. Natalia has published internationally and written for the US Kennan Institute’s Focus Ukraine blog, Canadian Forum for Ukrainian Studies and Germany-based Ukraine-Analysen and Ukrainian Analytical Digest.
Language Shift in Wartime Ukraine: Factors, Ideologies and Prospects
The protection of Ukraine’s Russian speakers was among the pretexts for the 2014 Russian invasion as well as the full-scale war unleashed by Russia in 2022. Russia’s claims of authority over the speakers of Russian have been based on simplistic equations of language and national identification. To show that these speculations bear little resemblance to how the things stand on the ground, Ukrainians have started the process of linguistic conversion. The years following the 2014 Russian invasion have seen a growing shift to Ukrainian from Russian whereby language choice is perceived as a social action with an existential effect. My project is an ethnographic study of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine who are involved in linguistic conversion. I concentrate primarily on those individuals who are switching to Ukrainian from Russian within grassroots Ukrainian language initiatives. Besides the motivations behind their language choice, I explore the reasons prompting them to invest in the language learning, as well as the process of education. I aim to establish the role of the war in the mass transition to Ukrainian from Russian, define its impact on Ukrainian language pedagogy, and also cast light upon the transformation of identities in eastern Ukraine.