Ewa Wróblewska-Trochimiuk, Ph.D., from the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, and Yana Hladyr, Ph.D., from the Kryvyi Rih National University in Ukraine, are investigating how the Ukrainian society presents itself in social media, which provide the opportunity to communicate through images. This primarily involves Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Telegram. The researchers closely follow the accounts of four Ukrainian public institutions to develop a catalog of values of the projected image of Ukrainian society and to assess its convergence with the values and culture of Western European societies. The researchers conduct the project with the financial support of the Foundation for Polish Science, within the framework of the FOR UKRAINE programme.
“We hypothesize that Ukrainian society presents itself as a democratic, civil society, different from Russian society. It wants to show itself to the international community as close to the values and culture of Western societies. In the online presence, Ukrainian society affirms values such as respect for the elderly, respect for animals, care for the weak, a culture of leisure and spending time with loved ones, a sense of individual agency within the community, and care for the heritage and the common. This modern image is in stark opposition to the set of characteristics attributed to the mentality of the so-called Homo Sovieticus. In Soviet and post-Soviet way of thinking, the individual has no influence over anything, the party apparatus or the impersonal system decide about everything and the common is nobody’s and does not need care,” states Ewa Wróblewska-Trochimiuk.
“The content published by the observed accounts shows Russia’s deliberate, intentional destruction of various civilian facilities in Ukraine, namely residential homes, hospitals, schools, zoos, and cultural monuments, theatres, churches or orthodox churches, including those of the Moscow Patriarchate. In contrast to the destructive Russia, the content shows the people of Ukraine as a creative subject who tries to rebuild destroyed objects wherever possible,” adds Yana Hladyr.
Communication Outside and Inside Ukraine
The researchers follow the social media accounts of four Ukrainian institutions. They are all closely linked to the political environment of President Volodymyr Zelensky. The researchers focus on the published visual content, namely short films, photos, and sometimes drawings. Three of the four observed institutions run their accounts in English, which means that they target an international audience. These institutions are the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, United24 which is an official fundraising platform for Ukraine, and the brave.ua campaign branding Ukraine and explaining very precisely what Ukrainian audacity and courage are.
“The fourth institution is the Centre for Countering Disinformation. This is the only studied agency that communicates with Ukraine’s interior. The content published on the accounts of this institution is stronger, and the language is more brutal and devoid of the euphemisms that appear in communications conducted outside Ukraine,” remarks Wróblewska-Trochimiuk.
Internet Communications Archive
Wróblewska-Trochimiuk and Hladyr seek to create an online archive of visual communication from selected reports published by Ukrainian public institutions. The images that will be included in the archive will be accompanied by a scholarly commentary on the catalog of values associated with the collected materials. “The archive will be expandable and, in this way, one could observe the changes occurring in the created image of Ukrainian society. We plan to present it at a scientific seminar that we will organize and thus initiate a scientific discussion on the topic,” states Wróblewska-Trochimiuk.
Both researchers emphasize that – besides the study itself – they find the new experience of co-directing a project in partnership very interesting. “Yana has previously been involved in the study of literature, particularly the issue of conflict in early twentieth-century Ukrainian literature. Because she socialized in Ukrainian culture, she reads it automatically and sees things that I am not able to see. On the other hand, I have the tools to research social media. Thanks to a grant from the Foundation for Polish Science, we could create a two-person, interdisciplinary team in which our competencies are complementary,” says Wróblewska-Trochimiuk. Both researchers emphasize that their research would not have been possible if it had not been for the funding received from the Foundation for Polish Science and the support of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Ewa Wróblewska-Trochimiuk, is a doctor of cultural studies, a Slavist, a Croatist, and a researcher of images. She works at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She researches the interface between visual culture and politics. She is interested in images of civil society, but also in images of resistance and disobedience. She is the author of Sztuka marginesów (The Art of Margins), a book on political posters in Croatia, as well as numerous academic articles and translations from Croatian. She is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Sprawy Narodowościowe: Seria Nowa.
Dr. Yana Hladyr is a philologist and literary scholar, a graduate of the Kryvyi Rih National University in Ukraine, and its long-time lecturer. She was awarded the title of associate professor in 2022. She specializes in literary theory, literature, and the Ukrainian language. Her second research specialization is glottodidactics. Since 2006, she has been teaching Ukrainian and Russian to foreigners. In 2021, she published (co-authored) a handbook for teaching Ukrainian as a foreign language Pозмовляємо українською, which was approved in Ukraine as an original study material.
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