Absencing and Haunting in Semiotic Landscapes

Natalia Volvach is a Ukrainian scholar and writer based in Sweden. She earned her Ph.D. at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University.

• Foreword by Maria Tumarkin, Pre/facing the violence of war 1. Absences and presences in occupation 2. Turbulent pasts of Qırım-Crimea 3. Occupation: Linguistic landscapes of Aqyar-Sevastopol 4. Resistance: Unpacking protests as manoeuvres in the face of power 5. National rebirth: Aqmeçıt-Simferopol and the Crimean Tatar space of otherwise 6. Vibrant voids: Ghosts of Ukraine in Qırım-Crimea 7. Reverberations of violence and an ethnography of ghosts 8. Capturing what seems missing

"Natalia Volvach’s hauntingly powerful book exposes the semiotics of erasure in spaces of conflict and war. Approaching the landscape with decolonial sensitivity and lyrical ethnography, it challenges us to rethink the practices, politics and lived experiences of (in)visibility. This is a moving, transformative intervention in critical sociolinguistics and semiotic landscape research."- Crispin Thurlow, University of Bern“In this highly engaging yet unsettling book Natalia Volvach takes us to the difficult terrain of Qırım-Crimea under occupation, tracing, in this wounded semiotic landscape, haunting absences produced by processes of silencing and invisibilizing. This remarkable ethnography is a must-read for anyone interested in self-reflexive accounts that are attentive to the suppressed testimonies of witnesses and to the resonances of their own body.”- Brigitta Busch, University of Vienna