War in Words

Join psycholinguist and journal editor Prof Serhii Zasiekin for a live panel with Guest Editor Dr Joshua Hartshorne and the authors of the special issue “Language and War” of East European Journal of Psycholinguistics (https://eejpl.vnu.edu.ua/index.php/eejpl/issue/view/19).

The event draws attention to the effects of the ongoing war waged by Russia on the language and culture of children and adults in Ukraine and around the world.

The contributors from Ukraine, USA, Canada, Japan, UK and Sweden will share their insights with the audience by:

• examining the Twitter/X discourse of UK and US politicians on the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,

• providing a psycholinguistic analysis of how media shape public perception of aggression in the context of war,

• describing the linguistic strategies used in hate speech and assessing their psychological impact,

• analysing President Zelensky’s cultivation of solidarity and soft power in his address to the Japanese Parliament,

• exploring how exposure to war affects the language development and communication of refugee children,

• deconstructing frames of conflictual identities of Ukrainians and Russians,

• providing an insight into how today’s Ukrainians use digital platforms to narrate their traumatic experiences, offering a unique perspective on the psychological impact of war on civilians.

• promoting the Narratives of War project – a virtual exhibit of written testimonies of the Russia’s war against Ukraine.

This event will take place in person and will also be livestreamed online.

Speakers:

Serhii Zasiekin is a Ukrainian psycholinguist and professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University in Lutsk, Ukraine. He is also Editor-in-Chief of East European Journal of Psycholinguistics. Zasiekin received his PhD in linguistics from Kyiv National Linguistic University and his DSc in translation studies from Vasyl Karazin National University of Kharkiv. From 2002 to 2008, Zasiekin held the positions of Chair and Dean at the Volyn Institute of Economics and Management. His research interests include psycholinguistics, the ethics of translation, translation universals, war narratives, and the literary legacy of Ukrainian writer Bohdan Lepkyi. Currently, he serves as Vice-President of the Ukrainian Association of Psycholinguists (UAP) and is a member of the International Society of Applied Psycholinguistics (ISAPL). Dr Zasiekin holds a British Academy Researcher at Risk Fellowship at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College London.

E-mail: sergiozasyekin@vnu.edu.ua; s.zasiekin@ucl.ac.uk

Joshua Hartshorne is a prominent psycholinguist, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, and Director of the Language Learning Laboratory at Boston College, USA, Guest Editor of the special issue “Language and War”. He received his PhD in psychology from Harvard University and did his postdoctoral research at MIT with Josh Tenenbaum. Prior to graduate school, he worked with psychologists John Monahan, Yuhong Jiang, and Michael Ullman. His research interests include language acquisition, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, critical periods in skill acquisition, the relationship between language and common sense, syntactic and semantic bootstrapping.

E-mail: joshua.hartshorne@bc.edu

Olena Karpina holds the position of Assistant Professor in the Applied Linguistics Department at Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University. She defended her Ph.D. thesis entitled “Communicative Behaviour of a Depressive Personality: A Case Study of English Literary Texts of the 20-21st Centuries,” at Yurii Fedkovych National University of Chernivtsi, Ukraine in 2019. Her academic research revolves around the areas of linguistics of emotion and translation studies. She took part in the international internship programme titled “Fundraising and Organization of Project Activities in Educational Institutions: European Experience” hosted by the Department of Polish-Ukrainian Studies at Jagiellonian University in Poland.

E-mail: karpina@vnu.edu.ua

Liudmyla Kovalchuk is Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology at Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University (Lutsk, Ukraine). She specialises in linguistics and English as a foreign language. Her academic interests focus on context as a socio-cognitive construct and the operations of contextualisation, recontextualisation and decontextualisation in the process of communicative interaction. After obtaining her MA and PhD in Philology, she has taught a range of courses including theoretical grammar of English, theory and practice of translation, scientific and technical translation, interactive technologies in teaching English at school and conversational English. She is a member of the Ukrainian Translator Trainers’ Union (UTTU) and the Ukrainian Association for Cognitive Linguistics and Poetics.

E-mail: kovalchuk.liudmyla@vnu.edu.ua

Yuliya Krylova-Grek, PhD, is Associate Professor at the National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” in Ukraine. Additionally, she serves as the Director of the NGO “Institute of Psycholinguistic Research” and is affiliated with Uppsala University in Sweden as a researcher. Her research primarily focuses on psycholinguistics, forensics psycholinguistics, media, political communication and narratives. A particular focus is given to media studies and their influence on public perceptions and behaviour. Dr Krylova-Grek developed a methodology for psycholinguistic text analysis, which is used to analyse media texts for various purposes. She has worked in the field of psycholinguistics since 2004 and has over 25 years of experience working in universities in Ukraine, Europe, and Canada.

E-mail: yulgrek@gmail.com

Victor Kuperman is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He is an internationally recognized expert and the Canada Research Chair in Psycholinguistics. He has close to 100 publications in high-impact scientific journals (Google Scholar h-index 33). Kuperman’s expertise is in creating and using data resources, including corpora and behavioral mega-studies. He uses computational and experimental methods of language research to investigate issues of direct social relevance, including loneliness and social isolation in older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic; mental health and emotional state of Ukrainian civilians during Russia’s invasion; success and failure in developing reading comprehension skills among young adults with low socio-economic status; and literacy as a predictor of employability and income among immigrants.

E-mail: vickup@mcmaster.ca

Misato Matsuoka, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Language Studies at Teikyo University, Japan. Her research interests include international relations theories, security studies, Japanese foreign policymaking and regionalism in the Asia-Pacific and Indo-Pacific.

E-mail: mmatsuoka@main.teikyo-u.ac.jp

Rieko Matsuoka is currently Professor of English at Human Culture Department of Teikyo University in Japan. She graduated from Tsuda College (Japan), majoring in international relations and obtained an MA in applied linguistics from Columbia University and doctorate in Education from Temple University, USA. She has been engaged in tertiary education for decades and her research interest includes discourse analysis, willingness to communicate, linguistic relativity and medical communication. Her publication of papers, book chapters, and books can be found in Google scholar. Her dissertation was also published, entitled ‘Willingness to Communicate in English among Japanese University Students’. She has recently been intrigued by laughter through her research on medical communication focusing on a medical doctor, who is a co-author of the research on laughter.

E-mail: rieko.matsuoka@main.teikyo-u.ac.jp

Antonina Skrypnyk is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Philology at Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. In October 2005, she received her Ph.D. in French Philology (thesis “French poetic discourse in the Middle Ages”). 2000-current - Lecturer at the Department of Romance Philology in the Educational and Scientific Institute of Philology of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. She teaches courses in psycholinguistics, theoretical grammar of French, linguistic and cultural realia in translation. Research interests: psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, theory of communication.

E-mail: enseignante78@gmail.com

Valentyna Ushchyna is Professor of English Philology at Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University of Lutsk, Ukraine. She specialises in linguistics and English as a foreign language, and her academic interests include the relationships between language, risk, gender, discourse and society. After completing her BA and PhD in Linguistics, she spent a year as a visiting scholar at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, USA. Her involvement in critical discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics and discourse psychology has led her to focus her research on the notions of risk and stance. She is the author of the book “Stancetaking in the English Risk Discourse: A Sociocognitive Perspective” (2015), Vezha-Druk. Since 2018, Valentyna Ushchyna has been the Chair of the Department of English Philology at Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University. In 2019-2020 she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, where she worked with Dr Scott Kiesling, Chair of the Linguistics Department, on a joint research project “Intersubjective Dynamics of Stancetaking on Risk: From Individual Cognition to Social Order”.

Email: vushchyna@vnu.edu.ua

Larysa Zasiekina is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University and Director of the Ukrainian Psychotrauma Centre, Ukraine. Dr Zasiekina currently holds a British Academy Researcher at Risk Fellowship in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. As a prominent authority on topics such as PTSD, moral injury, continuous traumatic stress, and the cultural dimensions of trauma memory, her work is widely respected within the field. Her focus is on the psychological inter-generational impact of genocide in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, including studies of survivors of the Holocaust and the Holodomor (man-made famine in the Soviet Union targeting ethnic Ukrainians) and their children. Professor Zasiekina has published extensively on the language of trauma in high-impact journals in her field and leads international partnerships with psychotrauma researchers at universities in Canada, Israel, Switzerland, the USA and the UK. As a Fulbright Scholar (2010-2011 and 2015-2016), she explored the collective traumas of Native Americans and African Americans in the USA.

E-mail: lz464@cam.ac.uk; zasyekina.larisa@vnu.edu.ua

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