Ievgueniia Bondarenko

Project at the MaCI

February - June 2026

The project focuses on the cognitive-semiotic aspects of Ukrainian internet memes created and disseminated across Ukrainian social networks and messaging platforms during Russia’s full-scale invasion. Internet memes inherently provide immediate and emotionally loaded response to topical social issues. Moreover, as cognitive- semiotic complexes, memes convey nationally significant concepts and culturally specific symbols. This accounts for their effectiveness in protecting the national information space, serving as grassroots tools of counter-propaganda: they safeguard national identity, informational coherence, and collective memory. At the same time, Ukrainian war memes are highly culture-specific, which complicates their interpretation by cultural outsiders in Europe. The content of Ukrainian war memes will be elucidated through a systematic analysis employing corpus-based methods for multimodal media.

At the conclusion of the project, a brief colloquium with a Harvard Library partner (Project SUCHO – Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Meme Wall) will report the results and facilitate the exchange of the ideas on Ukrainian counter-propaganda. As a follow-up, a port-folio will be prepared to support the publication of a monograph.    
 

The rationale of the project is to provide a deeper understanding of Ukrainian war memes as a counter propaganda medium by way of 
1) delivering relevantly objective information about key landmarks of the war and 
2) interpreting the multimodal meaning of the memes for representatives of foreign cultures.

The main outcome will be annotated corpus of 2,000 Ukrainian war memes hosted on a university-based platform. This resource will enable interested researchers to adapt and use the corpus for their individual research objectives in the field. 

This project is a follow-up of the PAUSE grant of College de France, based in UGA (ILCEA4) in 2023 and Jean Moulin Universite Lyon 3 (CEL) in 2024