Yuliia Soroka
Doctor of Science in Sociology
Sociology of culture
Ukrainian studies
Biography
Yuliia Soroka is a scholar in the Sociology of culture. Her education and academic degrees were obtained at N. V. Karazin Kharkiv national university (Ukraine). Her research areas: Sociology of culture, culture and power, cultural mechanisms of power. Gender, gender and politics, gender and queer in media representation. Social perception, Other and othering, polycultural society. Hate speech. Dialogue as a social technology, peacebuilding, facilitation, sociology of dialogue. Qualitative methods in sociology, Discourse analysis. Symbolic transformation in post-soviet urban space. Sociology of social changes, media and visual culture, popular culture, television news, cinema, postmodern sociology. Student-centred education, teaching sociology, teaching and learning methods.
She teaches sociology of Culture, Teaching Sociology, Sociology (for Social work), Sociocultural analysis in strategic communication, and Rhetoric of conflict in media.
Yuliia Soroka's works were devoted to the processes in the symbolic space of Ukrainian society in the frame of a sociocultural approach in a broad empirical field. There were the texts of new independent media in the middle of 1990th, post-soviet sociocultural transformation in Ukrainian society, namely attitudes to material wealth, students’ attitudes to past and recognition of heroes, popular culture and films, the changes in urban symbolic space (toponyms as such) and other.
Now she concentrates attention on culture and power relations. The main research question is how does culture “work” in the reproduction of power relations within society, what are the cultural mechanisms of power? Partly these ideas were presented in her monograph “The native, the strange, the different: the sociocultural perspective of perception of the Other” (2012) (Ukr.). Conceptualising perception as a sociocultural phenomenon, she considered Ukrainian society as a polycultural one, stressing the processes of legitimation of Ukrainian culture as a representative of the country, the state and the Ukrainian society, considering the Other as a constitutive instance of social perception and “stranger” and “enemy” as specific frames of the Other perception. The empirical base of this book was qualitative sociological data, mass survey data, and popular culture content.
Her concept of cultural mechanisms of power was used and empirically justified in research on the discourse of queer women in Ukrainian media, social theatre in Kharkiv, the discourse of Muslims in Ukrainian media, hate speech as a sociocultural concept, dialogue as a social technology, Collective identities within Pro-Euromaidan discourse, hostility towards IDPs in Ukraine after 2014, nomination of Olympic games winners in TV translations, Representation of the provincials in Ukrainian TV-shows, Standing greeting rituals and others.
She also works as a researcher and an expert sociologist in Ukrainian civic projects in dialogue and mediation, gender, urban revitalisation, and educational policy.