Language ideological assemblages under Russian occupation: unpacking the role of the researcher as epistemic agent

In this paper, I revisit interview materials with four young multilingual adults living in Qırım-Crimea, the Russian-occupied Ukrainian peninsula. Rather than presenting my ‘data’ that ‘describes’ or ‘explains’ participants’ language ideologies, I unpack the very ‘cuts’ that become enacted through interviewing as a method, or, here, seen as a measuring apparatus. In this manner, and inspired by Karen Barad’s agential realism, this paper diffracts language ideological research beyond representationalism and practice-based understandings of language, suggesting instead an assemblage perspective towards language ideologies. Studying language ideologies as participants’ wor(l)ds that become in intra-action, this paper offers a posthumanist approach that captures how language ideologies can re-matter human bodies. In this way, this study, situated within sociolinguistics of potentiality and posthumanist developments in the field, engages with onto-epistemological concerns surrounding the creation and curation of ‘data’. It suggests a critical interrogation of the role of the researcher as an epistemic agent who not simply conveys or presents ‘data’ but who produces the cuts, enabling certain wor(l)ds to appear and affect the reader.