Abstract
<jats:p>This article examines how cultural resistance is conceptualized, theoretically interpreted, and operationalized within Ukrainian scholarly discourse. Cultural resistance is approached as an analytical category employed to describe processes of transformation in established cultural hierarchies, symbolic orders, and criteria of legitimacy across specific socio-cultural contexts. The study systematizes approaches to cultural resistance found in international sociological and interdisciplinary literature and relates them to selected Ukrainian empirical research. On this basis, it reconstructs: (1) the principal modes of defining cultural resistance in academic publications, (2) the theoretical pluralism shaping its interpretation, and (3) the models of resistance studies applied in the Ukrainian research field. The analysis demonstrates that cultural resistance rarely appears in Ukrainian scholarship as an explicitly named object of inquiry. Instead, it emerges through the study of adjacent empirical phenomena, including language practices, transformations of symbolic space and toponymy, memory politics, and forms of cultural production in digital environments. Within these approaches, cultural resistance is interpreted not as a declared position or form of self-identification, but as a shift in perceptions of cultural acceptability, normativity, and legitimacy. The article concludes by proposing an interpretative framework that enables the analytical identification of cultural resistance across diverse cultural processes. It also outlines the conditions under which empirically observed practices may be convincingly interpreted as manifestations of cultural resistance in the postcolonial context of Ukraine.</jats:p>