Source as a Choice
May 2022 — December 2025
As researchers, our decisions usually privilege certain aspects over others. Our choices are made in search for answers to specific questions. We opt for certain approaches in our work: from the way we shape our first questions and design methodology to how we construct narratives out of the fragments of sources and our interpretations, to the long-term use of our work.
However, similarly complex choices inform the creation of the sources we rely on as well: institutions decide to collect statistical data in a certain manner, people decide to keep their diaries and write letters to each other, media outlets decide to cover specific topics and events. Some materials make it into archives (this itself is also often the result of specific choices), others fade out of focus until they might be rediscovered by people who follow new queries. Some sources are lost, or they are even deliberately destroyed.
Decisions within these processes are often invisible and are not reflected on, but they become especially pertinent in times of radical violence. In such times, the choice of creating and preserving sources may be a tool of exercising or resisting violence. Our choice in this series, though, is to discuss such events and contexts through the lens of certain sources, creating a platform for the conflict-laden pasts to live in the present and in the future.
For the program, which began in 2022 as part of the EHRI-3 project, we invite researchers to share their work on various sources related to war and mass violence throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Who created these visual records, and how did they become sources? We will examine not only photographs by correspondents or private snapshots, but also drawings by soldiers and amateur sketches by prisoners. We will also explore the dreams of those who experienced war and violence. Dreams are often interpreted as historical sources—ego-documents, just like other autobiographical records such as memoirs, diaries, and letters. Debates continue to this day about whether ego-documents can serve as genuine evidence of the past. The recurring question is: how reliable can human memory be, and how truthful can the authors of materials be—materials that researchers later choose as sources?
In 2025–2026, the Center for Urban History is organizing the "Source as Choice" series in partnership with the Documenting Ukraine Program / Institute for Human Sciences (IWM Vienna) and the Research Centre Ukraine / Max Weber Foundation.
We invite you to reflect upon the decisions and choices that accompany the generation and further life of sources in times of war and conflict.
TEAM
- Curators: Sofia Dyak, Viktoria Panas
- Communication support: Maryana Mazurak
- Consulting: Taras Nazaruk, Natalia Otrishchenko, Diána Vonnák, Bohdan Shumylovych
- Logistical and technical support: Sofia Andrusyshyn, Oleksandr Dmytriiev
- Design: Oleksandra Davydenko
