Visual in/and Historical Research
Research Focus

Visual in/and Historical Research

The rapidly developing field of visual culture studies is attracting growing interest from scholars in various fields: social sciences, humanities, and engineering. Scientists agree that understanding vision and visuality requires an interdisciplinary approach, and the knowledge gained should enrich each specific field of science.  In general, it is common to distinguish between vision as a process related to human physiology and visuality as a field in which social and historical aspects shape the ways of seeing (such as a city gallery, a cinema, or a microscope) and vice versa, how vision (such as images of war) affects the community and structures of the social.

Cultural forms of vision and visuality are attracting more and more attention from researchers, especially as the number of cameras, screens, and images in modern cities is growing, and it is important to consider and understand the historical roots of these phenomena. Visual methods are increasingly being used in contemporary urban studies, and the data obtained highlight influential aspects of the interaction of agents, serve as documents that testify to specific practices or significant histories. The development of modern visual research methods is also determined by technological means, both hardware and software.

Within this research focus of the Center, we implement projects in the field of visuality (including the history, phenomenology, and philosophy of images) and archiving of visual media. We analyze the changing historical position of the observer, study the apparatuses of visual practices, and focus on the corporatization and materiality of visual culture. All these aspects are important for urban history and how the city and life in the city have been historically imagined. In addition, our research focus covers the aesthetics of visual form and its historical impact on the perception of the subject, considering aspects of phenomena such as copy, reproduction, original, and the history of authenticity. This focus is closely related to another research area of the Center, which focuses on the visuality of everyday life, amateur practices, media, technology, and the professionalization of photography.

The interdisciplinary focus of the Center for Urban History is intended not only to study images (as objects) and visuality (as practices) from the perspective of historical, humanitarian, and social sciences, but also to develop expertise in this field. The Visuality and Historical Studies research area combines individual research projects and projects created by the Center's researchers in collaboration with technology and visual research experts both in Ukraine and abroad. The visual projects implemented in collaboration work with different disciplinary perspectives in the study of visual phenomena of the past and present: historical aspects of vision and visuality, visual sociology, humanities, and image sciences (Bildwissenschaft).

The research focus on visuality is being developed:

  • Bohdan Shumylovych, research, teaching, curatorial work;
  • Oleksandr Makhanets, research, development of the archival collections of the Urban Media Archive, exhibition projects;
  • Anastasiia Kholyavka, research, development of the archival collections of the Urban Media Archive;
  • Iryna Sklokina, research, curatorial work and processing of the archival collections of the Urban Media Archive;
  • Viktoriia Panas, implementation of public history projects, exhibition projects;
  • Ivanna Cherchovych, preparation of visual materials for education.

The results of the research within this focus were presented in the formats of exhibitions, lectures, digital projects, publications, training courses, conferences, and seminars. 

Selected projects:

Exhibitions and accompanying discussion programs:

Conferences and seminars:

Educational courses:

The topic of home movies and amateur films occupies a significant part of research and projects. Since 2016, the Center has been holding an annual international Home Movie Day (curated by Oleksandr Makhanets). The Center's Urban Media Archive stores and makes available one of the largest collections of digitized films in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. The topic of amateur cinema is at the center of another research focus.

Selected publications:

Other research focuses

Cities, Wars, and Recoveries in 20th Century Eastern Europe

Cities, Wars, and Recoveries in 20th Century Eastern Europe

This focus incorporates the history of the cities and towns in the eastern parts of Europe, both on and behind the front lines, during periods of belligerence and post-war recovery.

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Documenting Experiences of War

Documenting Experiences of War

We have involved our capacity and expertise to document the experiences of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as historical and/or legal evidence, but also as a way to withstand the invasion.

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Historicizing Urban Media and Communicative City

Historicizing Urban Media and Communicative City

Among the main questions of the research focus are: How can an urban landscape be historicized as a media landscape? How do we see a city's past if we look at it as a mediatized communication practice, as an infrastructure of interaction? What is included, and what is left out, in our narrative of a city's past?

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Professionals, Expertise, and Planned Urbanity

Professionals, Expertise, and Planned Urbanity

This focus on planned cities, towns, and districts in socialist societies explores the visions of planners, experts, and decision-makers, who were all involved in the construction and experience of planned urbanity.

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Public History and the City: Engaging and Reflecting the Pasts

Public History and the City: Engaging and Reflecting the Pasts

This focus brings together research on the forms, formats and multiple agendas in engaging with the past from urban perspectives and in urban settings.

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The Social City: Histories of Mobility, Status, Gender and Welfare

The Social City: Histories of Mobility, Status, Gender and Welfare

This research focus extends the established approaches to the history of modern Lviv, centered on the history of the formation of national communities, by addressing other categories of social divisions: gender, age, class, and group.

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Urban Cultural Infrastructures: Creators, Managers, Audiences in the Modern City

Urban Cultural Infrastructures: Creators, Managers, Audiences in the Modern City

This research focus aims to expand our understanding of the ways infrastructures shape creative culture in the modern city.

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Urban Heritages: Concepts, Practices and Legacies

Urban Heritages: Concepts, Practices and Legacies

This research focus incorporates several individual projects, as well as initiatives in cooperation that analyze heritage both as a set of concepts, discourses, and practices, as well as institutional and discursive frames.

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Visual Regimes, Materialities, and Technologies

Visual Regimes, Materialities, and Technologies

This research focus is related to visual practices and historical or social ways of seeing. Within it, we focus on the study of historical changes in technology, imagination, and politics, and how they influence the transformation of visual practices and sensibilities.

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