Counter-Archiving the Ephemeral: Photovoice with Ukrainian Women Traveling between Belgium and Ukraine.

For her PhD research, Hannah Grondelaers conducts longitudinal photovoice research with a group of 15 Ukrainian women who were displaced to Belgium after Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, and who continue to return to Ukraine during the war. As they travel, the women document daily life in their home country with photographs and videos they record on their phones.

Situating the photovoice material within the broader visual ecology of the war, Hannah examines how different visual realms produce knowledge about Ukraine and thereby contribute to particular ways in which Ukraine is imagined. When free to capture their realities in the way they want to, what do the women document while travelling back to Ukraine, and how does this differ from spectacularized media reporting?

During the Urban Seminar, Hannah will present the audiovisual material collected by the women and conceptualize it as a form of counter-archiving life’s coexistence with war in ephemeral moments that unsettle flattening media portrayals. She will reflect on the importance of contemporary Ukrainian art, and its refusal of spectacle, in finding the proper grammar with which to make sense of the epistemic role the photovoice material performs.

Urban Seminar will be held in a workshop format. Researchers are invited to discuss scholarly projects, research at various stages of development, and completed research that is being prepared for publication.

Participation in the Urban Seminar requires preliminary reading and discussion of the researcher's text. If you would like to join the Seminar, please email Anastasiia Fabirovska (a.fabirovska@lvivcenter.org), and we will send you the materials in advance.

The event will take place as part of the public program "Source as a Choice" organized by the Center for Urban History in partnership with Documenting Ukraine / IWM and Research Centre Ukraine / Max Weber Foundation.

During the meetings, researchers will share their work with various sources on war and mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The choice to create and preserve sources can be one of the tools for embodying this violence or, on the contrary, for opposing it. Our choice to talk about these events through the prism of certain sources creates a field in which the complex past will live on in the present and future.

Credits

Cover Image: photo from one of the participants of the project / provided by Hannah Grondelaers