Donbas in Focus: Visions of Industry in the Ukrainian East

The history and heritage of industrialization can evoke conflicting emotions for local communities. While past industrial achievements can be a source of community identity and pride, the environmental impact of industrialization and the socio-economic challenges of de-industrialization can also affect negatively the lives of local residents. Regeneration projects have tended to focus on adaptive re-use of industrial heritage objects, as museums, tourist attractions, galleries, and community spaces, in an effort to revitalize economically depressed areas and strengthen local communities.

Less attention, however, has been paid to the intangible heritage of industrialization: the culture, values and relationships that exist in communities that were invested materially and symbolically in industrial production.

Donbas in Focus: Visions of Industry in the Ukrainian East explores the ways that Donbas, a heavily industrialized region in Eastern Ukraine, was depicted in photography and film across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and asks how these processes continue to resonate in the region's political and cultural landscapes today. Situating the Donbas case in a comparative research frame, it questions established notions of the region's post-Soviet specificity, highlighting common challenges and experiences in post-industrial regions and communities across the UK.

While a number of recent studies have begun to address the question of Donbas's cultural construction through word, image and social practice, there is no one single-authored volume in Ukrainian, Russian, or English that engages with the politics of visualizing industry in the Ukrainian East and the ways these politics have informed the cultural myth of Donbas across the Soviet and post-independence eras. A study of this kind is now more urgent than ever given the ongoing conflict in Donbas, in the context of which marked tendencies to "Otherize" the heavily industrialized region have emerged.

By drawing parallels with the cultural construction of (post-)industrial regions across the UK, the project will contribute valuable new perspectives to the debate about Donbas identity politics, shifting the focus away from questions of ethnolinguistic identities, which have dominated Ukrainian public discourse and international media coverage of the conflict, to discuss the dynamics of power that shape and inform (post-)industrial regional subjectivities and experiences.

Donbas in Focus has the following component parts: 1) a monograph, the first sustained study of the practices and traditions of visualizing industry in Donbas, from the late-Imperial period to the present day; 2) a co-edited volume of artwork, photography, and critical essays reflecting on the critical-creative potential of industrial history and heritage; 3) a series of three industrial archive workshops, stimulating new forms of creativity around established industrial heritage collections and building the knowledge, capacities, and networks of professionals working with these resources; 4) a schools photography project, working with young people in the West Lothian area to develop a new body of photographic work that engages with the (post-)industrial landscape; 5) an exhibition of project photography and creative work that will tour the UK and Ukraine; 6) a radio broadcast for BBC Radio 3; 7) a project website.