One of the most important activities in heritage research is not just looking at the past, but recording the present for future generations of citizens and scholars. This is exactly what Dr Iryna Sklokina is doing from the Center for Urban History in Lviv.
One of the centre’s projects is „Un-archiving Post-industry”, which digitally preserves endangered industrial heritage collections in Ukraine’s East and fostering engagement with this heritage among local communities.
Collaborating closely with local archives and heritage practitioners, the project digitised collections at a number of museums in Ukraine, including Mariupol, Pokrovsk and Donetsk. It’s also worth noting that the project won a Citizens’ Engagement prize at the 2023 Europa Nostra Awards.
The podcast is hosted by John Beauchamp and Katarzyna Jagodzińska, head of the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub for Central and Eastern Europe in Kraków, who visited Lviv in early April 2024 to learn more about heritage protection in Ukraine in this time of war.
Dr Iryna Sklokina is a historian and research associate at the Lviv Center for Urban History, where her research is focused on Soviet and industrial heritage, museums and memory cultures, and the company towns of the Donbas. She has participated in several projects focused on cultural heritage and regionalism, including “OpenHeritage”, “Un-archiving Post-industry: Engaging Heritage and Developing Cultural Infrastructures”, and “Region, Nation and Beyond: An Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Reconceptualization of Ukraine”.
Hosted by Dr Katarzyna Jagodzińska, Head of the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub in Krakow and John Beauchamp.
Produced by John Beauchamp (Free Range Productions).