GRANTEE
National Pedagogical Drahomanov University
Assistant Professor
February 24, 2022 significantly changed the lives of all residents of Ukraine. They found themselves in a new environment that was polluted with the sounds of explosions, gunshots, and air-raid alarms. Their visual landscape has also been changed through taped windows, blackout regulations, the presence of defense facilities and combat vehicles in public space, the light of artillery fire, destroyed houses, streets covered with dead bodies, etc. It is extremely important to analyze and preserve information about how those aspects of the war have affected the quality of human life. Therefore, this project aims to study the specifics of the impact of the war on the everyday audiovisual environment in Ukraine.
The project is based on several key points:
• The consideration of the audiovisual environment of the war as a form of affective intrusion into the mind, where involuntary listening and vision change people's behavior and affect their psychological state and cognitive skills. Thus, sounds and visual images become instruments of violation of personal and physical space. In this aspect, it is important to investigate possible cultural practices of adaptation or resistance to these factors of influence.
• Since we cannot separate sounds or visual images from the circumstances in which we have heard and seen them, it is not the sounds and visual images themselves that are important but rather the associations they evoke in us. In this aspect, it is necessary to investigate how the war experience remains with the person. For example, when the sounds of war are gone, they can leave traces that can be activated by similar sounds that are unrelated to situations of danger. As a result, familiar sounds and even silence may be perceived differently.
• The audiovisual experience of war is an open, changeable, and subjective entity. It is important to take into account subjective experiences and the diversity of human conditions. That is why the research will be based on personality-oriented ethnography focused on a single individual's experience. Such an approach will be able to give an understanding of the consequences and the difficulties people encountered in the process of living through the audiovisual environment of the war.