Our Research
The Blinken OSA Archivum Research Unit is a creative archival laboratory which centers on the issues of academic and public knowledge production with special focus on epistemologies of truth-seeking, social justice, issues of archival credibility, access, and data protection. The Archivum is a repository of a large Cold War media archive and also holds collections on human rights violations, uncensored speech, and samizdat materials. Researchers at Archivum actively engage with documents in the archival collections as primary sources and with the history of collections within the evolving archival ecology. We research archival infrastructures and processes, as well as production and circulation of these collections through the lens of archival concepts. Archivum research seminars bring together in-house and associated fellows and staff to discuss archival findings along with interpretative frameworks and self-reflexive methodologies, especially pertinent at the times of the changing role and status of archives after the digital turn and in the era of “post-truth.”
Our activities include academic seminars and collaborative, interdisciplinary research projects. Research fellows at the Blinken OSA Archivum combine expertise in history of East-Central Europe and the former Soviet countries, archival studies, political science, cultural heritage, and information science. The Archivum’s researchers are also members of the CEU faculty who offer BA, MA, and PhD-level courses and contribute to specialized internships at the Archivum in Budapest. Courses at the CEU Vienna campus are offered at the Department of Historical Studies, the Department of Legal Studies, and at the Advanced Certificate Programs in Cultural Heritage Studies and Visual Theory and Practice. Further academic programs are organized in cooperation with CEU Institute for Advanced Studies (CEU IAS), CEU Democracy Institute (DI), and other research and academic institutions in Budapest and internationally.
The Research Unit contributes to the Blinken OSA Archivum in-house archival and public programs, as well as to the archival collection development, helping to preserve unique and endangered collections and make them accessible in a sustainable way. Participatory archival and curatorial projects, involving inclusive workflow and metadata design also benefit from constant information exchange between researchers and archivists. Research at the Archivum nourishes curated collections, exhibitions at Galeria Centralis, Verzio IHRDFF program, as well as other public programs.
The Archivum is a hub for researchers and archival professionals from around the world, working on the archival epistemologies of the Cold War and its aftermath, critical archiving for human rights and social justice, entangled and contested historical narratives, researching archiving and preservation practices of ephemeral, multi-media and forensic archives, memory studies, institutional and intellectual history in Eastern Europe, and theoretical and practical aspects of public history. To engage external researchers, the Archivum hosts the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA program. This program is supported by the International Visegrad Fund and is designed to foster cooperation with historians, cultural heritage professionals, and artists along the yearly announced themes. OSA Research Unit actively participates in designing the annual program call, mentoring and working together with the fellows, and maintaining an online community of over 200 researchers.
Our research builds on long traditions of open access, collaborative research, and sharing knowledge. Research collaborations aim to develop and sustain a broad, trans-sectoral international network. Our collaboration with other heritage institutions and partner archives builds on the inclusive accessibility of collections. The results are made accessible to professionals and the broader public and are shared widely in the form of publications, public debates, teaching, and other activities.
Research agenda
Research Field 1: On the Archive
With this research field, the Archivum investigates theories and methodologies related to the archives, both in general and applied to collections created during the Cold War and after. This research program considers that the core collection of the Archivum , the research papers of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, posits several challenges. Given the fact that the Cold War was primarily informational and that Western media outlets such as RFE/RL created an enormous databank as the basis for their broadcasts intended to provide alternative news to the countries under communist rule, the archive itself became a weapon and a repository of irreducible facts. This research platform thus deals with the problematic nature of information during an ideological war, the tension between a politicized vocabulary and the concrete phenomena, the referential relevance of items created under these conditions, the interventions of the archivists/ documentarists, the relationship between different Cold War archives, socialist state archives and secret police documents, and the relationship between human rights information gathering and larger Cold War issues. The status of textual and audio-visual documents produced by institutions belonging both by ordinary people and the grey zones are also under scrutiny.
For more recent times, the questions raised are about the circulation of information under authoritarian regimes or in contexts of crisis, as well as access to and credibility of archival sources in times of distrust in institutions, the role of archives within the volatile era of digitalization, but also “post-truth” and “alternative facts.” The case study of a Cold War archive provides even here an indispensable perspective for the understanding of the afterlife of a bipolar world.
Within this frame, individual researchers at the Archivum have recently worked and published on the knowledge-production practices during the Cold War (Ioana Macrea-Toma), the photographic family archives during the Soviet era (Oksana Sarkisova), the memory and preservation of Jewish heritage (Anastasia Felcher), the role of archives in managing or transforming the memory politics with regards to recent wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Csaba Szilágyi), policy recommendations with regards to access to archives (Iván Szekely), comparative studies of partisanship through voting behaviour and statistical data (Gábor Tóka), oral histories and evidentiary issues of post-war Hungarian opposition (András Mink),trust in archives and archivists, access to archival documents (István Rév).
This research platform also brought together the Archivum’s researchers and its Visegrad fellows within the project Methodologies of Working in Cold War Archives. It was aimed at fostering a methodological toolkit about how to work with sources belonging to adversarial truth regimes. An international workshop was organized in 2021. A publication is pending.
As the core collections of the Archivum are a rich storehouse of competing historical representations and interpretations, we have been interested in our archival work, teaching, and research activities in historical revisionism, that is in the presentist conviction that the present can change the past (historical facts), not only the perception and interpretations of past events. This kind of historical revisionism treats and evaluates events and characters of the past according to certain moral standards of today, typically with a therapeutic intent to compensate for real or imagined historical injustices.
Research Field 2: Through the Archives
This research field is connected to the first one but shifts its focus to the political and ideological events and practices outside the archives. It investigates what the world of the past looks like when looking at it through the archival holdings, practices, and processes. It deals with topics like propaganda, censorship, everyday life, evolution, opposition, resistance, and truth-telling under communism and after, and the complex discursive, political, and archival practices that shaped them.
The Archivum is one of the largest repositories of uncensored speech, anti-authoritarian samizdat texts, published and distributed without official permission. The challenge is to analyze resistance phenomena as well as the content of their productions through the lens of archival items and concepts that were themselves part of the ideological battles of the past, such as the Samizdat Archives at RFE/RL. Cold War institutions like RFE/RL were not just instruments of Cold war policy, but also repositories of independent Eastern European and Russian culture and anti-authoritarian political thinking. Research at the Archivum makes visible these collections together with similar in-house documents belonging to the personal archives of the main oppositional figures in Hungary.
The 2022 exhibition Fearless brought together the Archivum’s researchers and archivists to commemorate, recall, and raise awareness of the importance of fearless speech in a series of events.
The 2023-2024 theme of the Visegrad fellowship program at the Archivum, Lessons of the Cold War?, attracted fellows that studied the connections and differences between past issues related to oppressive regimes, censorship, violence, and information manipulation to current phenomena.
