News from WG1
By Katelin Marit Parsons (Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, Reykjavík, Iceland) and Joana Maria Pujadas Mora (Open University of Catalonia, Spain)
The working group meets monthly online and has focused attention on developing the map of archives and libraries with primary sources on women’s migration and women migrants’ experiences. An open meeting on finding primary sources and adding them to the map was held on 27 May. We have also reached out directly to archives in Europe with holdings relevant for our project. Countries currently represented on the map are: Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. We seek to extend representation to all countries in the network and encourage interested contributors to contact Katelin (katelin.parsons@arnastofnun.is).
We warmly welcome our new members Brigitte le Normand, who joined our working group in February, and Anastasia Hamatsou, who joined in March, as well as their two very last members, Sirpa Salenius and Bozena Miljic who just joined.
Five members of WG1 attended the annual meeting of the network in Nicosia, Cyprus (27–29 April 2022): Alexander Schunka, Anastasia Hamatsou, Janet Laidla, Marie Ruiz and Tatjana Šarić. Janet and Tatjana presented papers at the WEMov conference in Nicosia.
Tatjana Šarić will host our upcoming WG1 meeting at the Croatian State Archives in Zagreb on 27–28 June. We look forward to welcoming our guest, Donna Gabaccia, who will give a keynote lecture as part of the programme.
News from WG2
By Veronika Čapská (Charles University, Czech Republic) , Pirita Frigren (University of Pori) & Bénédicte Miyamoto (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), Fiona Bakas (Universidade Lusófona).
WEMov Working Group 2 welcomes its latest member Pauliina Rasanen. It organised an online workshop, ’Transcribathon 2.0- Biocards’ on Friday 20 May 2022, to which all WEMov COST Action members were invited. We had a good number of participants with 14 WEMov members participating in the workshop. Fiona Bakas started with an explanation of how the Landmarks devoted to female migrant are collected for the Register, and then how this data is fed into biocards that put these women (and their landmarks) on the map. This is a two-step process: 1) finding the female migrant landmark and putting some details on the Excel (eg coordinates, street, type of landmark, etc) and 2) creating a biocard with more detailed information on the women’s migratory journey and life and adding some copyright-free pictures. Pirita Frigren shared her knowledge with us on where it is possible to find copyright-free pictures (e.g. online museum and archive databases, Rijksmuesum, British Museum, Wikimedia Commons, Europeana) and other WG members also contributed with locations. Another way in which to find images with a creative commons licence is to search in Google Images, then press Tools, then Usage Rights and select ‘Creative Commons Licence’. After the 2-hour working workshop, we managed to get a very good number of completed biocards related to female migrant landmarks – a total of 50 were submitted! These will now be sent off to be transformed into actual points on the WEMov Women Migrant Landmark Map. Check it out! Thank you to all the members who worked hard on creating the biocards and we welcome you to continue working on these.
News from WG3
By Nicoleta Roman (Nicolae Iorga Institute of History, Bucharest, Romania) & Beatrice Zucca (Cambridge University, UK)
WG is happy to welcome Lela Goginava, Armela Maxhelaku, and Selma Smajlovic, and to announce that WEMov’s second book series, Palgrave Studies in Gender and Migration, is now open and ready for manuscripts and proposals. The co-editors Graham Finlay, Nicoleta Roman, Marie Ruiz and Beatrice Zucca invite WEMov network members to submit proposals to the series. For more information, please contact the co-editors. Furthermore, the Unknown stories book project – Across Europe, from early modern to present time. Migrant women and their unknown success stories – is approaching its completion. The volume aims to highlight the role played by unknown migrant women in various domains in their receiving country. For proposals, please contact the WG3 leaders before 15th June: nicoleta.roman.st@gmail.com & beatrice.zucca@unipd.it From 15 June, WG3 will start to explore the creation of datasets on women and migration, a project that will be at the core of its activity for the future. WG3 members and colleagues from other working groups are encouraged to suggest ideas, feedback and information that might help develop the project. WG3 co-leaders Beatrice Zucca and Nicoleta Roman, as well as WG1 member Andrea Caracausi, are the organisers of the international workshop West meets East: mobility of people, exchange of knowledge. Female migration in Europe from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, to take place at the University of Padua on 23-24 June 2022. WG3 meetings are scheduled via Zoom on: 27 May and 28 June.
News from WG4
By Sónia Ferreira (Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia, Lisbon, Portugal) & Miguel Oliveros Mediavilla (Universidad Antonio de Nebrija, Madrid, Spain)
