News from WG1
By Joana Pujades Mora (Open University of Catalonia, Spain)
Our progress has been based on the creation of a compact team leading WG1 and a sub-team specialized in the collection of sources to further advance the construction of the repository of sources on female migration. Thus, the WG1 leadership has been reinforced with Andrea Caracausi, Ayça Eminoglu, Elizabeth Mullins, Ivan Hrstić, together with Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora. Eva Eglaja Kristsone and Julia C Stryker form the wonderful tandem of WG1’s subgroup.
Our tasks over the last months have been diverse. In this way, we have required new information on sources on female migration that COST Action participants use for their research, as some of you reported in the initial survey or collected through information provided by national archives/libraries. Thanks to all of you who have contributed! So, a new template has been developed which is the basis for the repository/map that will be located on our website. In addition, we have started working on a call for a book on ‘Making migrant women visible through sources’ (provisional title) and on the organization of a workshop on ‘Discovering invisible migrants: Migrant women in sources’ (provisional title). Moreover, we have started contact with Europeana (web portal on digitized cultural heritage collections funded by the European Union’s Connecting Europe Facility and European Member States: https://www.europeana.eu/en/). Stay tuned, more information soon!
News from WG2
By Maija Ojala Fulwood (University of Turku, Finland)
WG members and national teams have worked actively and gathered over 400 entries to the Register of Migrant Women Landmarks. Currently we are editing the entries for our website’s interactive map of Landmarks. For this task we welcome all possible help across WG borders. To join the sub group Landmarks please contact the WG leaders. The register will focus on women who moved across community and cultural borders. For the challenging task to gather the information, follow-up strategies have proven useful: some members have started to search information on their field of specialty such as art history and women in science; others have integrated the landmarks’ search to their teaching, turning it into a student assignment. Recently Czech students have presented their findings to WG2 leader at an international seminar. Some cities have a list of all street names of women, which have served as a good starting point. Some WG members are also mobilizing local high school students to locate landmarks in their region. The register has also brought forward some interesting aspects of Landmarks related to women’s migration that will be further elaborated at the Budapest conference and planned publications – so stay tuned!
News from WG3
By Nicoleta Roman (Nicolae Iorga Institute of History, Bucharest, Romania) & Beatrice Zucca (Cambridge University, UK)
WG3 will be present at the 1st WEMov conference (Budapest, 9th September 2021) with a panel entitled Women, economic migration, and the law. Topics include references to law regimes, changing working environments, internal and international migration, highlighting the individual experiences in the broader economic developments.
The WEMov’s website section Let’s learn! will feature a Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), free online course hosted by University of Paris (WEMov’s Grant Holder) on FUN MOOC and coordinated by a dedicated sub-WG (Martin Andersson, Nina Drejerska, Irina Matei, Nicoleta Roman, Marie Ruiz, Müge Telci Ozbek, Snjezana Vasiljevic and Beatrice Zucca). WEMov’s MOOC will explore the interplay between migration and gender throughout history and contemporary times and through a range of cutting-edge topics. Each online class will gather 3 (or more) authors and will contain the following elements in a transnational and transdisciplinary approach. Our aim is to have all countries from the network represented. We encourage COST members to join this initiative and collaborate with the team as much as they can. Please send proposals to Müge Telci Ozbek at: . All contributions will be credited. mugetelci@gmail.com . All contributions will be credited.
The third activity coordinated by WG3 is the preparation and launch of the WEMov’s book series “Gender and Migration”. Monographs and edited volumes based on original, pathbreaking and well-documented research are welcome. Cooperation on the sub-series project on unknown stories and edited volume titled Across Europe, from early modern to present time. Migrant women and their unknown success stories is greatly encouraged as WG3 still accept proposals.
News from WG4
By Sónia Ferreira (Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia, Lisbon, Portugal) & Miguel Oliveros Mediavilla (Universidad Antonio de Nebrija, Madrid, Spain)
In WG4, we organized two virtual workshops and we discussed the technical and content issues regarding the production of visual materials. We are currently in the pre-production stages of the documentary film and interactive installation, with the Trinity College exhibition in the horizon.
The group is developing a set of ethical and procedural guidelines, to be followed by all members who wish to participate in the filming process. This will lead to a large collection of oral testimonies and interviews, assets which could eventually be of great relevance and interest for a printed publication.
At our annual meeting, in Budapest, in September, we want to start discussing collectively the material produced and the configuration of the different display devices that we are going to use for its dissemination.
We need the members of WEMov to give us suggestions of films and other visual material, as well as sources where this material can be viewed in order to constitute a list of visual content on women and migration to our website. In addition to the visual material produced by us, we would like to systematize information about other visual material that may be of interest to COST members.