Aleksandrinke is the general name of the phenomenon of mass emigration from one particular Slovenian region to Egypt, whose protagonists were women. Since the most common destination of their migration was Alexandria, at home they were referred to as aleksandrinke - Alexandrian women - and under this name they remain recorded in the collective memory. Emigration was a social strategy that had entered into the reasoning of women and of entire communities of this region and played an important role in meeting their socio-economic needs and in planning their individual and collective life paths. As such, it brought with it dramatic changes in the role of women, in the value placed on women's work within the traditional economy and within the internal dynamics of their society of origin. This emigration had a profound impact on women's self-esteem and at the same time on the public image of migrants as non-conventional female characters whose reputation fluctuated between silent thankful adoration and loud moral condemnation. It is thus not surprising that the phenomenon was, for almost half a century, buried under a thick blanket of oblivion, denial, shame and traumatic memories we have only recently started to remove.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 35925805This presentation illuminates the work of international research network on aleksandrinke. The network operates in multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary frame which presents many challenges to studying the phenomenon. The author exposes aspects of methodology of intercultural collaboration and some problems emerging when combining historical, sociological and literary-historical approaches to the case of aleksandrinke.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 35925549Maja Weiss is a Slovenian filmmaker, whose oeuvre, at first glance, seems rather heterogeneous; however, if we sharpen our focus, the resulting impression is Quite the opposite: Maja Weiss’s filmic opus demonstrates consistency in view of its multi-layered involvement in the issues of mobility, migration, and border- crossing. Weiss brings these issues into play not only in a thematic sense, butalso in three other ways. Her creativity is marked by geographic mobility; her oeuvre is characterised by the crossing (and, sometimes, blurring) of genre borders, and her career is typified by professional migration. In other words, mobility, border-crossing, and migration are the common denominators of Maja Weiss’s creativity, which the author Petek situates within the theoretical context of conceptualisations of mobility in film scholarship as well as within the historical context of Slovenian cinema.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 53305698This presentation provides a brief overview of theoretical histories of investigation of migration with respect to gender in Europe. The objective is a critical assessment of key theoretical contributions as well as new challenges to migration studies, particularly in the field of postcolonial and postfeminist scholarship. The main argument will be that in the context of globalisation, with its side effects of dismantling of modern notions of borders and boundaries of the nation state, classical opposition between sedentarianism/authochtony and mobility no longer suffices to address social, political and identity experiences of the postmodern subject. This throws also a new demand onto thinking of the migrant (as the alien and the foreigner), as well as on the conceptualisation of the social contract between the “host” and the “guest”. The paper suggests how, historically, women migrants, especially with respect to care and emotional, as well as intellectual labour, have been an avant-garde group, indeed among the first to transgress borders of homeland and live the experience of transnational belonging.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 54372706This analysis is derived from the assumption that in certain classes, topics of migration are more exposed and that the subjects where this is the case should carry an important role in constructing contemporary understandings of plurality of social world. This study provides a platform for further investigation of migration in relation to gender and nationalism, but also hopes to contributeto general debate on the development of curricula as an important agent in furthering democratic social and cultural processes.
F.02 Acquisition of new scientific knowledge
COBISS.SI-ID: 2688599