CONCLUSIONS OF THE CONFERENCE WOMEN RECOLLECTING MEMORIES
(summary and expectations)

Conference participants found the following topics important and just touched upon during the workshops in the first two days:

• Importance of women’s memories.
• Their unjustified marginalization and suppression from official history and collective memory.
• Entwinement and two-way influence of political events to concrete women’s destinies and vice-versa; (Through their own story women participate in, and influence, occurrences in the region to the same extent to which those occurrences influence their lives).
• Cross-border cooperation and feminist approach to psychosocial work with women victims of war violence, by which feminist women’s groups differentiated themselves from the work of other institutions.

Suggestions and expectations relating to preservation of women’s recollections and the inclusion of gender dimension of memory into public memory:

• Creation of a web site dedicated to women’s recollections of the era of transition and wars in the former Yugoslav countries.
• Activists writing their autobiographies.
• Seminars on way and methodology in researching women’s recollections.
• Gathering regional stories and experiences from different surroundings.
• Writing about experiences of nationalism in one’s own surrounding (from family, city to the state).
• Gathering and exhibiting photographs and films as visual forms of recollection.
• Founding a "virtual museum" of history of the region (as an open, interactive space for discussion and research).
• Systematic recording of the influence of women’s groups to the system itself, establishing of civil society, and the like.
• Linking transitional/wartime experiences of women from the region with women from other parts of the world who have similar experiences – from Eastern European countries to countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America.