Workshop 1

 

Expectations from the Conference and Working on Recollections

At the first workshop of the Conference, divided into smaller working groups, participants were expressing their expectations from the conference, defined its meaning and significance by answering the question “Why is it important to reconstruct women’s memories?” This is how the Conference participants evaluated the significance and expectations from reconstructing women’s memories:
   

  • we remember so that others wouldn’t remind us   
  • we remember for acquiring better insight   
  • we remember in order to recognize the good and successful in our work and learn from it   
  • remembering is thinking about ourselves and where we are   
  • remembering is affirmation of our work, activities and progress   
  • remembering the past gives hope to the future   
  • not to forget and not to be forgotten   
  • we want to remember because we are proud of what we did   
  • we want to control our memories   
  • we want our memories to become public, a part of the collective memory   
  • not to forget certain people and certain destinies   
  • to evaluate our work, its meaning and significance   
  • to document our work   
  • to prevent what happened to us from happening again   
  • to prevent “the occurrence” of bad future   
  • to learn from the past, not to forget   
  • to evaluate our professional, political and societal progress   
  • remembering is emotionally important   
  • the present and future depend on memories   
  • we do not want our memories to be replaced by the “official” ones   
  • remembering is important for personal identity and continuity   
  • we remember in order to pass on our experiences to the young


Expectations – what do we want to express with our memories:
    

  • we want to say that women are courageous, strong and that they want to decide about their own lives   
  • we expect the women to start practicing what they preach: love, respect and solidarity   
  • we want to say that women can and want to influence positive changes   
  • talking to women dear to us   
  • more influence and power in society   
  • active politics of collective memory in which women too are taking place   
  • we want to make sure women have their place in the collective memory   
  • we want to promote feminism in the sense of gender equality
  • we want to collect women’s memories on the culture of resistance to war