The Seeds Have Bloomed: Women Making History

For the last three years movement Women 100 (Hundred Years of Immigrant Women’s Life and Work in Malmö)  has been trying to make visible and recognize immigrant women’s life and work in Malmö. These stories are collected in the 4^th Women 100 Newsletter that  has just been released.

The newsletter reflects the continuation of exercises, conversations and methods aiming to visualize and unfold stories of immigrant women in Malmö. However, not as boxed and finished stories but as processes of participation and exchange. Newsletter no 4 (No 2, 2015) edited by initiators Parvin Ardalan and Mamak Babak-Rad among others is a collection of articles, visual essays, and montages depicting different methods of participation, immigrant stories and engagement around life and work in the city.

Feminist Dialog initiated the project or movement, partnering with Malmö City, Malmö Museum, ABF Malmö (Workers’ Educational Organisation), The City Archive, researchers as Malmö University, and not least women networks, organizations and individuals. Seminars, lectures, exhibitions, and workshops with group conversations and thematic work around e.g. interviewing, archiving, cartoon storytelling, and Roma life in Malmö, have taken place the last 2 years.

Malmö University’s Erling Björgvinsson and Anders Høg Hansen, Ørecomm member, have been involved from the beginning, as partners in development of methods, documentation and research on the movement – as part of the Living Archives project. Erling is now PARSE professor of design at University of Gothenburg, but still a researcher on Living Archives, while Anders is a teacher/coordinator on the MA in Communication for Development and involved in Living Archives and other research activities.

From a Communication for Development and Ørecomm perspective the various forms of mediating old and new Malmö identities, complex and in process, have been exciting and challenging. How to let people articulate their hi/stories, and to make visible unwritten and unrepresented aspects of the city’s past and present? The movement embraces the historical and the contemporary and among several key ideas – as sought reflected in the newsletter’s documentation of activity – the aim has been to mobilize (living) archives as social resources and reservoirs where alternative people’s histories may pose new ways of living, working and being in Malmö.

Newsletter no 4 (No 2, 2015) edited by initiators Parvin Ardalan and Mamak Babak-Rad among others is a collection of articles, visual essays, and montages depicting different methods of participation, immigrant stories and engagement around life and work in the city. You can learn more about Women Making History here.

Image via Women Making History.