How This Platform Came To Be

Women who migrated within and to Europe have shaped our societies as workers, caregivers, and activists. Yet their stories, perspectives, and contributions often remain marginalized in collective memory.

Women Work Migration is the result of a trans-European collaboration between migrant women, museums, researchers, artists, and activists from across Europe. Developed within the framework of the project Female Labour Migration in European History (2024-2026, short FeMig.Lab), the platform emerged from a shared exploration of European histories at the intersection of migration, gender, and labour. Together, we asked how the multifaceted experiences of female labour migration in and to Europe after WW2 and its impact on today’s societies can be made more visible: as lived human realities, as histories shaped by continuing structures of inclusion, exclusion, and discrimination, and as key actors in shaping democratic and plural societies across Europe.

Over the course of the project, we came together in different places across Europe to learn from local histories, initiatives, and practices. In Berlin, we traced histories of migrant women’s activism. In Leuven and Antwerp, we encountered inspiring migrant heritage and oral history projects. In Kraków and Bilbao, we gained insights into everyday forms of migrant self-organization, mutual support, and activism. In Solingen, we forged rings for the memorial of the 1993 Solingen arson attack. In Pazin, we engaged with films, grassroots archives, journalistic projects, and exhibitions that make visible the region’s histories of both emigration and immigration.

Through these encounters and exchanges, we explored and engaged with a wide range of approaches to make female labour migration history more visible: from grassroots oral history initiatives to large-scale exhibition and archiving projects; from biographical explorations in books, photography, films, graphic narratives, and journalism to academic research that seeks to address the many gaps that still shape our understanding of migration histories. While many inspiring projects already exist, opportunities for sustained exchange and collaboration across regions and national borders remain limited. A recurring question throughout our exchanges was how participatory public history practices can help develop more differentiated, intersectional, and agency-focused narratives, and open up European history-making to a wider range of voices, experiences, and forms of knowledge.

From the outset, our aim was not only to learn from one another, but also to create something together. Guided by the idea of moving from mutual learning to mutual making, we set out to develop a shared resource that reflects the diversity of our work, the plurality of experiences of female labour migration, and the collective reflections that emerged through the project. Women Work Migration grew out of this process: a collaborative platform, long-term resource, and space for exchange dedicated to making the presence, agency, and histories of migrant women in Europe more visible.

What This Platform Offers

This platform is intended as a resource and source of inspiration for further collective engagement with the interconnected themes of women, work, and migration. It seeks not to reflect not only the diversity of women’s experiences in the context of migration and labour, together with their regional, political, and social contexts, but also the diverse perspectives, approaches, and practices represented by the partners involved in the collaborative process of creating this platform.

The platform focuses on making visible both individual human experiences and the structural commonalities that emerge from bringing these biographies together. It also invites an open methodological reflection on how such stories can be represented in public.

Testimonies

At the heart of the platform is a collection of testimonies by women about their experiences of migration and work. These testimonies were developed collaboratively between partners from the FeMig.Lab network and, if still possible, the women sharing their stories and. Together, they offer a diverse, though by no means exhaustive, picture of different lived realities, forms of exclusion, participation and solidarity, and experiences of agency across a wide range of historical and contemporary contexts.

The testimonies are accompanied not only by short historical and political contexts, but also by reflections on their “Making of”. Rather than following a uniform concept or narrative style, the testimonies differ in format, tone, and approach, reflecting a variety of methodological practices and negotiation processes that precede the public presentation of personal stories. Offering insights behind the scenes and understanding the platform as a “sandbox”  for participatory public history was particularly important to us. Throughout the project, we repeatedly returned to questions such as: How can people participate in shaping the public representation of their own stories? How are decisions about representation negotiated and which responsibilities and challenges are involved in these processes? What motivations, benefits, and possibilities emerge for the individuals and communities who choose to share their stories? The Making Of sections provide insights into these processes and invite further discussion, exchange, and experimentation.

Topics

Drawing on the testimonies, we also sought to identify themes that connect them across regional, temporal, and structural differences. The collection of Topics represents an attempt to explore what characterizes experiences at the intersection of migration, labour, and gender as part of European history: both on the individual and on the structural level.

Through the Topics section, visitors can approach these themes and discover excerpts from testimonies in which they appear. The Topics describe, in an abstracted form, actions and practices that migrant women recount in their stories. By focusing on what they do, we seek to challenge narratives that portray women in migration processes as passive figures or reduce them to dehumanizing and instrumentalizing categories. Instead, we aim to highlight how women act, organize, support one another, pursue self-determination, and navigate difficult decisions, often under conditions that severely constrain their possibilities for action. The concepts used to describe these practices are not intended as euphemistic notions of agency or empowerment detached from social realities. Rather, they also point to the structural conditions that simultaneously enable and limit agency.

Network and Toolbox

Beyond the testimonies and topics, the platform also points to existing initiatives and resources in the field. The Network page introduces partner organizations and institutions working on migration, labour, and gender histories across Europe. The Toolbox brings together exhibitions, oral history projects, educational resources, guidelines, and other materials. We invite visitors to use these resources, build new connections, and contribute their own projects to strengthen exchange and visibility across the field.