The International Day of Migration on 18 December 2022 is the perfect occasion to commemorate actresses of migration, who have for long remained in the shadow of men migrants. As such, COST is highlighting a network focusing on women migrants and their contribution to European construction.
COST Action Women on the Move (WEMov) was initiated in September 2020 with the objective to unveil the presence and active participation of women migrants in the construction of Europe. WEMov gathers specialists of women’s migration across humanities who work together at making women, overlooked actresses of migration, come to light. Generally constructed as a male-dominated sphere, women were long excluded from the macro-narratives on migration. Indeed, until the 1980s women were rarely acknowledged in migration studies, often incorporated in group and family migration, and traces of women migrants in the past are still difficult to uncover. Today, even though women migrants make up for about 50% of the world migrants’ population, they are still often either portrayed as male migrants’ accompaniers, victims or economic burdens on receiving nations.
Women on the Move challenges these biased and incomplete perceptions of women migrants by revealing both their resources and the obstacles they face in migration processes. As such, it shows migration as a deeply gendered process.
EU Commissioner for Equality Helena Dalli endorses WEMov
Developing an EU Gender strategy is at the core of Commissioner Helena Dalli’s responsibilities. In this video endorsing COST Action Women on the Move, the Commissioner for Equality outlines the EU strategies to improve women migrants’ integration and inclusion.
Women on the Move on Open Research Europe (ORE)
One of WEMov’s key objectives is to boost publishing efforts on women’s migration. Hence, it has engaged from the start in launching collaborative tools, book series and article collections. When Open Research Europe (ORE) opened to accept COST Action submissions it was the perfect occasion for WEMov to launch an Open Access collection of articles. The COST Action’s Core Group met with ORE and decided to start this new adventure and WEMov’s members are now enthusiastically engaged in co-publishing with ORE.
‘Women on the Move’ is a collection of Open Access articles that focuses on women’s migration across time and disciplines, and encourages the interplay between different approaches and periods. It welcomes a diversity of article types offered by Open Research Europe, including research articles, reviews, case studies, data notes, method articles, essays, and more, and facilitates the dissemination of all research outputs as openly and quickly as possible. These articles combine to unveil the presence and contribution of women migrants to the structuring and consolidation of sending and receiving nations, be they in the past or the present.
The objective of this collection is to make women migrants visible because migration has long been analysed from a gender-blind perspective and women’s presence made invisible by an overwhelming focus on men and families. Hence, this collection aims at showing women’s active participation in migration processes in the past as in the present, unrestricted to any specific discipline.
The collection encourages groundbreaking theoretical and methodological approaches and all articles are subject to rigorous and open peer review by invited experts on gender and migration.
“Open Access is clearly the future of research publication, yet still too expensive to be accessible to most researchers. Funded by the European Commission, ORE is a perfect solution and an equitable opportunity based on merit and talent that allows all Horizon Europe grantees access to Open Access. It has already boosted our COST Action’s publication projects”
Dr Marie Ruiz, WEMov Action Chair
Additional information
- View the Action webpage
- View the Network website
- More information on Open Research Europe
- The International Day of Migration
Cover photo ‘Op zondagmiddag naar El Prado‘ by the Europeana Foundation capturing the migration of Spanish women to the Netherlands. Reused under a CC By 4.0 license.