We Can Do It! Women’s labour market participation in the maritime sector in the Upper Adriatic after the two World Wars in an intersectional perspective

Project Information

WeCanIt

Grant agreement ID: 894257

DOI

10.3030/894257

Project closed

EC signature date 6 March 2020

Start date 1 April 2020

End date 31 March 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 150 040,32

EU contribution

€ 150 040,32

Coordinated by

UNIVERZA V LJUBLJANI
Slovenia

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WeCanIt (We Can Do It! Women’s labour market participation in the maritime sector in the Upper Adriatic after the two World Wars in an intersectional perspective)

Reporting period: 2020-04-01 to 2022-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The primary objective of the MSCA-IF Fellowship “’We Can Do It!’ Women’s labour market participation in the maritime sector in the Upper Adriatic after the World Wars in an intersectional perspective” (acronym: WeCanIt; grant agreement no. 894257) was to estimate quantitatively and qualitatively women’s labour market participation in the maritime sector in 20th-century post-war transitions – WWI (1918-1925) and WWII (1945-1950) – in the Upper Adriatic in an intersectional perspective. The research will focus on five localities: Trieste (Italy); Koper, Izola, and Piran (Slovenia); Rijeka (Croatia). The primary objective of the WeCanIt Project was achieved through three research objectives (RO): to estimate the scope of the maritime industry in the Upper Adriatic during the periods defined above (RO1); to quantitatively assess women’s maritime labour market participation according to the intersectional approach in the Upper Adriatic in a longitudinal perspective (RO2); to identify – through case studies – the factors that influenced women’s maritime labour market participation in the Upper Adriatic during the periods defined above (RO3). The WeCanIt project represented a significant “unhooking” from the conventional – and conservative – perspective of research on the Upper Adriatic during the 20th century for the choice of the subject (maritime history), the approach (intersectionality), and the research object (women’s labour market participation). As for intersectionality, this approach examines how axes of identity (gender, social class, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, age, etc.) combine simultaneously. In the last fifteen or so, the intersectional approach has been applied with great success, especially in labour studies relating to wage inequality, discrimination and stereotyping, and immigrant and domestic labour. Recently, intersectionality figures increasingly in inequality policy development through UN and EU initiatives and diversity policy and management. In this context, intersectionality can represent an important instrument for innovative interpretative solutions concerning, for example, comparative political and social problem-solution analysis. Before the WeCanIt Project, and despite the approach’s potential in understanding complex scenarios, the intersectional analytical framework was never applied to the Upper Adriatic region.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The WeCanIt project started on 1 April 2020 and ended on 31 March 2022. Despite slowdowns and adjustments to the scheduling and project activities due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, the Project has fully achieved its objectives and milestones.
Work was conducted via 9 work packages (WPs). The Fellow was involved in all project management aspects, including the financial part (WP1). As for the training activities (WP2), the Fellow attended ca. 85 academic/learning events (i.e. webinars, lectures, workshops and/or conferences), for the most part online. The first data collection (WP3) took place at four archival institutions in Slovenia and Italy. The Fellow had access to 8 archives and ca. unique 77 items. Besides the Slovenian and Italian institutions, the second data collection (WP5) also interested the Croatian ones. The Fellow had access to 13 archives and ca. unique 123 items during this data collection.
Furthermore, the Fellow examined 11 photographic archives and managed to access 3 family archives. Moreover, during WP3 and WP5 the Fellow also collected some oral history interviews. The two data collection phases were followed by the first and second data analysis periods (WP4 and WP6). The Fellow processed all raw data to realize the quantitative analysis and examined the case studies for the qualitative analysis. Finally, the Fellow delivered ca. 11 public engagement activities (WP7) and put in place ca. 10 measures to exploit and disseminate the project results (WP8).
As for the stays at the Secondment (WP9), due to the lockdowns and the difficulties in crossing Europe, the Fellow could not spend the planned 5 months at IISH. However, to create the datasets, the Fellow had the opportunity to resort to the qualified support of the data experts of the Social Science Data Archives (ADP) of the University of Ljubljana.
Results of the WeCanIt Project are reported in: forthcoming datasets regarding the occupational situation of Zone A of the Upper Adriatic in the post-WWII period (1945-55); forthcoming articles on women’s labour market participation in the maritime sector in the 20th century post-war transitions in the Upper Adriatic; on the research blog and public history multilingual website of the WeCanIt project (www.wecanit.eu).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The WeCanIt Project has shoved the frontiers of gender, maritime labour and 20th Upper Adriatic histories forward in several ways. In particular, elements of innovation generated by the WeCanIt Project are at least three.
First of all, the Project strongly contributed to developing an innovative research topic, i.e. the combination of gender and maritime histories. Moreover, the forthcoming collective volume from the conference can represent an opportunity for an ambitious undertaking: to systematize or at least try to trace the general outlines of an innovative research sector. At last, the WeCanIt Project represented an important occasion to develop and implement gender balance in maritime studies, bringing light on the inclusion-exclusion paradox of women as seafarers.
Secondly, the two forthcoming occupational datasets represent the first in-depth studies on the labour market throughout the whole administration period of an AMG (1945-45) and during the transition to the rule of a post-WWII War Republic (1954-55). In the context of the studies on the “western” part (i.e. the one that responded to the logic of the market economy) of the Upper Adriatic region during the Cold War, the two datasets represent a decisive estrangement from mainstream research practice. In a short/medium-term perspective, this circumstance allows new and innovative comparative research perspectives on a scale never adopted for the area in question. Both datasets will be published by the ADP of the University of Ljubljana and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Finally, the public maritime Herstory website wecanit.eu is in total discontinuity with the public history practices implemented in the Upper Adriatic area. It offers four narrative paths that are characterized by a robust cross-national nature: women’s participation in the maritime labour market, labour dynamics, and daily life. All the contributions (panels) are available in four languages: English, Slovene, Italian, and Croatian. Last but not least, the website wecanit.eu also results from an experiment in transnational scientific communication, dissemination and cooperation during the Covid-19 public health emergency. Overall, it involved a curator (the Fellow), 8 authors afferent to 7 different institutions located in 4 different European countries, 6 translators, a project manager, a web developer, a photographer and graphic designer, a web hosting provider and, finally, a project partner.

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