A report on the workshop “Petitioning on the Move”, written by Emilia Henkel (Historisches Institut, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität-Jena), was published on H-Soz-Kult.
The workshop was organized by Masaryk Institute and Archives, Czech Academy of Sciences; in cooperation with the ERC-funded projects “NEPOSTRANS – Negotiating post-imperial transitions: from remobilization to nation-state consolidation. A comparative study of local and regional transitions in post-Habsburg East and Central Europe” and “Unlikely Refuge? Refugees and citizens in East-Central Europe in the 20th century”.
Researching groups that are marginalised, discriminated against or exposed to violence often presents historians with the same problem: Their voices are hard to find in archival materials commonly used in the discipline. Petitions as a source genre might present a solution to this dilemma. Used by marginalised people on the move as a tool to acquire aid and archived by the addressed institutions, they offer insights into people who left few other written traces. The workshop “Petitioning on the move” therefore brought together historians from all over Europe working with petitions as sources in their research on migration or other situations of liminality when people and/or borders were on the move.
Read more at H-Soz-Kult
