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In September, doctorate candidate María Auxiliadora Castillo Soto organized and delivered a workshop as part of her internship with ILFU. ILFU  is the International Literature Festival in Utrecht, who hosts and organizes the biggest literature festival in the Netherlands. This year’s festival lasted two weeks and presented over 200 authors from different countries to an audience of +20,000 who attended the different events offered. Aside from the festival, ILFU also organizes other public events and offer a range of writing and reading courses through their ILFU Academy platform. It was in this platform that our doctorate candidate hosted the ILFU Academy Workshop on Life Writing . The workshop was open to the public. Auxi Castillo Soto introduced varied concepts on transnational life writing and provided different prompts to practice free and speed writing on a topic of the participants’ preference. Participants shared their writing experience and their written texts with others. In subgroups, they listen to each other, provided feedback and generated discussions. Life writing serves as a healing process of expression, more so, if done in communal spaces. Auxi Castillo Soto make sure to provide participants with a safe space to experiment and practice with life writing as a tool to find their own voice and share their stories. Besides the participatory aspect of the workshop, participants discussed the topic of life writing with  Alejandra Ortiz  and  Chérissa Iradukunda,  two first-time authors who published their migratory journeys to the Netherlands. First, the authors read excerpts from their transnational life writing narratives, and later, participants asked them questions about their books, their stories, and their experiences as life writing authors. This Q&A session was recorded and it can be found as a podcast in EUTERPE’s Podcast Library . This was a great experience for Auxi Castillo Soto who learned about the Dutch working environment and acquired important soft skills to enhance her professional profile and CV. We want to thank for becoming a project’s partner and allowing the doctorate candidate the space to develop such an enriching workshop.

By Alice Flinta In June this year, EUTERPE doctoral candidate Alice Flinta participated in the seventeenth annual Black Europe Summer School – Interrogating Citizenship, Race and Ethnic Relations . The organisers, Prof. Kwame Nimako, Dr Camilla Hawthorne (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Prof. Stephen Small (University of California, Berkeley), brought us together – an enthusiastic cohort of around thirty-five students from various backgrounds – for two weeks, at IIRE, the International Institute for Research and Education in Amsterdam. BESS is a hub for intellectual, political, and social interrogation over race relations in Europe. This year it opened with an introductory talk by Prof. Nimako delineating a concise history of the coming together of the European Union. The lecture focused on which social and political stakeholders have been involved in the process, and which ones haven’t. Such an approach underscored the analysis of the EU’s power structure, its economic interests and social priorities. It shed light on the emergence of racist, nativist views that are reflected in current systems of “racial citizenship” and are fundamental to the notion of Fortress Europe. [PB1]   The second day, we started by taking a tour of four European port cities and their relationships with Blackness, intellectually guided by Prof. Olivette Otele (SOAS), whose copies of African-Europeans: An Untold Story  (London: Hurst & Company, 2020) were resting on most desks that day. From day three, we started to zoom into the different national realities, and approached race and race relations on a country-by-country basis. We started with Dr Margaret Amaka Ohia-Nowak (Marie Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin) guiding us though “Black Poland,” to then move onto “Black Germany” with Dr Madeline Bass (Max Planck Institute, Göttingen), “Black Britain” with Prof. Stephen Small, “Black Italia” with Dr Camilla Hawthorne, and “Black Portugal” with Dr Cristina Roldão (University Institute of Lisbon). In one of our last seminars, Dr Giovanni Picker (University of Glasgow) prompted us to move beyond the framework of the nation-state and adopt a transnational and transhistorical lens to assess the potentialities of juxtaposing Black European and Critical Romani Studies. [PB2]  Participants had the chance to present their research, projects and ideas at the day-long Inside Black Europe and African Diaspora Symposium  that took place on Friday, 27 June. The symposium was organised around four panels, the topics of which ranged from literature to sociological, ethnographic and methodological research, and a preview screening of a documentary on Afrori Books – Books by Black Authors  bookshop in Brighton (UK). Inspired by Dr Hawthorne’s “Black Italia”, I gave a presentation on how Afroitalian literature draws on the Mediterranean (as a relational space, but also as a philosophical framework) to disrupt and challenge racial affiliations in Europe. Fundamental to BESS is experiencing and engaging with legacies, memories and responses to Europe’s colonial past. For this purpose, the participation of the School’s cultural attaché, Jennifer Tosch, founder of Amsterdam’s Black Heritage Tours , was invaluable. From a boat tour of Amsterdam’s colonial past to a visit to Kehinde Wiley’s exhibition at the Van Loon Museum , from a guided excursion of the Royal Palace to a preview talk and walk on the site of the forthcoming National Slavery Museum , to the unforgettable Keti Koti Day on 1 st  July, Tosch brought to life many of the discussions that took place throughout the two weeks of workshops. Finally, the tour of the Wereldmuseum’s exhibition Our Colonial Inheritance  and the lecture by Wayne Modest were crucial to spark conversations on the management and remembrance of colonial legacies and their future. BESS is a fundamental experience not only for those who think, write and feel with and through questions of race and Blackness in Europe, but also for those who think, write and feel through Europe. As the many workshops, talks, lectures and presentations have made clear, Blackness has been, and regretfully remains, a marginal question within the European project – be it intellectual, social or political. Black Europe  is not just an educational programme, but also a social and political mission that leaves us, participants, with both an invaluable range of tools and frameworks to make our work more careful, caring and attuned to reality, and a renewed sense of engagement and purpose.

During this year’s Feminisms in a Transnational Perspective Postgraduate Course  held May 12-16 at the Dubrovnik (Croatia) IUC , we had a chance to present some of the results of the EUTERPE project. Under the title “The Otherwise of History”, the 18 th  Postgraduate Course gathered feminists across disciplines to consider the subversive potential of feminist and women’s history and to discuss how thinking historically from a transnational and feminist perspective can contribute to a politics of solidarity and alliances. As part of the panel Women, Counter Memory, and Feminist Resistance , Tamara Cvetković, EUTERPE DC based at the CEU, presented her research on women’s counter-narratives on Chechen asylum seekers in Austria based on the novel Losses in Friction by Mascha Dabic. On a roundtable about the GEMMA ERASMUS Mundus program – Transnational Futures, Thinking Across Generations, Jasmina Lukić, the Principal Leader of EUTERPE, talked about the importance of feminist networks, knowledge dissemination, transnational connections, and about the cooperation between EUTERPE and GEMMA program. The roundtable was moderated by EUTERPE’s Granada PI, Adelina Sánchez Espinosa.   https://www.facebook.com/interuniversitycentre/ https://www.instagram.com/iucdubrovnik/?hl=en

Team Granada Adelina Sánchez Espinosa Principal Investigator Adelina Sánchez Espinosa is senior Lecturer at the University of Granada and Scientific Coordinator of GEMMA: Erasmus Mundus Master and Consortium in Women's and Gender Studies; PI for the "Reception, modes and gender" Andalusian Research Group and the "Gender Responsible Lecturing Labs: Interfacing cultural and visual cultures Andalusian Research Project of Excellence, UGR PI for H2020 MSCA EUTERPE Project (EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender in Transnational Perspective") and a Horizon Chanse project: DIGISCREENS Identities and Democratic values on European digital screens: Distribution, reception and representation. She is Series Editor of the Researching with GEMMA collection (Peter Lang) She was the Vice-President of AOIFE (Association of Institutions for Feminist Research and Education in Europe): Director of International Relations for the UGR, Executive Secretary of the UGR Women's Studies Research Institute and Series Editor for the UGR "FEMINAE" Book collection. Some of her latest publications are: "Feminist Counter-Cinema and Decolonial Countervisuality. Un'ora sola ti vorrei and Pays Barbare (with Calderón Sandoval, Studies in Documentary Film, 2021); Seeking Eccentricity, Special Issue for Sociology and Technoscience Journal and Feminist Research Alliances: Affective Convergences (Peter Lang, 2022). Angela Harris Sánchez Researcher Angela Harris Sánchez holds a BA in Art history (Granada University), an MPhil in Art Therapy (Complutense University), the GEMMA double Erasmus Mundus Master and a double International PhD in Women's Studies, Discourses and Gender Practices (UGR) and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures (University of Bologna). She has been a National Research Fellow (FPU) and is now UGR-Postdoc and lecturer in the Archaeology Department. Recent publications are "Artherapy, Queer Failure and Horizontal Learning Experience in Students' Postmemory Family Narratives" (co-author). "Beyond Being: Dissident (ificatory) Responses towards a Heritage of Becoming" and "Contesting power in public art spaces. Liminal p(l)aces, diverting methodologies and observant participation in Valor y Cambio". Beatriz Revelles-Benavente Researcher Beatriz Revelles-Benavente is Permanent Lecturer at the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation and the local coordinator for the GEMMA: Erasmus Mundus Master in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Granada. She is co-editor of one section in the journal Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research. She has also co-edited the collection Teaching Gender: Feminist Responsibility and Politics in Times of Crisis and is the author of Feminist Literature as Everyday Use: A New Materialist Methodology for Critical Thinking. Before, she was granted a postdoctoral fellowship "Juan de la Cierva" at the University of Barcelona (UB) at the department of Cultural Pedagogies. She was also part of the board committee of the European Association Atgender: The European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation. Orianna Calderón-Sandoval Researcher Orianna Calderón-Sandoval is Junior Lecturer in Gender Studies and English Cultures at the University of Granada (UGR). She is also affiliated to the Women’s and Gender Studies Research Institute of UGR. Her research interests are located at the intersections of gender/feminist studies and film/audiovisual/transmedia studies. Among her recent publications are “Implementing Gender Equality Policies in the Spanish Film Industry”, International Journal of Cultural Policy (2021); “Debating Sexual Consent in the Teen Series The Hockey Girls: Reactions of Instagram Audiences”, co-written with Isabel Villegas-Simón and Pilar Medina-Bravo, Sex Education (2023); “Entanglements of feminist activism and gender equality policy in the Spanish and Swedish film industries: between convergence and critique”, co-written with Maria Jansson, Journal of Gender Studies (2024); and “Race-ing Masculinity: An Intersectional Analysis of the Spanish Public Platform Series Riders", co-written with Ángela Rivera-Izquierdo and Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, Feminist Media Histories (2024). https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9113-9010 She completed her PhD at the universities of Granada and Bologna, with a research project that focuses on feminist practices in documentary cinema. She was an Early Stage Researcher for GRACE “Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe”, Horizon 2020, Marie Curie Research Project (ESR 13: Visualising Gender Equality in Europe through Art and Screen).

María Auxiliadora Castillo Soto Utrecht University Doctoral Candidate María Auxiliadora Castillo Soto holds an Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies (GEMMA) from the universities of Granada in Spain and Ł ódź in Poland. She also holds a Master’s Degree in World Languages, Literature, and Linguistics from West Virginia University in the United States. Her research has focused on the teaching of English and Spanish as second languages, and literary analyses with an interdisciplinary perspective. In a broader sense, her research interests span feminist literary criticism, migration studies, transnational literature, postcolonial studies, and gender studies. Her teaching experience at the university level has ranged from teaching English and Spanish to Latin American culture and introductory gender studies courses. For the EUTERPE Project: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective, María Auxiliadora’s research analyzes how daily embodiments of transnational self-identified women serve as adaptation and survival strategies in the host countries, and how these same strategies may also represent a sense of autonomy, power, and resistance. The project focuses on the analysis of non-fictional autobiographical works written by transnational subjects who have migrated and resettled in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom to identify the different ways in which these embodiments challenge European belonging and identification. Contributions: Challenging European Identity: Representations of Female Transnational Experiences in Marrón by Rocío Quillahuaman Challenging the Idea of Europe: Representations of Female Transnational Experiences in Chérissa Iradukunda's Broken Object Ponzanesi, Sandra, and Maria Auxiliadora Castillo Soto. 2025. "Postcolonial Intellectuals: Exploring Belonging Across Borders in Igiaba Scego’s La mia casa è dove sono (My Home Is Where I Am) " Social Sciences 14, no. 4: 209. Andrea Abreu's Dogs of Summer : An in-depth exploration of working-class adolescenthood Conveying Migrant Experiences through Literature

Angela Harris Sánchez University of Granada Researcher Angela Harris Sánchez holds a BA in Art history (Granada University), an MPhil in Art Therapy (Complutense University), the GEMMA double Erasmus Mundus Master and a double International PhD in Women's Studies, Discourses and Gender Practices (UGR) and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures (University of Bologna). She has been a National Research Fellow (FPU) and is now UGR-Postdoc and lecturer in the Archaeology Department. Publications: Queering Power: Affective Relational Anarchies, F(r)ictions and Disidentifications beyond Identity, Universidad de Almería, (2024). “Artherapy, Queer Failure and Horizontal Learning Experience in Students’ Postmemory Family Narratives” in Feminist Literary and Filmic Cultures for Social Action . Gender Response-able Labs. London and New York: Routledge (2024)