Mobility in the Post-War Border Areas: Detecting Refugees in Gendered Perspective

The main empirical source serving as a basis of the presentation is rich archival material of the districts of Radovljica and Logatec (both in the Kingdom SHS) after World War I. These two rural districts represented the newly established border areas to Italy and/or Austria and recorded a high-rate mobility, stemming from complex factors: pre-war migratory patterns, the total war (along with the demographic consequences of the Isonzo Front), and the post-war social and political changes. The presentation will focus on population strata that were forced to migrate, and observe them from various angles (citizenship, social integration, morality, various demographic categories), with special attention to violence and gender aspects.

About the author

Urška Strle graduated in History at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana in 2004. Between 2006 and 2010. She worked as a young research fellow at the Slovenian Migration Institute at the Science Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana. In 2010 she completed her PhD thesis entitled Slovenians in Canada: Emigration through the Prism of Oral Testimony. In 2012 she was selected for a postdoctoral fellowship to research Slovenians in Canada, funded by the International Committee for Canadian Studies in Ottawa. Since 2013 she has worked as a research fellow at the Department of History in Ljubljana and since 2017 she has held seminars of Migration History and Oral History at the same institution.

She collaborates on the EIRENE project.