Italy

The Women's WORLD Program in Italy: Memory and Culture in the Life Histories of Kosovar Women. In 1999, the Associazione Orlando and Women's WORLD began a partnership project to develop an oral archive, using cassette tape recorders, that would preserve the memories and culture of Albanian women and enable them to be heard in the rest of the world. The project was originally designed to focus on women in Albania, women in Kosovo, and Albanian women who had emigrated to Italy. Once the war broke out in Kosovo, however, emphasis shifted to preserving the experiences of women there. The purpose was not to make a collection of journalistic testimonies about the war, but to record the memories of what existed before the war and eventually be able to put the life histories of Kosovar women in the context of the life histories of other women in the region.