Democratic Memory of Women in Spain

Direction: Rosa San Segundo

Codirection: Matilde Eiroa

Inscripción

Location: Aula 2.A.04. Campus Madrid – Puerta de Toledo.

Target Audience

Undergraduate, Postgraduate, and International students, and Senior University participants.

Speakers

Direction: Rosa San Segundo. Co-director: Matilde Eiroa. Link to CV. Speakers:

Matilde Eiroa. Académica Senior, UC3M.
Encarnación Barranquero, Universidad de Málaga.
Pilar Domínguez Prats, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Rosa San Segundo, UC3M
Rubén Burén, Professor, writer, and Researcher at the University of Design, Innovation, and Technology (UDIT).
Manuela Aroca, Fundación Pablo Iglesias.
Francisco Etxeberria Gabilondo, Advisor to the Secretariat of State for Democratic Memory.
Elena Sánchez Galindo, City Councilor for Youth and Democratic Memory of the Getafe City Council.

Program

Monday, June 22
10:00 AM to 12:00 PM. Opening and introduction to the course by the directors.
Women always present: protagonists and subordinates, Matilde Eiroa. Senior Academic, UC3M.
12:00 PM to 12:30 PM. Break.
12:30 PM to 2:30 PM. Imprisoned, executed, and buried in mass graves, Encarnación Barranquero, University of Málaga.

Tuesday, June 23
10:00 AM to 12:00 PM. Women in trade unions and the labor movement. Manuela Aroca, Largo Caballero Foundation.
12:00 PM to 12:30 PM. Break.
12:30 PM to 2:30 PM. Documentation for the study of the memory and history of women. Rosa San Segundo, UC3M.

Wednesday, June 24
10:00 AM to 12:00 PM. Women in anti-Francoist guerrillas: from liaisons to resource providers. Speaker: Rubén Burén, Professor, writer, and Researcher at the University of Design, Innovation, and Technology (UDIT).
De 12 a 12:30h. Break.
De 12:30 a 14.30h. 12:30 a 14:30 h. Screening of the film “Maquis”, a tribute to our grandmothers. Presented by: Rubén Burén, film director.

Thursday, June 25
10:00 AM to 12:00 PM. Exiled women: Mexico and France as primary destinations. Survival and adaptation. Pilar Domínguez Prats, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
12:00 PM to 12:30 PM. Break.
12:30 PM to 1:30 PM. Donors of Memory: testimonies of women fighting for democracy. Presented by: Matilde Eiroa.
1:30 PM to 2:30 PM. Short films on Women and Democratic Memory. Presented by: Rosa San Segundo.

Friday, June 26
10:00 AM to 12:00 PM. Round Table: Women’s Memory in the actions of the Secretariat of State for Democratic Memory and the Getafe City Council. Francisco Etxeberria Gabilondo, Advisor to the Secretariat of State for Democratic Memory, and Elena Sánchez Galindo, City Councilor for Youth and Democratic Memory of the Getafe City Council. Presented by: Rosa San Segundo.
12:00 PM to 12:30 PM. Break.
12:30 PM to 2:00 PM. Screening of the film Las cartas perdidas (The Lost Letters). Presented by: Matilde Eiroa.

Course Objectives and Motivations

This course aims to promote the duty of memory as enshrined in international law and human rights, focusing on education regarding truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-repetition. It is set within the framework of recovering the memory and history of women who lived through the Second Republic, the Civil War, and the Francoist regime, and who fought for democratic values.
In line with this effort to disseminate our past, the course addresses aspects such as repressed and imprisoned women, those executed by firing squads, those disappeared and buried in mass graves, exiles, post-war survival strategies, and female guerrilla fighters. Although the quantitative scale of persecution against them was lower than that of their male counterparts, women were targets of gender-specific violence. It is crucial to understand the underlying ideology and the techniques applied to dismantle the opposition and the rights acquired during the Republican era.
Equally, the course proposes to spread knowledge about those women who overcame labor, educational, and ideological barriers from the 1950s onwards. This includes students, workers, and those belonging to neighborhood, associative, and feminist movements who—using skills learned after years of obstacles to their personal and professional development—opened doors that led to the beginning of a democratic process after Franco’s death.

Upon completing the course, students will realize that the most emblematic value of the classical world is not the elitist character of its education or a particular monumental aesthetic (to cite two typical categories of the interpretation given throughout the 19th century), but rather the capacity to thematize every human problem, transforming it into a source of personal and collective teaching, fruitful and always enriching. From this experience, capable of converting the intimate drama of existence into a rational theme (thus allowing the birth of philosophy and Attic tragedy), or the difficulties of community life into political reflection, or the imitation of nature into art and technique, emerges that freedom of spirit that permeates all humanisms throughout history and that remains one of the priority ideals of the contemporary world.

Furthermore, the classical tradition is much closer to the paradigms of digital culture than one might imagine: if the “digital humanities” constitute in a certain way a form of re-imagining the traditional humanities, rethinking the development of the human being in relation to their history and culture through new possibilities for creating and disseminating knowledge, it is well known that the legacy of Greco-Roman civilization has been performing this same task for centuries, updating itself in each era, according to the urgencies of the societies that return to study Antiquity, to find in it answers about their own time.

CURRICULUM

Direction: Rosa San Segundo. Codirección: Matilde Eiroa

Rosa San Segundo is a Professor at the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) in Information and Documentation, specializing in Classification Systems, Knowledge Organization, Gender Perspective in Science, Equality, and Women’s Democratic Memory. She has served as the Director of the Department of Library and Information Science and the Institute of Gender Studies at UC3M. Additionally, she has been the President of the Iberian Chapter of ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization) and an evaluator for the National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA). She is currently the President of the University Platform for Feminist and Gender Studies (EUFEM).

Matilde Eiroa San Francisco is Senior Academic at the Carlos III University of Madrid, specializing in the period of the Civil War and Francoism, specifically in the study of repression, international relations, mass media, and women’s history. She has directed research projects related to the history and digital memory of said period. She has been a guest lecturer at international universities such as Harvard, Sheffield, Prague, and Warsaw. Furthermore, she contributes to democratic memory as a founding member of the 20th Century Historical Memory Chair at the UCM, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Documentary Center of Historical Memory, and a member of the Advisory Council of both the Memory Institute of Navarra and the Documentary Fund of Historical Memory in Navarra. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Spanish University Foundation and the “Women’s Memory” collection at the University of Salamanca Press.

Teaching Team

The teaching team for the course “The Classical World in the Digital Era: New Challenges” consists of six people, including the Directors, with equal representation between men and women (3+3). Coming from different but complementary disciplines such as Philology, Law, Archaeology and History, they have all been cooperating for many years, working together on the research lines of the “Lucio Anneo Séneca” Institute of Classical Studies at UC3M. This institute is at the forefront in the Spanish and international sphere in the field of “digital humanities,” developing a series of projects for the online publication of databases and digitization of documents related to the classical world and its survival throughout history. Regarding teaching activity related to the promotion, updating and scientific presentation of various aspects of the classical world, the six course instructors demonstrate a long teaching trajectory, of which the following activities are worth highlighting:

Francisco L. Lisi Bereterbide was for many years coordinator of the Classical Studies area in the Department of Humanities at UC3M and instructor of the undergraduate courses “Classical Culture” and “Transmission of the Classical Legacy” and the graduate course “The Transmission of the Classical Legacy.” Founder and first director of the “Lucio Anneo Séneca” Institute of Classical Studies.

Rosa M. Carreño Sánchez has been teaching, in both Spanish and English, the Humanities Course “Daily Life and Norms in Rome/Daily life and norms in Rome” for more than five years. This course is taught at the Getafe and Colmenarejo Campuses and is offered to students of different nationalities and from the most diverse degree programs (Law, Economics, Business Administration, Computer Engineering, etc.). She has experience in creating digital libraries, having participated in the digitization and publication of the “Antecessores” ancient legal collection of the Library of the Universitat de Girona.

Ana M. Rodríguez González was coordinator of the Conference on Greco-Roman Criminal Law: Crimes and Punishments in Antiquity, organized by the “Lucio Anneo Séneca” Institute of Classical Studies as early as 2008. Since then and to this day, one of the lines of her teaching activity has been dedicated to disseminating how criminal justice was perceived and organized in ancient history. On this topic and others also related to Roman culture, society, and law, she has taught numerous Humanities Courses and has published several didactic works designed to explain these subjects through a careful selection of texts. She has also participated in various research projects aimed at analyzing the relationship between Law and religion in the past of Greece and Rome.