On Tuesday 4 February 2025, at 5 p.m., at the Conference Room of the Stelio Crise State Library, Largo Papa Giovanni XXIII no. 6, in Trieste, a conference entitled ‘Trieste Migrante. Stories, borders and memories of refugees from 1945 to the present’ will take place.

Starting from Roberta Altin's publication ‘Border Heritage. Migration and Displaced Memories in Trieste’, Lanham-London, Lexington Rowman & Littlefield, 2024, the author dialogues with Tullia Catalan, contemporary historian at the Department of Humanistic Studies (DISU) and Alessandro Monsutti, Graduate Institute of International & Development Studies in Geneva, anthropologist expert on refugees and Afghanistan, who was a visiting researcher at the Department of Humanistic Studies at the University of Trieste.

The publication ‘Border Heritage’ opens new perspectives in migration studies through the analysis of the emblematic border of Trieste itself, crossed by four waves of refugee migration in the period 1945-2022. The book starts with the arrival of displaced Ukrainians, then analyses asylum seekers from the Balkans, refugees from the former Yugoslavia and the post-war exodus from Istria; the second part focuses on dispersed places, objects and memories. Each chapter begins with a first-person account by a refugee and the narrative plot offers a thread that analyses how different migrations have stratified, overlapped and contaminated each other. Critically rethinking the inheritance of a border area means reviewing cognitive categories and being able to perceive the different nuances of those on the margins, without necessarily wanting to merge them into a generic social inclusion. The theme of border heritages and identities is part of the project on ‘Common European Heritage’ entrusted to UNITS as WP7 coordination within the T4EU project involving an alliance network of ten European universities.

The conference is co-organised by the Stelio Crise State Library with the UNITS Humanities Department; T4EU - Transform for Europe.

Contact person: Roberta Altin raltin@units.it