GEO
Memory Research Center

Developing women’s oral histories as an academic discipline, documenting and publishing these histories is one of the Taso’s working directions. It started in 2011 and is a long-term program of Taso Foundation.

publishing series of “women’s memory” was founded in 2004. In 2013 the tenth book of the series was published. These series are directed to raising awareness about the women’s rights condition, tolerance and peace topics. At the same time, the narratives that are published according to the oral history methodology represent an important and yet unused resource of the social sciences.

Taso foundation has an archive of oral histories collected consecutively since 2001: documented texts, photos, audio and video materials. Only half of these materials are published. It is important to develop women’s oral histories as a social science field and a university discipline.

The working directions of the fund includes:

  • Publishing a new book of the women’s memory;
  • Conducting methodological seminars and grant cycles for documenting women’s oral histories;
  • Establishing/deepening cooperation with higher education schools and scientific research organizations in order to institutionalize women’s oral histories; also conducting methodological seminars for the adjacent field researchers/students;
  • Serving the interested researchers/students: the archive and library of the women’s oral histories.

Spreading feministic values:

The feministic library is the foundation’s long-term program which started in 2007. There are 4 books published in the frames of these series. The feministic library publications, which aim to inculcate feministic values and support women’s movement in Georgia, are published for wide audience.

The memory center library is based on the women’s program library(collected since 2000, given to the center in 2004), which is filled with women’s program and other organization’s publications, open society institute women’s program/independent program publications, also the publications collected from the international seminars/work meetings. Important materials were given to us by the invited lecturers Andrea Peto (Central European University, Hungry) and Selma Leidesdorf (Amsterdam University, Holland).

Serving the researchers: Just as the women’s program was doing until 2004, the women’s memory research center was working as a library to serve the researchers, journalists, women’s organizations interested in gender/women’s research, women’s rights and other adjacent topics.

In spite of the fact that during different times several gender resource centers have been funded(among them from the Open Society programs), our memory research center archive and library are still especially important as ones accessible for masses and constantly renewed. One of the priority programs of the women’s program is gender and education (code 16 314). The main users of memory research center library and archive are the researchers and trainers involved in all three directions of this program. Purchasing a new computer is connected to attracting new target groups – students/young researchers to work in the memory research center.