In her keynote, Laura Lee Downs’ focuses on social welfare schemes for preschool teachers in Italy’s Northeastern Borderlands, 1920-1940. Preschools were a vital source of basic welfare to needy children in these impoverished lands, and the teachers were the providers of these social services. But who looked after the well-being of these young women whose job was to provide education and socio-medical care to the region’s children? The lecture explores the fate of some 250 young women who were sent to remote villages along the Italo-Yugoslav frontier, where they struggled to accomplish their mission under difficult conditions.
Laura Lee Downs is Professor in the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence and Directrice d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where she holds the chair ‘La Gestion sociale : France-Angleterre, XXe siècle.’
The event will be hybrid. Online participation: https://unimeet.uni-graz.at/b/sch-zxk-gm8-nkt