The Belgrade workshop marked the transition from quantitative to qualitative research within the COST Action IS0901, and further strengthened the collaboration between the four working groups in the action. In addition, the scientific outcomes of the workshop linked COST Action to similar projects in the field of literary research, as well as to the wider context of open source perspectives.
As announced in the program, the women`s texts were approached from the perspectives of authorship and reception in the following sessions: “Networks and Genealogies, “Male-Female Transvesting”, “Evaluating Women Authors, “Norms and Exceptions” and “Gender vs. National Identities”. The concluding lecture by Suzan van Dijk underlined the subversiveness of „normal“ activities, such as embroidery. In addition, Belgrade conference opened a new perspective in the reception of European women writers in the Far East – Japan, in the first place. The keynote lecture on multiculturalism by Aleksandra Vraneš and Ele Carpenter’s Open Source Embroidery Project brought up important issues within the wider theoretical frame of cultural studies.
The Serbian research project Knjiženstvo was also presented – most of the members of the team, including Biljana Dojčinović, the chair of the project, announced their research plans. The draft of the Knjiženstvo database, which was inspired by COST Action IS0901, as was the entire project, was also presented.
The workshop was the first international gathering at the Faculty of Philology which was exclusively focused on the topic of women’s writing. At the same time, it provided a great opportunity for the members of COST Action to be heard by a wide auditorium of the Serbian academic community since numerous colleagues, professors, students, and researchers from various institutes, museums and libraries, located in Belgrade or in other Serbian cities, witnessed the meeting.