Our Horizon 2020 project, ITHACA: Interconnecting Histories and Archives for Migrant Agency: Entangled Narratives Across Europe and the Mediterranean Region, had officially started with the completion of the project’s Kick off Meeting during the last week of April 2021.

The ITHACA project focuses on narratives of and on migrants both in the past and in the present. The main aim is to analyse the migrations from the Middle Ages until today, within a rigorous historical framework. The main goal of the project is the creation of the ITHACA platform – a digital database for researchers, practitioners, policy makers and migrants – that will enhance narratives, documents and archival sources collected during the research phase.  

During this first official meeting of the consortium had the opportunity to present in detail their responsibilities on the project’s implementation, they have discussed about the project’s main milestones and how they will achieve them and of course defined the future steps for the successful implementation of the project.  

The Kick off Meeting was followed by the implementation of the project’s first roundtable on the migration in the modern and contemporary world, during which we were honored with the participation of our key speakers – Peter Gatrell from the University of Manchester, Karina Horsti from the University of Jyväskylä, Marianne Amar from the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris, and Lex Takkenberg from Project20. This roundtable gave us the opportunity to discuss and exchange knowledge and views on the migration in the modern and contemporary world, and it was the very first step towards the implementation of future project events.