Making Waves... of Words

Posted on 7 July 2025

What’s migration got to do with feminism? And what have they got to do with you?

It all started with a word: “associations.”

And then came meaning.

The cortile of the Biblioteca Sala Borsa in Bologna saw the beginning of this project during an October, shy-sun-lit, lunchtime break. We agreed that we wanted to see what we make of words – and what words make of us. Weaving together two of the many concerns that the EUTERPE Project grapples with, feminism and migration, we came up with the idea of facilitating an interactive game of scrabble played on a world map: a wor(l)d map.

Fast-forward eight months, and we are setting up the space at the York Explore Library, on the city’s Pride Day, in the context of the annual York Festival of Ideas whose theme of the year was “Making Waves.” It felt fitting then that this idea would travel transnationally and across bodies of water, from one public library to another. While setting up we could feel the resonances between the energy, openness, and community impact of the two spaces.

In this lapse of time and place, we integrated a multimodal component into this project: participants could write, embroider, draw, cut letters out of felt and paste them on to the wor(l)d map. We asked them to allow two questions to guide their contributions:

What do you think of when you think “feminism?”
What do you think of when you think “migration?”

The unstructured nature of the activity allowed participants to choose how long they wished to interact with the words – a second-long glance, a short verbal contribution, a minute or two to spell out a word, or a several-hours-long seated embroidery challenge. During these moments we encouraged the participants to converse (with us and with each other), about the topics in question and about language itself.

Over the two days that we spent in the library, we estimated we crossed paths with just under a hundred people from all paths of life: York residents, day-visitors, enthusiastic returnees who live somewhere else, national and international tourists, newly-settled Yorkers, University students and academics, kids on their weekly family trip to the library to pick up some books, habitués of York Explore, its staff members, etc…

We encouraged spontaneous associations, personal, unfiltered and multilingual. Conscious that the two starting terms, feminism and migration, are contentious, we wanted to gauge if the current political rhetoric was having an effect on how we think, and feel our way through, these topics. The responses were overwhelmingly passionate and inspired. Many of the participants sat down and spent hours with us, sharing their life stories and world visions. The tangible result is a map that speaks for empowerment and hope (both these words feature on it too): “love” appears a few times, often related to the memories places hold and the people who are in them; “freedom” has been framed as an obvious one, but one that we all agreed could never feature too many times on it; one brilliant participant, around the age of nine, confidently declared that her contribution just had to be “empathy;” interestingly, “home” appeared quite late – do we rarely make home or we just know we carry it with us? –; we can also see “football” which was the gateway into feminism for one of our younger participants.

We were keen to encourage multilingual and multi-alphabetical contributions, and here is where words like “sisu” (untranslatable Finnish term denoting an attitude of the spirit which encompasses resilience, determination, ambition and courage), “mer” (sea in French), “saoirse” (freedom in Irish), “familia” (family in Spanish), and “línguanhônha” (mother tongue, literally “women’s tongue” in Macanese Patuá) appear and leave a mark. Choosing not to translate words but carry them in their foreignness into an Anglophone environment is not just a matter of vocabulary, but rather of meaning-making itself.

Ultimately, and most importantly, words, as they carry meaning, carry us all too. During the two days we ran the activity, we could not shy away from the contentious nature of the concepts we were offering, as we had to confront how words feel differently in-and-on different individuals, as their meanings morph and shift continuously. Participants shared their conflicted feelings in relation to migration which, as a lived experience, is for many infused with “hope” and “freedom” but for others is a site of undeniable “struggle” and perpetual “translation.” Given the latest developments on the matter of gender recognition, “feminism” could not remain an unscathed site of “strength” and “resilience;” rather, we had to confront the reality that for many it also arises a sense of “disappointment” and “anger” in its exclusive and unwelcoming appropriation that excludes trans- and non-binary experiences, ultimately turning the concept into a betrayal.

Therefore, on the completed-but-never-finished wor(l)d map exhibited in these pictures, all of these emotions and lived experiences meet and speak to one another. As “wonder” so easily becomes “wander,” and “differences” are “bridged” by “solidarity” and “amistad,” so too do we hope that this activity has had a transformational impact on its participants, bringing our many local/national/transnational communities together through the simple act of putting pen to fabric and making waves of words.¹

The map will be exhibited at the York Explore Library in 2026 and at the University of York Library in the near future.

Thank you to all those who took the time to add their words.

Authors:

Alice Flinta (University of York), and Evangeline Petra Scarpulla (University of Bologna)