Social and Labour History News

Hybrid seminar at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, 2 November 2025

In recent years, labour and its many worlds have once again occupied a central place in historiographical debates on the history of the Americas. This renewed interest has not only brought a critical lens to hierarchies, coercion, and violence—both past and present—but has also sought to examine the agency, negotiations, connections, and strategies of those who, from below, acted amid various forms of inequality. We are grounded in a tradition of social and cultural labour history that seeks to understand the heterogeneous labour realities across the Americas. This field of study has placed workers—men and women—their families, support networks, spaces of socialisation, and lives in movement at the centre of analysis, enriching the notion of "worlds of labour" by showing how labour experiences are deeply intertwined with cultural values, political identities, and racial and gender relations. This fertile historiography has pushed beyond the factory, the union, and the white male worker as the privileged historical subject and beyond the classic periodisations that defined labour as a by-product of capitalism and the industrial revolution.

From this perspective, we aim to contribute to the global and connected histories of labour, focusing on the period between the 16th and 19th centuries, and inviting reflections on how racial and gendered relations shaped these labouring worlds. We seek to make explicit how collective imaginaries of difference have been inscribed in labour dynamics, reinforcing, challenging, and subverting established hierarchies. We aim to echo these entangled conversations and are particularly committed to including the voices of young scholars from the global South—voices that have too often been sidelined in these historiographical debates. In addressing these absences, we highlight, on one hand, disparities in access to research funding and the pervasive preference for English as the default language for narrating the history of the Americas. On the other hand, we underscore the persistence of historiographical traditions that have long taken methodological nationalism as both their point of departure and arrival.

We are especially interested in contributions that question, expand, or reframe methodological nationalism in the Americas by focusing on the transnational circulation of people, ideas, and labour practices. We welcome, in particular, studies that explore connections between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and labour circuits across the Pacific that can challenge Atlantic centrality. To that end, we invite research that explicitly employs connected history methodologies (e.g., multi-case studies, network analysis, prosopography, or transnational microhistory) and that integrates interdisciplinary approaches (history, anthropology, sociology, gender studies) to investigate the intersections of race, gender, and labour. By centring the Americas in this analysis, we open space for comparative and relational inquiries into colonisation, population movements, the imposition of diverse forms of coerced labour, and the formation of global markets and exchange networks.

In this spirit, we encourage submissions in multiple languages (Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French) and, through a hybrid format, seek to broaden participation among researchers with limited access to funding or traditional academic venues.

Important information:

The seminar Between Two Oceans: Connected Histories of Labour, Race, and Gender in the Americas (16th–19th centuries) will take place on 12 November 2025 at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), in a hybrid format. The event is promoted by Laboratório de Pesquisas em Conexões Atlânticas (CNPq/PUC-Rio). We look forward to welcoming in-person and remote participants whose proposals are selected.

Deadline for abstract submissions: 31 May 2025
Deadline for extended abstracts (up to 12 pages): 15 September 2025
Submissions to: gmitidieri@gmail.com / fidelrodv@gmail.com

Contact Information

Fidel Rodríguez Velásquez (fidelrodv@gmail.com)
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) 

Gabriela Mitidieri (gmitidieri@gmail.com)
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)
Instituto de Investigaciones de Estudios de Género (UBA)

Contact Email fidelrodv@gmail.com

Conference in Dresden, 15-17 April 2026

8. Hermann-Weber-Konferenz zur Historischen Kommunismusforschung (2026): “Punitive education. On the relationship between violence, ideology and care in ‘total institutions’ under communist rule”

Organizers: Prof. Dr. Thomas Lindenberger (Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at TU Dresden /HAIT/), Dr. Klára Pinerová (Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague /ÚSD/, HAIT) and PD Dr. Udo Grashoff (HAIT) in cooperation with the “Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung”, funded by the “Gerda-und-Hermann-Weber-Stiftung in der Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung”.

Location: Gedenkstätte Bautzner Straße, Dresden

Date: April 15-17, 2026

Deadline for abstracts: June 15, 2025

The communist regimes of the 20th century are often referred to as ‘educational dictatorships’ as they saw the (re-)education of each individual as the basis for building a socialist society. According to the communist understanding of the historical necessity of transition from capitalism to a communist society, it was not only the power structures and production relations that were to be overturned. At the same time, a ‘new man’ was to emerge who would leave behind the individualistic and egoistic attitudes of the exploitative society and, thanks to his intellectual and moral abilities, would harmonise with the collectivist principles of Marxism-Leninism out of his own ‘insight into necessity’. Only then, according to the communist dogma, would the antagonism of individual and society, as well as the division of society into classes, be finally overcome.

This ‘historical necessity’ had to be achieved through control and, if necessary, coercion. The ‘new man’ – later on in the context of the GDR: the ‘fully developed socialist personality’ - was to be created through targeted intervention in all areas of society with the help of surveillance and punishment. This applied to the party itself, it applied to the centre of society in large companies, mass organisations, education and leisure. This communist educational compulsion was also implemented and experienced in a particularly striking way at the margins of society where individuals branded as ‘parasites’, ‘asocials’ or ‘insane’ did not behave in accordance with social norms or deliberately violated them.

The conference will focus on those institutions and social places where people were particularly exposed to repressive re-education. We are talking about labour colonies, camps, youth work centres, special children's homes, but also regular prisons, in which the idea of re-education through labour and within a collective, often in reference to the Soviet pedagogue Makarenko, was the official guiding principle. For the study of these institutions it is important to pay close attention to the relationship between ideals and norms and practice. According to theory, the logic of revenge and retribution did not inform such re-education. The explicit aim was to reintegrate everyone into socialist society. However, the practices of punitive education in numerous ‘total institutions’ of real socialism thwarted these self-declared goals and turned them into their opposite. They caused or favoured the development of group dynamics that were characterised by a high degree of violence, humiliation and contempt for humanity, and this systematically and permanently. In consequence, communist rule created and reproduced its own ‘asocial’ or ‘negative’ milieu.

This ambivalence of re-education practices in communist dictatorships stands at the center of the conference. Its aim is to develop a differentiated understanding of the Janus-faced nature of the relationship between care, education and repression in communist regimes. Based on the treatment of non-conformists and delinquents in different contexts and regions, communist practices and concepts combining education and repression will be explored. Focusing on generic institutions will also allow comparisons with the rival systems in the West and with precursors of these typically ‘modern’ institutions. The conference is based on the conviction that the treatment of people in state-enforced custody and care - be it prisoners in prisons and camps, patients in psychiatric wards, children and young people in residential care, or similar - is one indicator of the humanity or inhumanity of the ruling system.

We are looking for contributions addressing topics of one of the following panels. In particular panels I and III:

1. COMMUNIST CONTEXTS: IDEOLOGY, THE PARTY, AND THE MILITARY

• The education of the ‘new man’ / the ‘developed socialist personality’, the party culture including criticism and self-criticism and penal education, the militaristic society, the reception of Makarenko's pedagogy in different countries of the East and the West.

2. PENAL INSTITUTIONS

• Prisons, camps, penal colonies, banishments, gulag, including re-education experiments in prisons

3. SOCIAL ENGINEERING, CONTROL, AND DISCIPLINE

• Children's homes, youth work centres,  medical and care institutions, discipline and punishment through the exclusion of marginal groups such as ‘parasites’, ‘asocials’, 'rowdies', members of ethnic minorities and sub/counter-cultures.

Proposals
Proposals of 300–500 words, accompanied by a short biographical note, should be sent by June 15, 2025, to the following address: punitiveeducation.conference@tu-dresden.de.

Decisions will be announced no later than June 30, 2025.

The 8th “Hermann Weber Conference on Historical Research on Communism” will take place from April 15-17, 2026, at the Gedenkstätte Bautzner Straße, Dresden. Travel and accommodation costs will be covered by the organizers after consultation. The conference language is English. It is expected that the draft papers will be submitted by March 16, 2026. They will be presented and discussed at the conference. The conference is sponsored by the “Gerda-und-Hermann-Weber-Stiftung in der Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur”. A revised version of selected conference papers will be published in German in the “Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung” 2027 (translation resources are available; the papers will be proofread). The application requires the willingness to submit a contribution for review for this publication.

Organised by: 

Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at TU Dresden (HAIT)
Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague (ÚSD)

6th Conference of the European Labour History Network, 16-19 June 2026, Barcelona

Panel Organizers: Aurélie Andry (Ruhr University Bochum), Thomas J. Adams (University of South Alabama), Philipp Urban (Ruhr University Bochum), Philipp Reick (TU Berlin)

Since at least the end of the 18th century, social reformers, labor leaders, organized workers, and political movements have promoted democratic control of the workplace, industry, and economic life as a crucial precondition not only for social justice and material security but also for political democracy more generally. In so doing, they have highlighted that when workers and employees lack effective voice at work and control over the labor process, their political participation and formal political equality is seriously curtailed more broadly. Indeed, many have argued that political democracy will fail to materialize or, where it existed, soon experience 'backsliding' should democratic rights over work, industry, and the economy be withheld or decline. Against this backdrop, intellectuals, political and trade union actors, and social movements proposed a wide range of theories as well as practical measures that underlined the participation of employees and labor in decision-making as a prerequisite for the sustainability of democratic rule. In light of the current attacks on democratic institutions, we believe that now is the time to re-think what role the improvement and expansion of employee participation in industrial and economic decision-making might play in the fight for the future of our democracies.

Today, growing fears of democratic erosion in the political sphere happen to follow on the heels of a general decline of economic democracy over the last decades. For this reason, we want to explore the role that 'democracy' has played in the thinking, organizing, and lived experiences of past and present-day individuals and movements pushing for greater control over individual workplaces, whole industries, and entire economies. Instead of concentrating on how workplace democracy has impacted economic performance, productivity, and employee satisfaction--the focus of much previous research--we want to go to the heart of our subject and ask: whether, how, and why democracy at work strengthens and improves democracy in a variety of other social spheres, from families and civic organizations to local communities, the nation state and the international arena? For this purpose, we are proposing a series of panels that go beyond the historical gaze of our working group's previous activities.

We invite contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including history, philosophy, sociology, law, political science, economics, and more. We are particularly interested in transnational and comparative papers and papers on non-Western and Global South debates and developments. We are open to case studies as well as theoretical and conceptual papers. We have no focus on a specific period. Rather, we hope to facilitate interdisciplinary debate that includes both past and contemporary perspectives. For case studies, we expect that presenters reflect on how their case(s) relate to some of the broader themes we explore in this panel.

We are looking for papers that deal with (but are not limited to) issues such as:

• the relationship between industrial and economic democracy on the one hand and political democracy on the other. How have theoreticians, political actors, trade unionists, and everyday workers conceived of the influence that industrial and economic democracy would have on democracy in politics? How can the impact of industrial and economic democracy on political democracy be measured, studied, and interpreted? What are the conceptual and methodological challenges in such studies?

• the impact of democratic participation on 'democratic mentalities'. To what extent (and how) did/do theoreticians and practitioners believe that the subjective experience of being involved in decision-making at work infuses(d) employees with the spirit and consciousness that fuels support for democratic rule and sustained democratic engagement beyond the casting of ballots? Did/does active participation equip workers with skills necessary to participate in democratic deliberation and action outside their work environment? Are/were employees who participate in democratic decision-making at work more likely to accept majority decisions? Are/were employees who participated in democratic decision-making at work more likely--in their daily political lives--to actively counter authoritarian, fascistic, colonial or other anti-democratic political forms?

• the relationship between industrial democracy and economic democracy. Were/are some places or industries more likely than others to distinguish between democratic participation at the workplace and democratic participation in the wider economy? How did/do these two levels influence one another? Have distinct political movements been more likely to align themselves with one or the other?

• the meaning of participation, control and representation in industrial and economic democracy. What did/does active employee participation to decisions of workplace and economic management look like? What measures were/are implemented to facilitate active participation in decision-making? Who resist(ed) these measures, and why? How did past and present actors conceive of representation? What was/is the relationship between participation and representation?

The deadline for submission is July 15, 2025. Paper abstracts of max 300 words should be accompanied by a short bio. Decisions about individual papers will be communicated by mid-September. We will submit the panel proposals by September 30, 2025. The conference organizers will communicate the final acceptance of panels on October 20, 2025. Please send paper proposals as well as all inquiries to aurelie.andry@eui.eu.

The conference is organized by TIG (Work, Institutions, and Gender) of the University of Barcelona, Spanish Network of Labor History. The conference will be an on-site event. Hybrid sessions are possible under special circumstances. The conference fee is 180 EUROS (regular) / 150 EUROS (early bird) / 120 EUROS (students and participants without institutional funding) / 100 EUROS (early bird reduced fee). There might be a limited number of bursaries and/or support for student accommodation (which will be decided by the conference organizers). For more information on ELHN and conference logistics, see https://socialhistoryportal.org/elhn.

Workers and the “Golden Age” of Social Democracy?

Stefan Berger, Leon Fink, Jan de Graaf, and Patrick Dixon, Guest Editors

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Stefan Berger, Leon Fink, Jan de Graaf, and Patrick Dixon / Workers and the
“Golden Age” of Social Democracy? An Introduction 1

THE COMMON VERSE

Thomas McGrath / Slaughterhouse Music 8

ARTS AND MEDIA

Kathy M. Newman, Joseph Entin, and Patricia Hills / Philip Tipperman:
Forgotten Labor Painter of the 1930s 11

CONTEMPORARY AFFAIRS

Diana S. Reddy / Relitigating the New Deal: The Stakes of Current Constitutional
Challenges to the NLRB 24

ARTICLES

Nelson Lichtenstein / Why No Corporatism in the United States? American Versus
German Models of Industrial Relations in the Early Postwar Era 36

Gerd-Rainer Horn / Workers and Catholicism in Postwar Western Europe
and Latin America 53

Eloisa Betti / Fordism’s Underside: Women’s Work in Postwar Italy 69

Stefan Müller / Social Democracy at High Tide: The Humanization of Work in
Postwar West Germany 85

Jan de Graaf / Rethinking Shop-Floor Power in Postwar Europe: Participation
Versus Mobility in East and West 100

Andrew Elrod / Inflation, Wage Policy, and the End of the New Deal Order 115

BOOK REVIEWS
Frederick Corney / No Harmless Power: The Life and Times of the Ukrainian Anarchist
Nestor Makhno by Charlie Allison 132

Aaron Benanav / Precarious Workers: History of Debates, Political Mobilizations, and
Labor Reforms in Italy by Eloisa Betti 133

David Brundage / The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America’s First Labor
War by Mark Bulik 135

Ryan Pettengill / Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United
States by Charisse Burden-Stelly 137

Zachary Lockman / Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the
Making of the Suez Canal, 1859–1906 by Lucia Carminati 140

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer / Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in
the American Century by Brent Cebul 141

Kenyon Zimmer / Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American
Socialism by Lorenzo Costaguta 143

Jana K. Lipman / The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama
Canal by Joan Flores-Villalobos 145

Timothy J. Lombardo / Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the
Making of a White Working Class by Max Fraser 147

Deborah Simonton / Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century
London by Laura Gowing 149

Jim Phillips / Futures of Socialism: “Modernisation,” the Labour Party, and the British
Left, 1973–1997 by Colm Murphy 151

Jennifer Delton / Courteous Capitalism: Public Relations and the Monopoly Problem,
1900–1930 by Daniel Robert 153

William Hal Gorby / The Ruined Anthracite: Historical Trauma in Coal-Mining
Communities by Paul A. Shackel 155

Dallas Augustine / Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage
by Jarrod Shanahan 15

 

https://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/issue

The Africa Centre (London), 9-10 June 2025

This workshop seeks to examine critically the rich intellectual, political and cultural exchanges that took place in the context of African revolutions and decolonization (1950-1990). Papers from different disciplines are welcome.

Intellectual Exchanges Between Revolutionary Africa and the Third World (1950-1990)

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the independence of Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe from Portuguese colonial rule, following the independence of Guinea-Bissau two years prior. The violent struggles for the liberation of Portuguese-speaking Africa were articulated with the broader project of the African revolution, decolonization on the continent and the wider struggle for the liberation of the Third World. More-than-national politics were variously expressed in the forms of negritude, pan-Africanism, the anti-apartheid movement, Afro-Asian solidarity, the global workers’ movement and tricontinentalism.

This workshop seeks to examine critically the rich intellectual, political and cultural exchanges that took place in the context of African revolutions and decolonization 1950-1990, with particular focus on exchanges between Africans and between Africa and Latin America. We posit that this period was characterized by an energetic, if flawed, search for a theory and practice of liberation adequate to the project of revolution and decolonization in the Third World. Our approach proposes to consider the critical exchanges of ideas, themes and concepts that informed and underpinned the projects of liberation in Africa and beyond: selfreliance, dependency, underdevelopment, imperialism, tricontinentalism, internationalism, solidarity, nationbuilding, revolutionary pedagogy, military strategy, theorizations of the relationship between revolution and culture, and others besides.

The aim is to explore how these interactions can shape our present conceptions of revolution and liberation on the continent and beyond. We welcome proposals for 10-minute presentations from researchers, writers and activists in the following streams:

- Transnational Intellectuals and Travelling Concepts
- Revolution and Culture
- Solidarity and Decolonial Hubs

Please submit abstracts of up to 250 words to t.stennett@exeter.ac.uk by 15 May 2025.

Programm

09.06.2025 Conference @ the Africa Centre, London

10.06.2025 Projection of the documentary Mário by Bill Woodberry at Close-Up Film Centre, London

Kontakt

t.stennett@exeter.ac.uk

International Conference at the German Historical Institute Washington / Conveners: Ulrike von Hirschhausen (GHI Washington) and Robert Gerwarth (University College Dublin), 28-29 May 2026

The legacy of Western colonialism, its "imperial legacies," and its relationship to Nazi rule and the Holocaust have caused a fierce public debate raging on both sides of the Atlantic for several years now. This debate, widely known in Germany as the "Historikerstreit 2.0" revolves around two key questions: how mass crimes should be publicly remembered and whether there is a causal connection and/or structural similarities between colonial violence and Nazi mass violence, including the Shoah.

The seemingly irreconcilable positions of the debate so far have mostly been presented in programmatic essays and newspaper articles but are rarely substantiated by empirically grounded social-historical analyses.

Empirically oriented historians have so far only partially contributed to the discussion. This is precisely where the conference aims to intervene—by bringing greater objectivity to the currently heated debate through a clear empirical and social-historical analysis of systems of rule and mass violence.

We invite scholars from different methodological and historical backgrounds to submit proposals relevant to one of the planned panels of the conference.

- occupation regimes
- settlers
- counterinsurgency/partisan warfare
- camps
- collaboration
- forced labor and expropriation
-

The event is jointly organized by the German Historical Institute Washington and the Centre for War Studies, University College Dublin. The conveners are Ulrike von Hirschhausen (GHI) and Robert Gerwarth (UCD). The conference will take place from May, 28 - 29, 2026 at the GHI.

Please submit an abstract (max. 500 words) and a short biography (max. 150 words) in English via the GHI online platform by July 1, 2025.

Applicants will be notified by early September 2025. Accommodation will be arranged and paid for by the conference organizers. Participants will make their own travel arrangements. Funding subsidies for travel are available upon request for selected scholars, especially those who might not otherwise be able to attend the workshop, including early-career scholars and scholars from universities with limited resources.

Please contact Nicola Hofstetter (hofstetter-phelps@ghi-dc.org) if you have any difficulties submitting your information online or if you have other questions related to the event.

The University of Helsinki and the Lithuanian Institute of History are pleased to announce the international conference "Imperial Experiences in Family Violence: Crimes and Criminology in 19th–20th centuries." The event will take place at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library’s which serves as a partner in hosting the conference. This gathering aims to examine the historical dimensions of family violence within imperial contexts.By exploring legal practices, social perceptions, and criminological approaches across different empires, the conference seeks to analyze how state policies, legal transformations, and cultural norms shaped responses to violence in the family. Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines, the event fosters a comparative discussion on the intersection of law, crime, history, and family dynamics in imperial settings.

Date and location

December 15–16, 2025

Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, Vilnius, Lithuania

Argument

The University of Helsinki and the Lithuanian Institute of History are pleased to announce the international conference "Imperial Experiences in Family Violence: Crimes and Criminology in 19th–20th centuries." The event will take place at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library’s which serves as a partner in hosting the conference. This gathering aims to examine the historical dimensions of family violence within imperial contexts.By exploring legal practices, social perceptions, and criminological approaches across different empires, the conference seeks to analyze how state policies, legal transformations, and cultural norms shaped responses to violence in the family. Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines, the event fosters a comparative discussion on the intersection of law, crime, history, and family dynamics in imperial settings.We invite scholars and practitioners to submit original paper proposals. Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Legal definitions and regulations of family violence in imperial systems
• The role of courts, law enforcement, and state institutions in addressing domestic violence
• The impact of legal reforms on the prosecution and adjudication of family violence
• Imperial legal frameworks and their relationship with gender, family authority, and social hierarchy
• Social perceptions and responses to family violence among state authorities, religious institutions, and communities
• Legal and extralegal punishments for domestic crimes and their evolution over time
• Judicial and societal treatment of intimate partner homicide, child abuse, and other forms of family violence
• The influence of class, ethnicity, religion, and geography on legal and social responses to family violence
• Comparative perspectives on family violence across different empires, including Russian, Ottoman, British, and Soviet contexts
• The adaptation and exchange of legal and social measures in regulating family violence between imperial authorities
• Family violence in colonial and peripheral regions versus imperial centers
• The role of patriarchal norms and power structures in shaping family violence and state responses
• Women’s and marginalized groups' strategies for resisting, reporting, and legally challenging domestic violence
• The impact of modernization, nationalism, socialism, and colonial rule on attitudes and policies toward family violence
• Archival, judicial, and media representations of family violence and their reflections on broader social transformation

Submission guidelines

The conference will be held in person in Vilnius, Lithuania. The working language of the event is English. There is no participation or registration fee. 

A limited number of bursaries to cover conference costs for young scholars without funding or scholars coming from low-income countries will be available.

All submitted abstracts will be reviewed by the Conference Organizing Committee to determine the final list of speakers. Accepted participants are expected to participate in the post-Conference publication (the format to be determined based on the abstracts submitted). Speakers will be required to submit a longer version of their presentation (3,000-5,000 words) before the conference by December 1, 2025.

Please submit a 300–500 words original abstract along with a short academic biography via the link here.

Submission deadline: June 15, 2025

Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2025For any inquiries, please contact: feverhelsinki@gmail.com

Organizing Committee

Chair: Dr. Sigita Černevičiūtė, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Helsinki, Till Death Do Us Part: Four Epochs of Violence in Every Family in Russia – What Makes it Russian? (FEVER)

Members:

• Prof. Dr. Marianna Muravyeva, Principal Investigator, University of Helsinki, Till Death Do Us Part: Four Epochs ofnViolence in Every Family in Russia – What Makes it Russian? (FEVER)
• Dr. Andrea Griffante, Lithuanian Institute of History
• Dr. Alexander Kondakov, University College Dublin
• Dr. Ineta Lipša, National Archives of Latvia
• Ignė Rasickaitė, Statehood Center, National Library of Lithuania
• Dr. Monika Rogers, Lithuanian Institute of History
• Dr. Vitalija Stravinskienė Lithuanian Institute of History

The International Labor and Working-Class History journal (ILWCH) invites submissions for a special thematic issue on “Hot Work,” edited by Eduardo Contreras (Hunter College, CUNY) and Selda Altan (Randolph College)

The International Labor and Working-Class History journal (ILWCH) invites submissions for a special thematic issue on “Hot Work.” This issue will explore the meanings and experiences of labor in environments marked by heat, whether physical, industrial, or site-specific. It aims to bring together scholarship that examines labor and work life through the lenses of geography and climate; health and safety; and environmental change.

Heat has long been a defining force in labor and working-class experiences. From the tropics to industrial foundries, and from colonial plantations to modern kitchens, “hot work”—as a concept and phenomenon—intersects with urgent questions about climate, inequality, and labor rights. This issue seeks to foreground these linkages to analyze how heat has defined work, shaped identities, and fueled struggles for justice. 

We will approach "hot work" in at least three ways.  Geographically, we seek essays focused on the lives and labors of people in tropical and arid parts of the world. These areas remain underrepresented in labor history. Guiding questions may include: How have labor struggles overlapped with concerns over land, natural resources, and Indigenous rights? How have colonialism, imperial agendas, and decolonization defined and circumscribed what proved possible for working people in these regions? How have climate conditions shaped the trajectories of labor demands and initiatives for socioeconomic stability?  

We will also use "hot work" to foreground labor in environments and industries traditionally characterized by high levels of indoor or outdoor heat, including agriculture, construction, fire service, food production, metalworking, and utilities. Key questions may include: How has heat exposure predisposed workers to chronic illness and affected life expectancy? How have societal perceptions of labor in hot environments been marked by race, class, and gender? What roles have labor unions and state policies played in addressing—or failing to address— the health and safety hazards in these sectors? 

Lastly, we invite essays grappling with how the nature, experiences, and perceptions of “hot work” have evolved across sociohistorical contexts. What did it mean to engage in hot work in and beyond tropical and arid regions? How has the meaning of “hot work” evolved in response to environmental disasters, industrialization, and rising global temperatures? How has climate change, over the longue durée, become a catalyst for new work lives, migration, and struggles for dignity and well-being? Who has been most affected by “hot work,” and why?
 

Submission Guidelines

We welcome traditional scholarly articles (8,000–10,000 words, including footnotes) as well as shorter formats such as photo essays, transcribed interviews, and field notes. Contributions representing a wide range of historical periods and places are encouraged, with a particular interest in perspectives from the Global South.

Please submit an abstract of up to 250 words by May 15, 2025. If invited to submit a full piece for peer review, the deadline for a completed first draft will be August 15, 2025. The projected date of publication is Fall 2026. To submit an abstract: Authors first need to log onto our editorial software, ScholarOne, create an account, and submit a “Special Feature Abstract.” The portal can be accessed at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ilwch

Contact Information

Managing Editor, ILWCH

Contact Email ILWCH@columbia.edu URL https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-labor-and-working-class-h…

The Journal of African American History is planning a special issue in 2027. Titled “Black Women’s History in the Twenty-First Century: Engaging the Future,” the issue will provide an opportunity to reflect seriously on the state of scholarship on Black women in the United States as well as reshape thinking about Black women’s impact on U.S. society. Guest editors, Karen Cook Bell and Hettie V. Williams, invite articles that analyze Black women’s experiences with focuses on the lives, labors, wartime experiences, and legal battles of Black women and their self-making practices, which allowed them to navigate slavery, freedom, Jane and Jim Crowism, and the turmoil of the Civil Rights and post-Civil Rights eras. This special issue will provide an examination of dominant narratives in the historiography of Black women’s history that have emerged in the twenty-first century and examine future explorations in the field.

Foundational texts including editors Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978), which was the first volume of historical essays on Black women; Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985); the multivolume Black Women in America: A Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Darlene Clark Hine (1994); “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: A Reader in Black Women’s History, edited by Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed (1995); Hine and Kathleen Thompson’s A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (1998), and White’s Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in the Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (1999) have guided generations of scholars of Black women’s history as they reexamined the complex interweaving of politics, labor, identity, and gender in American history since the colonial era. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross’ more recent study, A Black Women’s History of the United States (2020), re-envisioned the history of Black women in the U.S. and imagined future explorations.  

Leslie Alexander stated, “There is a compelling need to study Black women in their own right.” Guest editors Karen Cook Bell and Hettie V. Williams seek articles that examine Black women’s history in the context of the following topics:

• Slavery and Abolition
• Black Women’s Resistance
• War and Gender Violence
• Emancipation
• Economic Development
• Culture (e.g., education, religion)
• Migration and Mobility
• Intellectualism 
• Black Internationalism
• Social and Political Movements (e.g., Black Feminism, Black Lives Matter)
• Politics
• Black Women’s Queer History
• Black Girlhood
• Reproductive Justice
• Black Women’s Health and Wellness

 

Authors should submit essays via the Editorial Manager® system. Manuscripts, including footnotes, should contain between 10,000 and 11,500 words (approximately 35 to 40 pages). “Instructions for Authors” are available on the JAAH website. For inquiries, please contact jaah@alasu.edu or the guest editors, Karen Cook Bell at kcookbell@bowiestate.edu and Hettie V. Williams at hwilliam@monmouth.edu. January 1, 2026, is the due date for manuscript submissions.

 

Contact Information

Dr. Karen Cook Bell

Bowie State University

Bowie, MD 20715

Contact Email kcookbell@bowiestate.edu

International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam), 10-13 September 2025

Since ChatGPT has arrived, we can observe how labour is being affected by AI: for many, it brings along a huge time efficiency, but at the same time jobs are killed by this efficiency. AI is presented as heaven and hell at the same time. Big tech firms that have power over AI and social media, have been criticized for using this power to manipulate algorithms, putting democracy under pressure. From a progressive perspective, big tech and social media have become a threat to democratic societies and their protagonists. The left discusses how to deal with the rising “technofeudalism” and IALHI should take up that discussion.

Social media and big tech firms also affect archives and libraries: it is worth collecting social media for their strong impact on societal change and the public opinion. Additionally, libraries and archives make use of these platforms by themselves, attracting the public to their collections and activities. Tools such as AI may be a threat to employment, yet at the same time they also present opportunities for work practices at archival institutes and other workplaces. For our conference, we invite contributions on the whole range of these topics from GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) as well as from individual researchers.

Contributions may include, but should not be limited to, the following thematic clusters:

1. How do we make use of big tech?

• How do we use AI, Google services, cloud servers, and so on?
• How do we make use of social media?

2. How do we relate to big tech: threats and opportunities?

• What stand do we take as labour archives and libraries to the bias against and underrepresentation of specific positions on platforms?
• How do we deal with the circumstance that big tech firms are an infrastructural part of a capitalist structure that we cannot do without?
• How do we deal with the possible threat of losing control over our data? What role do the location of data storage and data backup play?
• How do we train our contributors and donators not to give away information they want to keep (and give it to us later)?

3. What are the consequences to our acquisition policy?

• What is to be done about bit rot – how to preserve specific ephemeral data?
• What do we win – from a heritage point of view – by capturing the volatile information of the platforms?
• To which extent can we practice kind of division of labor e.g. with the Internet Archive when it comes to collecting digital objects?

4. How do we preserve big tech inside archives and make it accessible?

• What social media and websites do we collect, and how?
• How can we assist our archival partners in their document management even before they turn over their archives?
• How can we make our collections of social media, websites etc. more visible and accessible while big tech firm’s general terms and conditions of business are very restricted?

5. What are our strategies in dealing with the challenges of big tech?

• How should we deal with false information and biased viewpoints on the platforms? Should we take up an active role of fact checkers?
• How can we make our own institutions more resilient and strengthen our donators?
• How can we act in solidarity with archives and libraries under threat?
• How can we deal with misleading information and save our own data as authentic information? 

Hands-on topics:

The conference welcomes proposals for hands-on sessions on tools and methods, in particular prototypes or first experiences. Proposals for hands-on sessions should be practically realizable on site.

Please send in your proposals with a short description of your presentation to info@ialhi.org. Use this mail also for any questions concerning the conference. Deadline is 6 June 2025.

For more information on IALHI, go to https://ialhi.org. 

Historical Background

Kansas City and its surrounding region served as a hotbed for social justice movements that posed often underrecognized challenges to the cultural, legal, and political status quo during the latter half of the 20th century. National and local leaders such as Thurgood Marshall and Esther Brown contributed to a sustained legal campaign against racial segregation, culminating with the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954. Sustained local activism expanded desegregation across many aspects of society, notably in parks and recreation, shopping districts, employment, and housing.

Beyond struggles for Black civil rights, the Kansas City area witnessed activism from diverse groups. In 1966, members of fifteen homophile organizations met in Kansas City to form the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO). This historic meeting launched the rise of a national movement to combat discrimination faced by the LGBTQ+ community. During the Termination Era, local Indigenous families established the Indian Council of Many Nations, which later founded the Heart of America Indian Center (now Kansas City Indian Center) to provide social services for Native Americans in the area. The fervor of the Chicanx Movement of the 1960s and 1970s also reverberated in the area. In 1969, Kansas City’s Latinx neighborhoods became part of a national movement when Chicanx students organized a walkout from West High School to demand culturally relevant and bilingual education. Kansas City’s history as a contested ground galvanized communities to rise up, challenge the status quo, and build an equitable urban landscape reflective of its diversity.

Project Description

The University of Missouri - Kansas City (UMKC) Center for Digital and Public Humanities and the Kansas City Public Library (KCPL) request proposals for articles examining myriad social justice movements in Kansas City from the post-World War II era to the end of the 20th century.

Proposals for this multi-faceted partnership will be considered for inclusion as articles/chapters in one or both of the following outcomes:

• An edited volume published by a university press;
• A digital project that combines scholarship with archival sources, oral histories, biographies, and other relevant documents.

Selected contributors for the edited volume will be required to attend a conference to workshop their papers in April 2026 and will present at a three-day public symposium in November 2026. (We will provide travel expenses for both the workshop and symposium). Selected website contributors will also be invited (optionally) to present their work at the public symposium. These efforts seek to encourage new research on understudied topics, bring this scholarship to larger public audiences, and facilitate community discussions about activism and civil rights. The project is modeled after previous collaborative and award-winning efforts, including the books

Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border, Wide-Open Town: Kansas City in the Pendergast Era and websites, Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri Conflict, 1854-1865 and The Pendergast Years: Kansas City in the Jazz Age and Great Depression.

Suggested Themes and Topics

We welcome proposals that contextualize the methods and strategies of Kansas City’s social justice movements within national narratives and themes. Research topics should encompass political activism and community uplift on behalf of historically marginalized communities, including but not limited to women, Black Americans, Latinxs, LGBTQIA+ persons, working-class communities, or people with disabilities. How did diverse Kansas Citians challenge the status quo throughout the late-20th century? How is the Kansas City experience unique (or representative) when compared to social justice movements in the Midwest and nationwide?

Suggested themes and topics may include, but are not limited to:

• activist groups and individual activists
• direct action, protests, and boycotts
• student movements and educational activism
• interracial and interethnic coalitions and solidarity movements
• intersectional movements
• voting rights and electoral politics
• environmental justice
• labor activism
• institution and/or organizational building
• community organizing and neighborhood-level activism
• legal battles and challenges
• economic justice
• self-determination, Black Power, Chicanx Power, Red Power, etc.
• immigrant rights
• feminist movements and activism
• LGBTQIA+ resistance and activism
• Cultural and artistic expressions
• degradation of schools
• community development (investment and disinvestment)
• white flight and development of the suburbs

 

Instructions for Submissions

The symposium welcomes submissions from:

• Scholars, Researchers, Public Historians, Authors, Community Members, Kansas City Activists and/or their Descendants, Students, Artists and Creative Writers

Proposed Dates:

• Paper Workshop: April 22-24, 2026

• Public Symposium: November 10-12, 2026

Submission Details:

• Deadline: June 15, 2025
• Format: A one-page abstract (500 words single-spaced) with working title; brief C.V. or resume.
• Honoraria will be provided for contributors to both the website and volume. We will offset travel expenses to the workshop and symposium for those involved in the volume project.
• Contact/submission instructions: Please address proposals and inquiries to: kcmc@umkc.edu. Be sure to put An Era of Rights in the subject.

This project is supported by the Kansas City Monuments Coalition (KCMC), an effort funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Monuments program. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.

The edited volume and digital project are two parts of the larger KCMC. The University of Missouri – Kansas City was awarded a $4 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the creation of the Kansas City Monuments Coalition. The grant, part of the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project, was secured through the efforts of UMKC’s History Department faculty and the Center for Digital and Public Humanities. The Coalition consists of sixteen organizations in the Greater Kansas City Area to preserve and commemorate a more inclusive history of the region. It will also support public programs in partnership with the Kansas City Public Library.

by Dominique Vuillaume

Ce livre analyse la mutation des savoirs consécutive au choc de l’industrialisation et à l’apparition dans son sillage de la classe ouvrière française, sur la période clé allant de la Monarchie de juillet à la fin du Second Empire.

Le surgissement pour le moins incompréhensible pour l’époque du paupérisme ouvrier - c’est-à-dire d’une pauvreté qui touche celles et ceux qui sont au coeur de l’appareil productif plutôt qu’à ses marges – provoque une effervescence intellectuelle considérable dans laquelle le mouvement philanthropique joue un rôle moteur. C’est lui qui s’attache à construire de toute pièce un savoir empirique susceptible de rendre compte de cet « inexplicable » dans le refus implicite des savoirs descriptifs issus du XVIIIe siècle. C’est l’invention de l’enquête ouvrière « en première personne ». A suivre le cheminement de ces enquêtes, on s’aperçoit que la philanthropie finit par construire une explication du malheur ouvrier totalement étrange pour notre conscience contemporaine. Et derrière l’étrange se révèle un étayage des conclusions des enquêtes ouvrières sur une  anthropologie morale de la volonté. Une anthropologie qui s’efforce de préserver un espace de délibération entre la promesse démocratique portée par la révolution de 1789 et la détresse palpable du monde ouvrier avec son univers de non droit.

Économiste et sociologue de formation, l’auteur a entrepris une double carrière de chercheur et d’administrateur scientifique à l’Institut national de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale et dans des organismes publics en charge des relations entre sciences et société sous divers aspects. Ses thèmes de recherche récents portent sur l’étude comparative des paradigmes mobilisés sur la question des drogues en France et aux Etats-Unis depuis le milieu du XIXe siècle.

Workshop Belgian volunteers in the Spanish Civil War

Wednesday 28 May 2025 - 13:30 - 17:30
Amsab-ISH - Ghent, Belgium

Website Brigadistas from Belgium: https://brigades.amsab.be

On Wednesday 28 May, the new online database Brigadistas from Belgium will be presented in Amsab-Institute of Social History in Ghent, Belgium. This website contains biographical data of more than two thousand volunteers who went to the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939. The database was compiled on the basis of unique information from Spanish and Russian collections by researchers Rudi Van Doorslaer and François Van Pelt.

During the workshop, we will look back at the research into the history of the Spanish Civil War in Belgium, with contributions from, among others, the French historian Edouard Sill and documentary maker Sven Tuytens. The afternoon will conclude with a public debate led by moderator Vincent Scheltiens.

In 1975, the year in which dictator Francisco Franco died, Ghent historian Rudi Van Doorslaer was the first Belgian to gain access to the Spanish files of Belgian members of the International Brigades. These documents were kept in the archives of the former secret police in Salamanca. In the following decades, the data was systematically supplemented with information from other archive sources, collected at home and abroad.

In recent years, François Van Pelt, who studied political science at the Université Catholique de Louvain, supplemented this data collection with valuable information from the original files of the International Brigades. These archives were evacuated from the Brigades' base in Albacete to the Soviet Union in 1938 and kept in the State Archives of Moscow.

They have now been digitised and can be consulted online. Van Pelt developed a database that forms the basis of the website Brigadistas from Belgium. For the first time, we now have an almost complete list of the volunteers from Belgium and Luxembourg who participated in the Spanish conflict.

Programme

1:30 pm – Coffee and reception

2:00 pm – Welcome

• Paule Verbruggen, director Amsab-ISG
• Vincent Scheltiens, historian

2:20 pm – Presentation of the database

• Rudi Van Doorslaer, visiting professor Ghent University: The history of the database
• François Van Pelt, political science Catholic University of Louvain: How the data base is being developed
• Donald Weber, Research coordinator Amsab-ISG: Presentation of the website

3:00 pm – Coffee break

3:15 pm – Speakers

• Edouard Sill, researcher Centre d’Histoire Sociale des Mondes Contemporains: The historiography of the Brigades internationales: the current state of affairs
• Sven Tuytens, VRT correspondent Madrid: Spain today: the shadow of the civil war

16:30 – Public debate

• Vincent Scheltiens, moderator
• Widukind De Ridder, researcher CegeSoma

17:30 – Reception

Practical

• Date: Wednesday 28 May 2025 - 13:30 - 17:30
• Location: Amsab-Institute of Social History - Bagattenstraat 174 - 9000 Ghent
• The workshop is free, but registration in advance is required via the registration form. The event has room for 50 people, so be there on time.
• The workshop will be held in Dutch, English and French.

This event is organised by Amsab-Institute of Social History, in consultation with CegeSoma, the Belgian expertise centre for the history of conflicts in the 20th century.

Call for Papers: New Critical Approaches on Communists and Communism in Belgium

Research Workshop
22 October 2025
CegeSoma (ARA OD4) in collaboration with Dacob/CArCoB

It's no coincidence that this Research Workshop takes its name from a collection of essays by José Gotovitch (1940-2024). Former director of CegeSoma, professor at ULB and linchpin of the Centre d'Histoire et de Sociologie des Gauches and CArCoB, José Gotovitch embodied like no other the intersecting history of the Second World War and the Cold War. Just over a year after his death, we would like to explore new avenues of research, focusing on innovative methodologies and sources that were recently made available.

Although the focus is on the history of communism in Belgium, the aim is also to consider it as an intrinsically transnational phenomenon. We particularly encourage proposals that address (trade) relations with Eastern Europe and the various solidarity movements with the so-called “Third World”.

More broadly, we will also address the question of the relationship of Belgian communists to the discursive practices and organizing principles of post-colonial movements in South America, Asia and Africa. We also wish to focus on the role of communists within the various (trans)national committees of survivors of Nazi concentration camps.

In terms of new methodologies, we refer, for example, to contemporary oral history practices (beyond social or institutional history) and to the work of French historians Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal on “Le sujet communiste. Militant identities and laboratories of the “self”. “Innovative research can also draw on recently revealed sources. These include, for example, Gotovitch's research archives recently transferred to Dacob/CArCoB and CegeSoma's rich collection of “Journals and Manuscripts”.

Interested parties can submit a brief abstract (300 words) to widukind.deridder@kuleuven.be and chantal.kesteloot@arch.be by June 1, 2025. Selected proposals will receive a reply by June 30. The workshop will be held in English, French and Dutch. The contributions will then be compiled in a thematic issue.

CfP for the conference:

The body and health in feminist labour history

Warsaw, The Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 14-16 October 2026

Deadline for submissions 15 November 2025

This three-day conference, called by the European Labour History Network working group “Feminist Labour History” and hosted by the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, aims to explore new perspectives in the study of the history of labour through the lens of gender and intersectionality. The conference builds on and moves forward the debates on and within feminist labour history which took place during the conferences of the European Labour History Network and the 2019 conference of the FLH Working Group in Bologna.

The conference, “The body and health in feminist labour history”, Warsaw, 14-16 October 2026, focuses on the history of gendered labour from the perspective of the body and health. Historically, conceptualizations of bodily differences built on the understanding of gender, race, ethnicity and age have played a significant role in establishing the division of labour in society and related cultural imaginaries, as well as inequalities, hierarchies and labour regulations. Ava Baron and Eileen Boris argued that, “as a category for historical analysis, ‘the body’ allows for incorporating difference more fully, for it is one of the most powerful and pervasive cultural symbols that define who and what we are.”1 Bringing the focus on the (gendered) body into the discussions on feminist labour history, and drawing on the ‘bodily turn’ in the humanities and approaches from fields such as the history of medicine and health and sensory history can make feminist labour history more inclusive and enhance our understanding of the historical engendering of various types and forms of labour and gendered experiences of work.

We invite proposals for individual papers focusing on one of the following topics:

• Occupational health and safety, including toxic substances, stress, and other environmental harms in the workplace and their impact on working-class communities
• Medical discourses on woman’s body at work
• Histories of labour and reproductive health (menstruation, pregnancy, menopause)
• Bodies, violence, and sexual harassment in the workplace
• Embodiment: representation and corporeality
• The history of racialized bodies and the colonial body at work
• The relation between the construction of bodily difference (in terms of biological needs and nutrition) and the wage (such as equal pay), employment, classifications of jobs into light and heavy work, discourses of productivity, and the sexual division of labour
• A sensory history of work: the ways in which beyond labour conditions the working environment, including smells, noise, temperatures, weather conditions, impacts the labouring body
• Dressing the labouring body: uniforms and work clothes
• The disabled body and labour

We would like to draw the attention of interested colleagues to the additional conference theme which the Feminist Labour History Working Group is organizing for the 6th European Labour History Conference, University of Barcelona, 16-19 June 2026: “The spaces of work and labour: gendered perspectives on the local and the global”. Please consider both calls for papers, when deciding which of the two conferences you will submit your proposal and/or when submitting different or complementary proposals for each conference.

Please send a 500-word abstract and a short academic CV (max 500 words) in one Word file to flh.conference.warsaw@gmail.com by 15 November 2025. The proposal should include name, surname, current affiliation and contact details of the proponent.

Limited travel funding will be available for selected early career scholars.

Scientific Committee: Eloisa Betti (University of Padova), Eileen Boris (University of
California in Santa Barbara), Natalia Jarska (Institute of History, Polish Academy of
Sciences), Leda Papastefanaki (University of Ioannina), Eszter Varsa (Central European
University) and Susan Zimmermann (Central European University)

Organizing Committee: Marta Chmielewska, Natalia Jarska

Labour & Empire Working Group

Precarity and Scale in the History of Colonial Labour

ELHN Conference, University of Barcelona
June 16-19, 2026

Following up on a long-term project on working-class anti-imperialism, explored in publications (Beliard, Kirk 2021) and at conferences (most recently in Bristol 2023 and Uppsala), the ELHN Labour & Empire Working Group moves towards a renewed focus on colonial labour systems for the 2026 ELHN conference in Barcelona.

Colonial labour has played a crucial role in the formation of global capitalism. As historian Robin Blackburn points out, the forced labour of enslaved Africans represented a vital lever to capitalist expansion (2024); other scholars, meanwhile, have drawn links between Marxist theories of primitive accumulation and settler colonial practices of enclosure and land privatisation (Guernsey 2024, Issar 2021). Drawing on a growing body of work, the Labour & Empire Working Group’s 2026 panels aim to provide a political economic analysis of colonial labour regimes, and scrutinise how the study of colonial labour conditions aids a deeper understanding of global political economic developments.

We seek papers that provide in-depth analyses of labour in colonial contexts, while also embedding these analyses in a wider context of transnational, intercolonial or colonial-metropole economic relations. The question of scale, a prevalent topic in global history, is central here: papers that embed labour in the interplay of global, local, national and transnational dynamics are welcomed. How, we want to ask, did local labour conditions fit into wider divisions of labour? To what extent did changing labour divisions in the metropole affect labour in the colony, and vice-versa? A multi-scalar lens is of particular interest to the working group.

A second topic we aim to explore is precarity. Following a broader discussion about structures of precarity for workers around the world (Lesutis 2021, Ba’ 2023), the working group seeks papers that apply the - still often Eurocentric - analysis of precarious labour to the colonial world. From chattel slavery to transportation schemes of undocumented labour migrants, colonial labour has long been marked by particularly precarious working conditions. What forms of precarity have been attached to colonial labour practices over time? To what economic ends has colonial labour been ‘made’ precarious? What methods did colonial, imperial and capitalist regimes introduce to entrap labourers into forms of unfree and capitalised precarious work - and how did social stratification on the basis of race, gender, nationality and geography relate to the disciplining and ‘precarising’ of colonial labour?

We welcome 250-word proposals for papers which address one or more of the following themes:

• Analyses of colonial labour at different scales: local, national, imperial, global;
• Different modes of precarious labour in colonial contexts;
• (Changing) labour divisions and labour regimes in colonial contexts;
• Ideas of free and unfree labour;
• Colonial labour regimes as embedded within wider global systems and divisions of labour;
• Intersecting social stratifications (i.e. race, gender, class) and their relation to conditions of labour;
• Continuities and breaks between chattel slavery and subsequent regimes of colonial labour;
• Production, circulation and the colonial context;
• The interplay between land and labour in colonial contexts;
• Opposition to unfree and indentured labour both within and across empires;
• Developments in the historiography of colonial labour with regards to issues of scale: how to intersect local and global analyses, how to incorporate the role of the imperial and the national in micro-history analyses, and so on;
• Colonial labour and the debate on the origins of capitalism.   

Proposals should be submitted to labourempire.elhn@gmail.com by June 30 2025.

For more information about the ELHN Labour&Empire group and its activities, please visit: https://socialhistoryportal.org/elhn/wg-empire.

Bibliography

• Stefano Ba’, ‘Precarity and Processes of Classification: Conflictual Concepts of Class, Labour-Power and Caring’, Alternative Routes 33.1 (2023): 56-68
• Yann Béliard, Neville Kirk (eds.), Workers of the Empire, Unite: Radical and Popular Challenges to British Imperialism, 1910s to 1960s (Liverpool University Press, 2023)
• Robin Blackburn, The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776–1888 (Verso Books, 2024)
• Paul J. Guernsey, "Reframing So-Called Primitive Accumulation for Settler Colonial Contexts: Ancestral Enclosures and Spatial Conceptions of History." Capitalism Nature Socialism 35.2 (2024): 138-156.
• Siddhant Issar, "Theorising ‘racial/colonial primitive accumulation’: Settler colonialism, slavery and racial capitalism." Race & Class 63.1 (2021): 23-50.
• Gediminas Lesutis, The Politics of Precarity: Spaces of Extractivism, Violence, and Suffering (Routledge, 2021)

The spaces of work and labour: Gendered perspectives on the local and the global

6th European Labour History Conference, University of Barcelona, 16-19 June 2026

Deadline for submissions 1 July 2025

The Feminist Labour History Working Group of the European Labour History Network (ELHN) invites submissions for its sessions on the theme of “The spaces of feminist labour history: gendered perspectives on the local and the global” to be held at the 6th European Labour History Conference in Barcelona, 16-19 June 2026.

The feminist labour history network in Barcelona aims to capture the history of the world of gendered work through exploring the places where work happens. It focuses on the interconnection of the different sites and spaces of work, considering the locations and the physical surroundings in which work has occurred in different times across the world from a gender perspective. The sessions aim to address the interconnection between work happening in private and public spaces across the globe, and in spaces situated at the core and even beyond the margins of the world of work. They could interrogate the political geography of work, that is, the ways in which the performance of work and the movement of workers between different sites of work could strengthen, reproduce, challenge, or alter power relations.

We invite papers addressing the spaces of feminist labour history including (but not limited to) the following topics of interest:

• Workplaces from the kitchen to the plantation; varieties of spaces and sites, e.g., the factory, the household etc.
• Moving between different spaces of work /multi-space workers, e.g., workers, who perform work during part of the year in agriculture and in industry.
• Unequal development and the spatiality of work
• Workplaces interconnected across space, and trans-local connections between work in different places (“chains of labour”).
• The materiality of work: the role of objects in the performance of work.
• Work in particularly demanding, and hostile spaces.
• The changing ’natural’ environments and rythmns of workplaces, e.g., during the day and the seasons.
• The role of solidarity networks.
• Unpaid/reproductive/care work and their spaces.
• Migrant labour in both domestic and international migration

We plan to collaborate with ELHN Working Groups: Workers’ Education, Labour Migration History, Workplaces: Pasts and Presents, and Labour and Empire.

We further draw attention to our specialized international conference on “The body and health in feminist labour history,” organized by the Feminist Labour History Working Group and hosted by the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, to be held 14-16 October 2026. Please consider participating in both conferences by submitting a different or complementary paper proposal to each.

Please send a 500-word abstract and a short academic CV (max 500 word) in one Word file to WG coordinators Eszter Varsa varsae@ceu.edu and Eloisa Betti eloisa.betti@unipd.it by July 1, 2025. The proposal should include name, surname, current affiliation and contact details of the proponent. The subject of the email needs to be: “Feminist labour history ELHN 2026”.

If you have any further questions, do not hesitate to contact the coordination committee:
Eloisa Betti: eloisa.betti@unipd.it
Natalia Jarska: njarska@ihpan.edu.pl
Françoise F. Laot: francoise.laot@univ-paris8.fr
Eszter Varsa: varsae@ceu.ed

Fidel Rodríguez Velásquez

Pontificia Universidad Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

Gabriela Mitidieri

Pontificia Universidad Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

Instituto de Investigaciones de Estudios de Género (UBA)

En los últimos años, el trabajo y sus mundos han vuelto a estar presentes en las preocupaciones historiográficas para indagar en el pasado de las Américas. Este interés no solo ha aportado una mirada crítica para repensar las jerarquías, la coacción y la violencia que lo caracterizaron (y caracterizan), sino sobre todo para examinar la agencia, la negociación, las conexiones y las estrategias de quienes desde abajo debieron actuar en medio de diversas formas de desigualdad. Partimos de una tradición de Historia social y cultural del Trabajo para pensar las heterogéneas realidades laborales en las Américas. Este campo de estudios ha situado en el centro a las y los trabajadores, sus familias, redes de apoyo, espacios de socialización y vidas en movimiento enriqueciendo la noción de “mundos del trabajo” al evidenciar que las experiencias laborales se entrelazan con valores culturales, identidades políticas y relaciones raciales y de género. Se trata de una historiografía fértil que amplió la mirada más allá de las fábricas, el sindicato y del obrero varón blanco como sujeto privilegiado. Así como de las periodizaciones clásicas que situaron el trabajo como un subproducto del capitalismo y de la revolución industrial.

Desde este ángulo buscamos contribuir al campo de la historia global / historia conectada del trabajo, centrados en el periodo que abarca del siglo XVI al XIX, reuniendo reflexiones enfocadas en cómo las relaciones raciales y de género moldearon dichos mundos laborales. Buscamos explicitar cómo los imaginarios colectivos sobre la diferencia se inscriben en las dinámicas laborales, reforzando, cuestionando y subvirtiendo las jerarquías establecidas. Queremos hacernos eco de estas conversaciones entrelazadas, apostando a sumar voces de jóvenes historiadores e historiadoras del sur global, muchas veces soslayadas en el debate en esta clave historiográfica. Al indagar en estas ausencias, podemos señalar, por un lado, la disparidad en términos de acceso a fuentes de financiamiento y el hábito de ponderar el inglés como lengua predilecta para narrar la historia de las Américas. Pero, por otro, el peso de las tradiciones historiográficas que muy frecuentemente han hecho del nacionalismo metodológico su punto de comienzo y de fin.

Nos interesa reunir perspectivas que trastoquen, amplíen o reformulen ese nacionalismo metodológico en las Américas y que pongan en primer plano las circulaciones laborales transnacionales de personas, ideas y prácticas. Alentamos especialmente a que, dentro de esta convocatoria, haya lugar para historias conectadas entre el océano Atlántico y el océano Pacífico, así como los circuitos laborales a lo largo del Pacífico que permitan tensionar la centralidad atlántica. Para ello, invitamos a investigaciones que empleen explícitamente metodologías de historias conectadas (por ejemplo: estudios de casos múltiples, análisis de redes, prosopografía, o microhistoria transnacional) y que incluyan propuestas interdisciplinares (historia, antropología, sociología, estudios de género) para abordar los cruces entre raza, género y trabajo. Entendemos que situar las Américas en el centro de este análisis abre la posibilidad de examinar de forma comparada y relacional procesos como la colonización, el movimiento de poblaciones, la implantación de diversas formas de coerción laboral, y la formación de mercados y redes de intercambio global. En este sentido, alentamos la presentación de contribuciones en diferentes idiomas (español, portugués, inglés y francés) y buscamos con la modalidad híbrida impulsar la participación de investigadores con acceso limitado a financiamiento o a espacios de difusión académica.

Fecha límite de recepción de resúmenes: 31/05/2025

Fecha de recepción de resúmenes extendidos (hasta 12 páginas): 15/09/2025

Envío a: gmitidieri@gmail.com / fidelrodv@gmail.com

 

 

 

Entre dois oceanos: Histórias conectadas de Trabalho, Raça e Gênero nas Américas (séculos XVI-XIX)

Fidel Rodríguez Velásquez

Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)

Gabriela Mitidieri

Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio).

Instituto de Investigaciones de Estudios de Género (UBA)

Nos últimos anos, o trabalho e seus mundos voltaram a ocupar um lugar central nas preocupações historiográficas ao investigar o passado das Américas. Esse interesse não apenas trouxe um olhar crítico para repensar as hierarquias, a coerção e a violência que o caracterizaram (e ainda caracterizam), mas, sobretudo, para examinar a agência, a negociação, as conexões e as estratégias daqueles que, desde baixo, tiveram que agir em meio a diversas formas de desigualdade. Partimos de uma tradição de História social e cultural do Trabalho para pensar as realidades laborais heterogêneas nas Américas. Esse campo de estudos colocou no centro os trabalhadores e trabalhadoras, suas famílias, redes de apoio, espaços de socialização e vidas em movimento, enriquecendo a noção de “mundos do trabalho” ao evidenciar que as experiências laborais estão entrelaçadas com valores culturais, identidades políticas e relações raciais e de gênero. Trata-se de uma historiografia fértil que ampliou o olhar para além das fábricas, dos sindicatos e do operário branco do sexo masculino como sujeito privilegiado. Assim como das periodizações clássicas que situaram o trabalho como subproduto do capitalismo e da revolução industrial.

A partir dessa perspectiva, buscamos contribuir para o campo da história global / história conectada do trabalho, com foco no período que vai do século XVI ao XIX, reunindo reflexões sobre como as relações raciais e de gênero moldaram esses mundos laborais. Procuramos explicitar como os imaginários coletivos sobre a diferença se inscrevem nas dinâmicas de trabalho, reforçando, questionando e subvertendo hierarquias estabelecidas. Queremos ressoar essas conversas entrelaçadas, apostando na inclusão de vozes de jovens historiadores e historiadoras do sul global, muitas vezes negligenciadas no debate historiográfico. Ao investigar essas ausências, podemos apontar, por um lado, a disparidade no acesso a fontes de financiamento e o hábito de privilegiar o inglês como língua principal para narrar a história das Américas. Por outro lado, destacamos o peso das tradições historiográficas que frequentemente fizeram do nacionalismo metodológico seu ponto de partida e de chegada.

Nos interessa reunir perspectivas que questionem, ampliem ou reformulem esse nacionalismo metodológico nas Américas e que priorizem as circulações laborais transnacionais de pessoas, ideias e práticas. Encorajamos especialmente que, dentro desta chamada, haja espaço para histórias conectadas entre o oceano Atlântico e o oceano Pacífico, bem como os circuitos de trabalho ao longo do Pacífico, capazes de tensionar a centralidade atlântica. Para isso, convidamos pesquisas que empreguem explicitamente metodologias de histórias conectadas (por exemplo: estudos de casos múltiplos, análise de redes, prosopografia ou micro-história transnacional) e que incluam propostas interdisciplinares (história, antropologia, sociologia, estudos de gênero) para abordar os cruzamentos entre raça, gênero e trabalho. Entendemos que situar as Américas no centro dessa análise abre a possibilidade de examinar de forma comparada e relacional processos como a colonização, o movimento de populações, a implantação de diversas formas de coerção laboral, e a formação de mercados e redes de intercâmbio global. Nesse sentido, incentivamos a submissão de contribuições em diferentes idiomas (espanhol, português, inglês e francês) e buscamos, com a modalidade híbrida, ampliar a participação de pesquisadores com acesso limitado a financiamento ou a espaços de divulgação acadêmica.

Referencias clave / Referências-chave

Aram, Bethany. "¿Entre dos mares? Reflexiones a partir de la Historia Atlántica y hacía tres conceptos de la Historia Global." Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos. Nouveaux mondes mondes nouveaux-Novo Mundo Mundos Novos-New world New worlds (2019).

Barragán, R. (2019). Trabajo y trabajadores en América Latina (siglos XVI–XXI). Centro de Investigaciones Sociales (CIS).

Barragán, R., & Zagalsky, P. C. (2023). Potosí in the global silver age (16th–19th centuries). Brill.

Chalhoub, S. (1990). Visões da liberdade: Uma história das últimas décadas da escravidão na corte. Editora Companhia das Letras.

Chalhoub, S., & Teixeira da Silva, F. (2009). Sujeitos no imaginário acadêmico: Escravos e trabalhadores na historiografia brasileira desde os anos 1980. Cadernos AEL, 14(26), 11–49.

Cowling, C. (2018). Concebendo a liberdade: Mulheres de cor, gênero e abolição da escravidão nas cidades de Havana e Rio de Janeiro. Editora da Unicamp.

De Vito, C. G., Schiel, J., & Van Rossum, M. (2020). From bondage to precariousness? New perspectives on labor and social history. Journal of Social History, 54(2), 644–662.

Echeverri, M., & Ferreira, R. (2023). Shades of unfreedom: Labor regimes in Latin America in the nineteenth century. In M. Echeverri & C. Soriano (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Latin American independence (pp. 276–311). Cambridge University Press.

Ferreira, R. (2013). Biografia como história social: O clã Ferreira Gomes e os mundos da escravização no Atlântico Sul. Varia Historia, 29, 679–719.

Fontes, P. (2008). Um nordeste em São Paulo: Trabalhadores migrantes em São Miguel Paulista (1945–66). FGV Editora.

Fontes, P., Fortes, A., & Mayer, D. (2017). Brazilian labour history in global context: Some introductory notes. International Review of Social History, 62(S25), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859017000645

Galeano, D. (2019). Delincuentes viajeros: Estafadores, punguistas y policías en el Atlántico sudamericano. Siglo XXI Editores.

Hoffnung-Garskof, J. E. (2020). Migraciones raciales: La ciudad de Nueva York y la política revolucionaria en el Caribe español, 1850–1902. Maize Books.

Lara, S. H. (2021). Palmares & Cucaú: O aprendizado da dominação. Edusp.

O’Donnell, J., & Pereira, L. A. de M. (2016). Cultura em movimento: Natalie Davis entre a antropologia e a história social. História Unisinos, 20(2), 131–142.

Pereira, L. (2020). A cidade que dança: Clubes e bailes negros no Rio de Janeiro (1881–1933). Editora Unicamp.

Popinigis, F., & Cruz Terra, P. (2019). Historiografia da escravidão e do trabalho no Brasil: Avanços e desafios. In R. Barragán (Coord. y comp.), Trabajos y trabajadores en América Latina (siglos XVI–XXI) (pp. [xx–xx]). Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia.

Schettini, C. (2019). El dinero de las prostitutas. Trabajo sexual y circuitos inmigratorios entre Río de Janeiro y Buenos Aires (1907–1920). In C. Schettini & J. Suriano (Comps.), Historias cruzadas: Diálogos historiográficos sobre el mundo del trabajo en Argentina y Brasil (pp. [xx–xx]). Teseo.

Scott, R., & Hébrard, J. (2015). Papeles de libertad: Una odisea transatlántica en la era de la emancipación. Uniandes.

Van der Linden, M. (Ed.). (2008). Workers of the world: Essays toward a global labor history (Vol. 1). Brill.

Vergara Figueroa, A., & Cosme Puntiel, C. L. (Eds.). (2018). Demando mi libertad: Mujeres negras y sus estrategias de resistencia en la Nueva Granada, Venezuela y Cuba, 1700–1800. Editorial Universidad Icesi. https://doi.org/10.18046/EUI/escr.16.2018

Prazo final para submissão de resumos: 31/05/2025

Data de recebimento dos resumos estendidos (até 12 páginas): 15/09/2025

Enviar para: gmitidieri@gmail.com / fidelrodv@gmail.com

12-14 June, University of Chicago

ONLINE REGISTRATION CLOSES MAY 19TH

It's time to register for LAWCHA2025! 

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Please go online and sign up today for the conference and make your dorm or hotel reservations. 

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• If you are on the program (whether presenting in person or virtually) you must be a member of LAWCHA. 
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We are pleased to announce that Labour History Review is celebrating the publication of its 90th edition. Labour History Review is published in partnership with the Society for the Study of Labour History, alongside the book series Studies in Labour History, edited by Professor Neville Kirk. Since 1960 the journal has explored the working lives and politics of ‘ordinary’ people and has played a key role in redefining social and political history.

To mark the occasion we are sharing a selection of articles from the journal which are free to read for a month.

Browse the 90th Edition of Labour History Review including a free to read roundtable on The Starmer Labour Government in Historical Perspective >

The Editors of the journal, Paul Corthorn (Queen’s University Belfast) and Peter Gurney (University of Essex) are delighted to offer the following introduction to the selected articles:

We have great pleasure in celebrating the publication of the 90th edition of Labour History Review by making freely available the following articles. We have chosen them from the last decade or so – the period of our editorship – and it was a hard choice to make from a wealth of high-quality articles.

Read the following articles for free throughout May

Donald MacRaild, ‘”No Irish Need Apply”: The Origins and Persistence of a Prejudice’ 78/3 (2013), 269-99

Jonathan Hyslop, ‘The Strange Death of Liberal England and the Strange Birth of Illiberal South Africa: British Trade Unionists, Indian Labourers and Afrikaner Rebels, 1910-1914’, 79/1 (2014), 97-120

Jamie Bronstein, ‘Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, the ‘Member for All England’: Representing the Non-voter in the Chartist Decade’, 80/2 (2015), 109-34

Tom Buchanan, ‘Ideology, Idealism, and Adventure: Narratives of the British Volunteers in the International Brigades’, 81/2 (2016), 123-40

David Selway, ‘Death Underground: Mining Accidents and Memory in South Wales, 1913–74’, 81/3 (2016), 187-209

Emmanuelle Morne, ‘Glorious Auxiliaries’? Gender, Participation, and Subordination in the Chartist Movement (1838–1851)’, 85/1 (2020), 7/32

Matt Beebee, ‘2019 Labour History Review Essay Prize Winner: Navigating Deindustrialization in 1970s Britain: The Closure of Bilston Steel Works and the Politics of Work, Place, and Belonging’, 85/3 (2020), 253-83.

Want access to Labour History Review? Recommend this journal to your librarian >