Social and Labour History News

Rueda, María Alicia. (2024). Luis Emilio Recabarren: Educador Marxista de la Clase Obrera Chilena. Izquierdas, 53.  http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/s0718-50492024000100230. 

http://www.izquierdas.cl/images/pdf/2024/53/art20.pdf

Resumen: El presente artículo ofrece una aproximación filosófica e histórica al estudio de Luis Emilio Recabarren y lo reivindica como un educador marxista de la clase obrera chilena del primer cuarto del siglo XX. En primer lugar, el artículo revisa la historiografía chilena centrándose en el debate en torno a Recabarren como pensador marxista. Basándose en un análisis crítico de los ensayos de Recabarren, se identifica el pensamiento marxista que los cruza y, a través de los textos de prensa, la praxis educativa de Recabarren en las organizaciones y prensa obreras.

«Acronia. Studies in the history of anarchism and radical movements»

https://mimesisjournals.com/ojs/index.php/acronia/index

Decolonizing the History of Anarchism and Radical Movements

Deadline for submission of the abstract (not more than 1,000-1,500 words and a short bio of the author): February 15th, 2025.

The ongoing debates and controversies surrounding the cultural and hegemonic legacies of colonization have emphasized the necessity of re-evaluating the history of labor movements from perspectives that challenge the West's centrality. In recent years, a growing body of scholarship - stimulated by the transnational turn and driven by decolonization and Indigenous movements - has begun to critique and revise the Eurocentric paradigm that has long shaped the historical narrative of anarchism. This research has opened new and promising avenues of inquiry, prompting a reconceptualization of anarchism and the broader libertarian movement, traditionally viewed as an intrinsically Western phenomenon rooted in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. An expanding body of research focusing on the Global South (among the others those by Benedict Anderson, Maia Ramnath, Ciccariello-Maher, Ole Laursen, Lucien van der Walt, Steven J Hirsch) has provided alternative perspectives to the dominant view that anarchism in these regions was simply an "imported" ideology from the West, passively adopted by local populations. In contrast, these recent studies highlight the originality of anarchist movements beyond Europe, while simultaneously exposing some contradictions within the Western anarchist movements, particularly their occasional alignments with colonialist attitudes and hegemonic cultural frameworks in their interactions with native populations.

A decolonial perspective, therefore, holds the potential to challenge established paradigms and offer a fundamental re-interpretation of the history of anarchist and radical movements on a global scale, while simultaneously raising critical theoretical, methodological, and empirical questions.

The editorial board of Acronia: History of Anarchism and Radical Movements is pleased to announce a call for submissions for its upcoming issue on the theme: Decolonizing the History of the Anarchist  and radical movements. Contributions are invited in Italian and/or English and may explore any aspect of decolonizing anarchist and radical movements . Submissions may engage with theoretical debates, historiographical analyses, reconstructions of specific historical experiences, or examinations of cultural productions.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• The experiences of anarchist and radical movements in the Global South
• Theoretical reinterpretations of anarchism from a decolonial perspective
• Anarchy and Indigenous movements
• Interactions between European anarchist refugees and local populations
• The role of anarchists within or in relation to national independence and decolonization movements
• Anarchists as carriers of colonizing cultural ideas and practices
• The intersections of anarchism and racial issues
• Anarchism and Orientalis
• Critique and opposition (or complicity?) of Western anarchisms toward the colonialism of their respective countries.

The editorial board welcomes submissions that contribute to broadening and diversifying the understanding of anarchist history through innovative and critical approaches.

Editor
Pietro Di Paola (University of Lincoln, UK)

For any inquiries, please contact the following address: acronia@mimesis-group.com

Abstract: This call for papers from Cahiers d'histoire. Revue d'histoire critique focuses on left-wing activism in Africa, particularly that which can be considered as revolutionary, underpinned by anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, from the 1960s, with access to independence, to the 1990s, with the implementation of a multi-party system and the imposition of structural adjustment policies. The aim is to shed light on histories that are often overlooked in academic literature, because they were often lived underground, during the long periods when post-colonial states prohibited multipartyism de facto or de jure. Priority will therefore be given to studies that provide new elements or develop an innovative approach to existing knowledge, whether in contemporary African political history or Africanist political science.

 

Practical details:

a)    Send an abstract ranging from 400 to 600 words by February 15, 2025 (preferably in French), together with a brief CV and a bibliographical selection that will enable you to situate the author's field(s) of specialization. Please send this to both email adresses : martinmourre@hotmail.com and bianchini@gmx.fr

b) The selection of draft articles will take place during the second half of February.

c) Articles must be completed by July 15, for an issue to be published in early 2026.

 

The review publishes articles in French; English versions are accepted but will be later translated for publication in French.

Call for Conference Papers: “Strikes and Social Conflicts in Hostile Environments”, September 5-6, 2025

Deadline for Submission of Abstracts: March 1, 2025

Seventh Conference of the International Association of Strikes and Social Conflicts

Co-Organized by

    The Arrighi Center for Global Studies, Johns Hopkins University and the
    International Association of Strikes and Social Conflicts (IASSC)

Conference Venue: The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center, 555 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC (USA)

Conference Theme: Strikes and Social Conflicts in Hostile Environments

While workers and other subordinate groups are always operating under conditions that limit their range of action—that is, circumscribing the kinds of protest demands or action repertoires that are considered normative or acceptable—there are historical periods and geographical spaces in which the environment is especially hostile to collective action from below.

Our premise is that we have entered one of these especially hostile periods on a global scale. As such, there is an urgent need to examine and draw lessons from instances (both contemporary and historical) in which subordinated groups navigated through, organized in, protested against, and at times, successfully transformed the “hostile environments” in which they were embedded.

Historically, many would point to the labor repressive colonial regimes and the spread of fascist movements in the first half of the twentieth century as one example of a period of widening/deepening “hostility” on a global scale.  Likewise, the early-twenty-first century, with the current global resurgence of fascist and far right regimes and movements in new forms, can be understood as another period of widening/deepening hostility.

At the same time, spatial unevenness of hostile environments has been central to the functioning of historical capitalism in any given period. For example, in the decades after the Second World War, the apartheid regime in South Africa and military dictatorships in Latin America and East Asia existed at the same time that the right of workers to strike and form independent trade unions were at their height in many core countries. Equally important, workers in the same location (e.g., within the same country, city, workplace) are regularly divided between those who are ruled through consent and those who feel the brunt of the hostility—with distinctions drawn along the lines of gender, migration/citizenship, race/ethnicity, urban/rural, etc.  

Finally, even in the darkest periods in world history, there have been local pockets of hope in which successful mobilizations around (and advances of) labor rights and social justice have prevailed. Here we might think of the settlements established by enslaved people who had escaped from bondage (marronage); or Rojava, the autonomous polyethnic socialist regime established in northeast Syria in the midst of the Syrian Civil War; or the experiences of other liberated areas in the midst of wars and revolutions.

Call for Abstracts:  

In line with the above discussion, we welcome abstracts for papers focused on:

• case studies of strikes and social conflicts under colonial, fascist, neofascist, far-right, and other hostile regimes, both past and present;
• workers organizing to break down internal class divides (within countries or between countries) and their lessons for working class solidarity and labor internationalism today;
• the experiences—past and present—of the “rays of hope” that shined through (even for a short time) in deeply hostile environments, and their lessons for today.

We also encourage the submission of abstracts that focus on the following specific aspects of the overall conference theme:

• the contemporary university as hostile environment (for faculty, students and workers—not assuming these are mutually exclusive categories);
• strikes and social conflicts in wars and hostile geopolitical environments, past and present;
• the role of ecology and climate crisis in contemporary hostile environments.

We welcome papers that are contemporary or historical as well as papers that are single case, comparative or global in perspective. We encourage all paper presenters to grapple with and make explicit the lessons of their analysis for our present-day hostile environment(s).

Finally, we welcome abstracts for papers on strikes & social conflicts beyond the conference theme.

Procedures for Abstract Submission

Paper abstracts of 250-500 words should be submitted via this google form.  The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2025.  Decisions will be announced by April 1, 2025.

There are no conference fees for attendees. Buffet meals will be provided at the conference itself; however, participants should plan to cover their own travel/accommodation expenses. Information on hotel options and other conference updates will be posted on the conference webpage.

Papers presented at the conference will be considered for a special issue of the IASSC’s journal, Workers of the World.

Conference Organizing Committee (Contact email for conference queries: arrighi@jhu.edu).

Committee Chair: Beverly J. Silver (Johns Hopkins University); Arrighi Center Committee Members: Zophia Edwards (Johns Hopkins), Ricardo Jacobs (UC Santa Barbara), Mateus Alves de Mendonca (Johns Hopkins), Corey Payne (University of Richmond), Christy Thornton (New York University); IASSC Committee Members:  Ralph Darlington (University of Salford) and Alice Pate (Kennesaw State University).

 

“Control and punishment devices”

3rd International Conference on History of Prison and Punitive Institutions

https://www.unavarra.es/congreso-historia-prision/?languageId=1

14 to 16 January 2026, Iruñea - Pamplona.
Universidad Pública de Navarra – Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa.

Introduction

The Group for the Study of History of Prison and Punitive Institutions organises the 3rd
International Conference on the History of Prison and Punitive Institutions, under the title Control
and punishment devices, following up the 2nd Conference held in Albacete in September 2019.
The aim of the Conference is to articulate a space for fruitful exchange, for sharing lines of research
recently carried out in the field of punitiveness, taking into account the control and disciplinary
logics that are projected in different institutions and geographies. As in previous editions of this
Conference, there is a clear intention of bringing closer contributions both from the
historiographical field (from the Middle Ages to Contemporary History and even immediate
history) and the analyses most concerned with current modulations of the punitive, which are being
promoted from other disciplines such as Sociology, Anthropology or Law. This will be a great
opportunity to update the state of the historical investigation on control and punishment
experiences and institutions from a multidisciplinary perspective. Furthermore, in a context
marked by a growing presence of warfare, projecting itself onto different social dimensions, we
deem necessary and urgent to reflect again with a critical eye on the ways in which the notion of
punishment can be rethought and the forms it has taken and takes in different social spheres.

The conference has been organised in the framework of a research project:
“Historia y presente del control social, las instituciones punitivas y los cuerpos de seguridad en
España (siglos XX-XXI): Prácticas, discursos y representaciones culturales”
(PID2021-123504NB-I00)

Proposal submission

Proposals for interventions at the conference may take two forms, each of which has its own
peculiarities.

• Written communication: A first version of the texts will be distributed among
the participants of each table or session before the conference, and a final version
will be published in a collective book, if the authors are interested in doing so.
The proposal should include:
◦ Title
◦ Short introduction of the author (5 – 10 lines)
◦ Abstract (200 words)
◦ Chronological and thematical axis in which is included

• Talk: In this case there is no commitment to publication by the organising
committee, although the proposal will be distributed in advance to the
participants of each round table. The proposal must include:
◦ Title
◦ Short introduction of the author (5 – 10 lines)
◦ 2.000-word text explaining the broad outline of the intervention
◦ Chronological and thematical axis in which is included

The scientific committee, taking into account the number of proposals received and the logistical
capacity of the conference, will be responsible for accepting the proposals and placing them in the
different sessions according to what it deems most appropriate. As a general rule, priority will be
given to interventions accompanied by a written communication.
The conference will have a face-to-face format, although at some tables, depending on the proposals
received and logistical issues, there will be the possibility of on-line participation by speakers from
other continents.
With regard to language, written communications will be accepted in any of the official languages
of the Spanish state, as well as in English and Portuguese. The sessions will generally be held in
Spanish, although those responsible for each session may facilitate the participation of speakers in
other languages, depending on the proposals received

Fees and registration procedure

Regarding registration for the conference, it is necessary to bear in mind that:
• Registration to the conference is required for the definitive acceptance and incorporation of
the papers into the structure of the conference.
• The date and procedure for registration will be detailed in the second circular and online:
https://www.unavarra.es/congreso-historia-prision
• The registration fee will be 25 euros
• Enrolment in the conference may be recognised with 1 ECTS credit for UPNA students

Schedule and registration

With a view to the preparation and spreading of the conference we would like to make known
from now on what will be some reference dates:

• Submission of communication proposals:
◦ Deadline: 14 March 2025.
◦ Proposals will be sent to the following e-mail address:
congreso.historiaprision@unavarra.es

• Second circular letter:
◦ Publication date: May 2025
◦ The second circular will indicate the structure of the conference sessions and the
papers accepted in each of them.
◦ Depending on the proposals finally received, this structure may be slightly modified
in the third circular.

• Submission of the texts of the communications:
◦ Texts may be submitted until 20 October 2025.
◦ The scientific committee will evaluate the texts and reserves the right to
request corrections before the final acceptance of the papers.

• Access to the texts of the communications:
◦ During the month of November 2025, the submitted texts will be sent to those
registered for the conference.

• Publication of the proceedings:
◦ In the course of 2026 the GEHPIP will publish a book in digital format with the final
proceedings of the conference.

More info: https://www.unavarra.es/congreso-historia-prision/presentation?language…

Responsables scientifiques du numéro : Jérôme Lamy (CNRS), Jean-François Bert (Université de Lausanne). Coordinateur de rédaction du numéro : David Hamelin

Proposition de dossier pour la revue Images du travail, travail des images (n° 21, septembre 2026)

L’image scientifique et, plus généralement, la culture visuelle des pratiques savantes, ont fait l’objet de nombreuses enquêtes historiennes et sociologiques. Ainsi les travaux de Lorraine Daston et Peter Galison sur l’émergence de différents régimes d’objectivation par l’image se sont fondés sur une analyse précise des façons de représenter les objets de recherche (Daston, Galison, 2012). L’ouvrage classique dirigé par Michael Lynch et Steve Woolgar, Representation in Scientific Pratice (Lynch, Woolgar, 1990), donnait à voir la multitude des entrées visuelles dans les manières de connaître. De même, l’administration de la preuve par l’image a fait l’objet d’intenses recherches, permettant de situer un régime scopique étendu au public le plus large (Bigg, Vanhoutte, 2017). Plus généralement, la place des images dans les dispositifs politiques de recherche – notamment dans les tentatives de domination coloniales (Bleichmar, 2012) – rejoint celle des pratiques discursives. Enfin, les enjeux commerciaux d’une science prise dans les intérêts marchands (Margócsy, 2014) mettent au jour des cultures visuelles historiquement spécifiques.

Cependant, il est un domaine où l’attention aux images de la science reste à confirmer, c’est celui des savant∙e∙s au travail. Les corps des savant∙e∙s (Bert, 2023), leurs positions mises en scène pour témoigner du labeur de la pensée, les démonstrations collectives publicisées (comme dans les Congrès et les colloques [Miskell, 2016]), les représentations médiatiques (Babou, Le Marec, 2008) ou les implications plus didactiques (Robert, 1995 ; Gauthier, 1996) restent encore à explorer.

Cette proposition de dossier vise à restituer la diversité des grammaires visuelles du travail savant : qu’il s’agisse des portraits, des peintures, des sculptures, des photographies, des films, des effigies, ou encore des images plus populaires, comme les timbres. Ce sont tous les supports de l’image laborieuse de la science qui pourront être évoqués. L’enjeu est de saisir ce que les représentations disent (ou reconstruisent) à la fois du travail savant, de ses spécificités (e.g. l’usage des instruments [Dekker, Lippincott, 1999 ; Lamy, Bert, 2021], les différences selon les disciplines), des tensions qu’il porte (e.g. entre le collectif et les tropes du génie), des mythologies qu’il reconfigure (e.g. le travail sur le terrain vs. le travail en laboratoire), des forces politiques qui l’animent (e.g. les luttes des scientifiques et leur médiatisation), des hiérarchies sous-jacentes (e.g. les effets du genre [Mitchell, McKinnon, 2018], la place des technicien∙ne∙s, des assistant∙e∙s [Shapin, 1989]).

Les propositions veilleront à mettre au centre de leur questionnement les représentations, leur matérialité et leurs spécificités. De même, il importera de ne pas s’en tenir à des approches purement descriptives. Le dossier mettra plutôt en valeur les articles prenant en compte les processus de fabrication des images.

Les approches pourront émaner d’historien∙ne∙s, de sociologues, d’anthropologues. Le comparatisme est bienvenu dans les analyses. Le dossier accueillera des articles se concentrant sur les images conçues dans leur diversité matérielle, processuelle et pratique la plus grande : de l’image fixe (peinture, photographie, dessins, BD), aux films, aux jeux-vidéos…

Quelques grands axes peuvent orienter les propositions d’articles

• Représenter l’ergonomie savante : les bureaux, les cabinets, les bibliothèques, les laboratoires, les observatoires, les savant∙e∙s sur le terrain. L’enjeu, ici, est de donner à voir les arrangements spatiaux et matériels mis en scène et/ou construits pour les besoins d’une représentation savante dont on pourra chercher à repérer les stéréotypes et les motifs : l’écrivain∙e assis à son bureau ou dans son cabinet ; le lecteur ou la lectrice représenté le livre ouvert, sur une table de bibliothèque, mais aussi en dehors, en promenade, ou encore lors d’un déplacement ; le ou la scientifique montré en train de regarder au travers de ses instruments (Dibie, 2020 ; Bernasconi, Nellen, 2019).

• Représenter le travail en action : les images détaillant les gestes savants selon leur spécialité (le ou la médecin, l’architecte, les naturalistes…) dessinent les contours d’une grammaire des compositions visuelles selon les lieux-communs attachés à une discipline. On peut penser, par exemple, à l’historien∙ne∙s dans les archives (Artières, 2015). L’enjeu pour certains savant∙e∙s peut d’ailleurs être de déjouer parfois l’image attendue. C’est le cas par exemple du sociologue Erving Goffman, qui s’ingéniait à se faire photographier sans livre, sans feuille et sans stylo (Winkin, 2022).

• La difficile représentation des savoir-faire : le coup d’œil, la maîtrise du corps, l’instrument dédié forment quelques-uns des moyens visuels mis en œuvre pour évoquer une pratique difficilement descriptible, opaque dans ses subtilités, échappant, pour l’essentiel, aux ordinaires matrices de la représentation. Que donne-t-on à voir dans ces images d’une manière de faire science ? Que laisse-t-on filtrer visuellement de l’ordinaire des recherches qui reposent sur des savoir-faire particuliers ?

• Les petites mains du travail savant : les secrétaires, les technicien∙ne∙s, les ingénieur∙e∙s, les assistant∙e∙s… Le travail savant est d’abord et avant tout collectif (Waquet, 2022). Une partie importante de l’imaginaire visuel occidental moderne s’ingénie à réduire ce foisonnement d’acteurs∙trices à la seule personne du savant, intronisé en génie solitaire. Comment les représentations imagées travaillent-elles cette tension ? Quelle place est donnée aux agent∙e∙s de la recherche ? Existe-t-il des codes graphiques et visuels pour les évoquer ?

• Les lieux communs de la représentation : Einstein tirant la langue met en tension le sérieux du savant et sa capacité à faire rire, la photographie de Watson et Crick autour de la représentation de l’ADN fait surgir l’infiniment petit au côté des savants, Andrew Wiles, pris devant un tableau noir, est un véritable point nodal des représentations de mathématicien∙ne∙s (songeons au film Le théorème de Margueritte [2023])… Ces allant-de-soi visuels supposent des consolidations perpétuelles du champ des représentations dont il conviendrait d’analyser les soubassements sociaux, culturels, politiques… (Chambers, 1983). Ainsi la figure du savant-explorateur, image canonique de la virilité scientifique (Oreskes, 1996), constitue, par exemple un code visuel relativement commun. Il est possible, également, d’intégrer à l’analyse la caricature du/de la savant∙e∙ au travail, qui, d’une certaine manière, distingue les traits saillants et communément admis de la figure du ou de la scientifique (on pense ici à Darwin ou Newton par exemple). La caricature et la bande-dessinée procèdent d’une même exploitation de figures partagées du savant au travail.

• Et ailleurs ? Qu’en est-il de ces représentations de savants au travail dans d’autres configurations (historiques et culturelles) savantes ? Qu’est-ce que ces représentations nous disent du savoir et du savant en Inde, dans les mondes musulmans, ou au Japon ? Comment le savoir y est-il compris et surtout montré ? Est-il de l’ordre d’un sacrifice, d’une joie, d’une aventure ? L’occasion d’une fuite ou d’un retrait du monde qui peut aussi être représenté ?
• L’évolution historique des représentations. Si l’on se fixe sur un savant et son image, peut-on repérer, sur le long cours, des transformations des postures dans lesquelles il est présenté ? D’Ada Lovelace à Pasteur, de Newton à Marie-Curie, les scientifiques les plus connu∙e∙s ont été pris dans des régimes successifs de représentations très différents. Des enquêtes longitudinales pourront être menées sur ces figures célèbres, afin de déchiffrer les codes historiques de leur présentation.

Ces axes ne sont que quelques éléments d’indication pour orienter les propositions ; toutes les enquêtes et les analyses sur l’ordre visuel qui sous-tend le travail des scientifiques sont bienvenues dans ce numéro.

Les propositions de contributions peuvent être issues des différentes sciences sociales. Elles reposent nécessairement dans leur démonstration sur un corpus d’images mobilisées dans l’enquête. Ces images en noir et blanc ou en couleurs doivent être reproduites dans l’article. Rappelons que Images du travail, Travail des images est une revue scientifique entièrement numérique, gratuite et ouverte. L’auteur doit à ce titre s’assurer de la disposition des droits d’utilisation et de diffusion. Les articles sont d’un format de 30 000 à 50 000 signes maximum. Dans un premier temps, sont attendues des propositions d’articles soit un texte d’intention de 2000 à 3000 signes en tenant compte du calendrier suivant :

15 mars 2025 : date limite de réception des propositions d’articles par courriel aux adresses suivantes.

30 septembre 2025 : envoi des articles en vue de leur soumission au comité́ de rédaction de la revue (les publications devront être rédigées en français).

Contacts pour toutes informations complémentaires et pour l’envoi des documents :

• Jérôme Lamy : jerome.lamy@laposte.net
• Jean-François Bert : jean-francois.bert@unil.ch
• David Hamelin : david.hamelin@le-centre.pro
• La revue Image du travail, Travail des images : imagesdutravail@gmail.com

 

Références

Artières, P. (2015) « L’historien face aux archives », Pouvoirs, n° 153, p. 85-93.

Babou I & Le Marec J (2008) « Les pratiques de communication professionnelle dans les institutions scientifiques. Processus d’autonomisation », Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances, vol. 2, n°1, p. 115-142.

Bert J.F. & Lamy J. (2021) Voir les savoirs, Lieux, objets, gestes de la science, Paris, Anamosa.

Bert J.F. (2023) Le corps qui pense. Une anthropologie historique des pratiques savantes, Bâle, Schwabe.

Bigg C. & Vanhoutte K. (2017) « Spectacular astronomy », Early Popular Visual Culture, vol. 15, n°2, p. 115-124

Bernasconi, G., Nellen, S. (dir.) (2019) Das Büro. Zur Rationalisierung des Interieurs, 1880-1960, Bielefeld, Transcript Verlag

Bleichmar D. (2012) Visible Empire. Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

Chambers, D.W. (1983) « Stereotypic Images of the Scientist : The Draw a Scientist Test », Science Educaton, vol. 67, n°2, p. 255-265.

Daston L. & Galison P. (2012) Objectivité, Dijon, Les Presses du Réel, 2012

Dekker E. & Lippincott K. (1999) « The Scientific Instruments in Holbei’s Ambassadors : A Re-Examination », Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 62, n°1, p. 93-125.

Dibie, P. (2020) Ethnologie du bureau. Brève histoire d’une ethnologie assise, Paris, Métaillié.

Gauthier G. (1996) « La représentation des enseignants dans le cinéma français, 1964-1994 », Recherche & Formation, n° 21, p. 43-56.

Lynch M. & Woolgar S. (dir.) (1990) Representation in Scientific Practice, Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press.

Margócsy D. (2014) Commercial Visions. Science, Trade and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

Miskell L. (2016) Meeting Places. Scientific Congresses and Urban Identity in Victorian Britain, Londres, Routledge.

Mitchell M. & McKinnon M. (2018) « ‘Human’ or ‘objective’ faces of science ? Gender stereotypes and the representation of scientists in the media », Public Understanding of Science, vol. 29, n°2, p. 177-190.

Oreskes N. (1996) « Objectivity or Heroism ? On the Invisibility of Women in Science », Isis, vol. 11, p. 87-113.

Robert A. (1995) « Quelques aspects de l’image des enseignants à travers leur presse syndicale », Recherche & Formation, n° 21, p. 57-71.

Shapin S. (1989), « The Invisible technicians », American Scientist, vol. 77, n°6, p. 554-563.

Waquet F. (2015), L’ordre matériel des savoirs. Comment les savants travaillent XVIe-XXIe siècles, Paris, CNRS éditions

Waquet, F. (2022), Dans les coulisses de la science. Techniciens, petites mains et autres travailleurs invisibles, Paris, CNRS éditions.

Winkin Y. (2022), D’Erving à Goffman. Une œuvre performée ?, Paris, MKF.

University of Helsinki, 5–6 June 2025

The anti-fascist urban experience is traditionally depicted through the lens of symbolic spatial politics and confrontational tactics: marches, demonstrations, street battles, anarchist-inspired movements, and anti-fascist block tactics. These are aimed at challenging fascist territorial claims in cities, often resulting in the creation of “temporary autonomous zones” and the denial of the possibility for fascists to engage with the broader public, epitomised by the slogan “They shall not pass”. However, this depiction captures only a fragment of the anti-fascist urban experience.

This conference invites contributions that challenge and expand the traditional understanding of the anti-fascist urban experience, approaching the city itself as a multilayered space of resistance, solidarity, and community-building that evolves along the constant interplay of past struggles, present actions, and a collective projection of an imagined anti-fascist urban future. It asks: How have anti-fascists envisioned and practiced the liberation of urban communities from fascism, racism, sexism, patriarchal values, and structural oppression in both the global North and the global South during the past century (1919–today)? How have they sustained solidarity across diverse and intersecting struggles while grappling with the challenges posed by gentrification, social atomisation, neoliberal urban planning, and intensified policing?

Also of interest are contributions on anti-fascist resistance to eco-fascism in the urban setting, particularly from decolonial, Indigenous, and environmental perspectives. How have anti[1]fascists understood their relationship with and responsibility to the non-human life forms that also exist in the urban space? How has the dichotomy between “rural” and “urban” reinforced colonial understandings of civilisation? How do we understand the anti-fascist city in the context of sustaining life?

We encourage submissions that explore any geographical area, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• The spatial dynamics of anti-fascist protest activity

• The anti-fascist city as a layered memory space

• Class and race in the anti-fascist city

• Anti-fascism in the post-colonial city

• Intersectional perspectives on anti-fascist urban spaces

• Anti-fascist geographies of internationalism

• The emotions and experiences of the anti-fascist city

• Imaginaries, visions and myths of the anti-fascist city (past, present and future)

• The materiality of anti-fascist urbanism

• The gendering of anti-fascist city spaces

• Desire and sexuality in the anti-fascist city

• Cultural expressions of the anti-fascist city: street theatre, urban spectacle, music, art, murals, etc.

• Anti-fascism in literary urban studies

• Interplay between global and local anti-fascism

 

Keynote Speaker: David Featherstone, Professor of Political Geography, University of Glasgow.

 

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Paper proposals must include:

• Name of author(s)

• Paper Title + Abstract (300 words)

• Short academic bio (150 words)

• Statement on the need for financial assistance

• Please submit your proposal to < lgp.helsinki@gmail.com >

 

Important deadlines and dates

• Submission deadline: 1 February 2025

• Notification of acceptance: 15 February 2025

• Paper submission: 22 May 2025

• Conference dates: 5–6 June 2025

 

Location / Venue

University of Helsinki, Finland

 

Funding

We encourage researchers to seek funding through their respective institutions. We are currently applying for funds to offer partial financial support for travel costs.

 

Paper publication

Selected papers from the conference will be considered for publication in a peer reviewed journal special issue on the anti-fascist city. Further details regarding the publication process will be announced later.

 

Conference Organizing Committee

Kasper Braskén, Moshumee T. Dewoo, Shane Little

 

This conference is organised by the research project “Locating Global Protest against the Extreme Right: Anti-Fascism, Anti-Racism and Internationalism in Multiethnic Metropoles” (LGP), funded by the Research Council of Finland (project No. 355478), University of Helsinki, Finland: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/projects/anti-fascism-anti-racism-and-internationalism-multiethnic-metropoles

 

Subject Fields / Keywords

Urban history, left-wing politics, anti-fascism, political geography, solidarity, resistance

International Conference
Sciences Po Paris — 16-17 October 2025

At the turn of 19th and 20th centuries, European working-class movements combined their contesting industrial and capitalist order to a radical political critic towards democracy’s limits. Specifically, socialism asserted that its essential ambition of political modernity, tending to autonomy, was nothing but an illusion if disconnected from the tangible social and productive relationships that determined the political capacity of social classes in last instance. This denunciation fuelled the concept of industrial democracy, understood as an ideal according to which formal as well as real political and economic equality would be achieved, and political freedom would be guaranteed by the very socialisation of material production (Charbonnier: 2019). Such an ideal implies a definition of progress based on a concrete organisation of labour, that would ultimately subvert the very foundations of capitalism by the transformations and social consequences it would generate for the sake of an alternative and emancipatory modernity. Considering the history of “industrial democracy”, as thought and experienced by working-class movements, comes down to questioning connection between productivism and social progress, and prompts to think the possibilities of a reflexive modernity.

For those who issued and used it the concept “industrial democracy” implied bringing in democracy in the working place as well as breaking in the industrial world and social relationships in the heart of representative assemblies. In a nutshell, this ambition was tantamount to the absorption of economy by politics in order to rejuvenate democratic modernity, and conversely the absorption of politics by economy in a new organisation of producers. Issued at first around 1848 by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Charles Laboulaye (Samuel Hayat: 2011), the expression was used by Jean Jaurès in France, in Britain by Beatrice Potter and Sydney Webb who linked older aspiration of Guild Socialism and recent ambitions of the Fabian Society together, in the United States by John Dewey under the influence of the Fabian economist and historian G.D.H. Cole (Renault: 2020). Besides, the concept was shaped by socialists as a keystone for a coherent thought on State and its forthcoming changes, as a starting point for a radical rejection of capitalism, that would be amended or abolished. Such a democratic ideal also spread among reformist and revolutionary trade-union organisations in the 1890s and 1910, as they claimed the right for labour representation in corporations as well as working-class control on production (Le Crom: 2003). In France as in the United Kingdom, the First World War gave rise to genuine forms of consultation for production, of “worker’s control” under the supervision of State (Sirianni: 1980). Finally, associationism rising among labourers during the first half of 19th century (Christen, Fayolle, Hayat: 2021), as well as cooperative movements in Western Europe and Northern America (Dreyfus: 2017; Blin, Jarrige, Gacon, Vigna: 2020) or in Russia (Safronova: 2023), embodied different paths of this ideal before 1914.

After the First World War, council communism in Central and Eastern Europe (Germany, Hungary) and factory occupations in Italy were crucial in experiencing the ideal of industrial democracy in a revolutionary context. Its very formulation was carried on with the
Soviet experience (as stated by the decree on workers’ control of November 14th, 1917), and clarified by theoretical productions of Karl Korsch (Korsch: 1968) and Antonio Gramsci (Schecter: 1991). But after 1920, this juncture was followed by a decline of democratic experiences at work or, to say the less, a rethinking as shown by the conceptual shift from “industrial democracy” toward “economic democracy” (Müller-Jentsch: 2008). Thus, whereas industrial democracy was initially connected to social economy and decentralisation, its defenders oriented it towards “planisme” and interventionism, and even corporatism. Symptomatic of this intellectual shift was the career of the CGT militant Hyacinthe Dubreuil, who published in 1924 La République industrielle, appeared as a specialist of cooperative organisation within the International Labour Bureau from 1931 to 1938, and defined a project of “Chevalerie du Travail” under the Vichy government (Le Van-Lemesle: 2004).

In 1953, the famous sociologist Georges Gurvitch wrote an article for Esprit centred on industrial democracy, writing that “all experiences of industrial democracy attempted so far turned out to failures and defeats” (Gurvitch: 1953, p. 965). Paradoxically, this criticism was stated at the very opening of an era that would recognise, legitimate and reproduce in Western Europe and elsewhere (Yougoslavia, Israel, Australia, etc.) forms of consultation and “cogestion” for production. In fact, 1960s and 1970s social crises would encourage trades unions, employers and governments to promote democratisation of labour relations as a way to overcome fundamental inconsistencies of the fordist productive model. During the 1970s and 1980s, these experiences have immediately caught the sociologists’ attention and gave rise to an abundant literature. Nowadays, historians work on this exceptionally rich period, as the recent international conference held at the Université d’Evry in September 2023 has shown. Last, in the continuity of reflections of Bruno Trentin or André Gorz, industrial democracy appears as one of the possible ways to come out the labour crisis that hit postfordist societies (Trentin: 2012).

Compared to the social sciences abundant literature centred on the history of industrial democracy in the second half of 20th century, the earlier period designated by Gurvitch’s criticisms seems less known in its concrete experiences, its political and social history, its connected transnational context. The aim of this conference is to investigate this first and long period of industrial democracy history, and to insert it in its global context, in Europe, Northern America, Soviet Union, and in other parts of the world were a vision of industrial progress was linked to a conceptualisation of democratic modernity. In order not to restrict to a history of political and economical ideas, the conference will particularly stress on exploring new methodologies and themes, based on recent historiographical developments, leading to a strong questioning about the place and value of industrial democracy in our contemporary societies. Thus, suggestions of contributions may answer to one of the following themes:

A transnational history of the concept of “industrial democracy”: in which political and intellectual networks, by which authors was it formalised? How was it translated and conveyed from a linguistic and intellectual context to another, and through what media (correspondence, newspapers and publications, meetings…)? In what extent does it imply difference in interpretations?

“Industrial democracy” and labour internationalisation. Did post-WWI international organisations play a role in the institutionalisation and normalisation of “industrial democracy”, and was it considered as a democratic objective? Did this institutionalising process helped to defined new measure and control instruments, a specific knowledge on labour political consequences? In local or regional context, how and who formalised this knowledge (professional organisations? Institutions? Associations?)

“Industrial democracy” defined by experiences. Was “industrial democracy” experienced in other contexts than the already known British Workers’ Control? How did the perspective of “industrial democracy” supported a productivist understanding of economic and political modernisation? What was the role devoted to consumption and consumers?

“Industrial democracy” as a challenge to capitalism and State. In what extent and how did “industrial democracy” renewed approaches and criticisms of representative democracy and capitalism? Did it imply a redefinition of political and social understanding of citizenship? Did it imply a redefinition of the role of State?

“Industrial democracy against property”. In what extend did “industrial democracy” imply a criticism against property? Did common ownership of the means of production lead to a thought on “commons” (railways, mines, land, etc.). What were the material consequences (the role of cooperative societies on defining legislation)?

Industrial democracy and control of work risks. What role did representation and consultation of workers play in controlling accident, professional diseases, industrial débordement? Did “industrial democracy” produce alternative forms of regulation, different from technology or administrative control? How did they anticipate issues of technical democracy in the ecological era?

Information:
The conference will be held on October 16-17 2025 in Sciences Po, Paris. Proposals from early career researchers in history and other social sciences are particularly welcome.
Submissions (title, 2000 characters abstract, short CV) should be sent to Emmanuel Jousse (Emmanuel.jousse@sciencespo-lyon.fr) and Bastien Cabot (bastien.cabot@sciencespo.fr) by March 1st, 2025. A reply will be given by April 1st, 2025.
Please note that communications will be published in the French historical review Cahiers Jaurès in June 2026, after going through an evaluation and review process. Papers should thus be submitted by March 1st, 2026.

Welcoming structure
The Sciences Po Centre for History was founded in 1984 and brings together all research and teaching in history at Sciences Po, doctoral studies included. The CHSP is primarily concerned with political history, understood in the broadest sense and approached from a transnational and comparative perspective.

Partnerships
Recognized as a public interest organization since its creation in 1992, the Jean-Jaurès Foundation is the first of France’s political foundations. It is chaired by Jean-Marc Ayrault. Independent, European and social-democratic, the Jean-Jaurès Foundation has been a forum for reflection, dialogue and anticipation for over thirty years. The partnerships it supports are designed to give rise to relevant analyses and bold proposals, to place them in historical perspective, and to put this intellectual and political production at the service of all.
The French Society for Political History aims to promote and develop research in the field of « politics », across all eras and territories.

Organizers
Emmanuel JOUSSE (Associate professor, Sciences Po Lyon / LARHRA)
Bastien CABOT (Post-doctoral researcher, Sciences Po Paris / Sciences Po Centre for History)

Bibliographie / Bibliography :

François Bédarida, Éric Giully, Gérard Rameix, chapitre « Vers la démocratie industrielle ? » in : Syndicats et patrons en Grande-Bretagne, Paris, Les Éditions ouvrières, 1980, p. 157-173

Alexia Blin, François Jarrige, Stéphane Gacon, Xavier Vigna (dir.), L’utopie au jour le jour. Une histoire des expériences coopératives (XIXe-XXIe siècles), Nancy, L’Arbre bleu, 2020

Célestin Bouglé, Socialismes français. Du socialisme utopique à la démocratie industrielle, Paris, Armand Colin, 1932

J. Bourdeau, « La démocratie industrielle. Les grèves et les syndicats », Revue des deux mondes, 4e période, t. 156, 1899, p. 833-865

Pierre Charbonnier, chapitre « Démocratie industrielle », in : Abondance et liberté. Une histoire environnementale des idées politiques, Paris, La Découverte, 2019, p. 163-200

Hervé Charmettan, « Chester Barnard et la démocratie industrielle. Une autre voie du progressisme américain en déshérence », in : Virgile Chassagnon, Véronique Durraive (dir.), Économie politique institutionnaliste de l’entreprise. Travail, démocratie et gouvernement, Paris, Classiques Garnier, coll. « Bibliothèque de l’économiste », 2020, p. 183-229

Carole Christen, Caroline Fayolle, Samuel Hayat (dir.), S’unir, travailler, résister. Les associations ouvrières au XIXe siècle, Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses Universitaires de Septentrion, coll. « Histoire », 2021

Alexis Cukier, Le travail démocratique, Paris, PUF, coll. « Actuel Marx Confrontation », 2018

Michel Dreyfus, Histoire de l’économie sociale. De la Grande Guerre à nos jours, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2017

Hyacinthe Dubreuil, La République industrielle, Paris, Éditions de la bibliothèque d’éducation, 1923

Georges Gurvitch, « Les voies de la démocratisation industrielle », Esprit, n°203, vol. 6, 1953, p. 964-972

Samuel Hayat, « Démocratie industrielle (Démocratie ouvrière) », in : Chantal Gaillard, Georges Navet (dir.), Dictionnaire Proudhon, Bruxelles, Aden, 2011, p. 138-153

Karl Korsch, Politische Texte : Arbeitsrecht für Betriebsräte, Hambourg, Europäische Verlaganstalt, 1968 {1922}

Charles Laboulaye, Organisation du travail. De la démocratie industrielle, Paris, Librairie scientifique-industrielle de L. Mathias, 1848

Jean-Pierre Le Crom, L’introuvable démocratie salariale. Le droit de la représentation du personnel dans l’entreprise (1890-2002), Paris, Syllepses, 2003

Charles Léger, La démocratie industrielle et les comités d’entreprise en Suède, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, coll. « Académique », 1950

Lucette Le Van-Lemesle, « La ‘république industrielle’ de Hyacinthe Dubreuil (1883-1971), ou la dérive corporatiste », in : Steven L. Kaplan, Philippe Minard (dir.), La France, maladie du corporatisme ? XVIIIe-XXe siècles, Paris, Belin, coll. « Socio-histoires », 2004, p. 387-401

Wenzel Matiaske, Florian Schramm (eds.), “Industrial Democracy”, numéro special Management Revue, vol. 19, n°4, 2008

Walther Müller-Jentsch, « Industrial Democracy : Historical Development and Current Challenges », Management Revue, vol. 19, n°4, 2008, p. 260-273

André Philip, La démocratie industrielle, Paris, PUF, 1955

Emmanuel Renault, « Dewey et la démocratie industrielle », Pragmata, n°3, 2020, p. 176-215

Anna Safronova, Histoire des coopératives russes et soviétiques (1860-1930). Moderniser le peuple, Paris, Classiques Garnier, coll. « Bibliothèque de l’économiste », 2023

Darrow Schecter, Gramsci and the Theory of Industrial Democracy, Aldershot, Avebury / Brookfield (Vermont), Gower Publishing Company, 1991

Carmen J. Sirianni, “Worker’s Control in the Era of World War I: A Comparative Analysis of the European Experience”, Theory and Society, vol. 9, n°1, 1980, p. 29-88

Sydney Webb, Beatrice Potter-Webb, Industrial Democracy, Londres, Longmans, Green & Co., 1897

This call for articles is aimed at surveying the field of housing to create a collage of the newest approaches and findings and consequently provide a state-of-the-art springboard from which to reflect on the dynamics that arose between people outside of public spaces and the less visible effects of the experience of shared living as a process and encounter on both urban and rural environments.

Shared Housing – New Approaches to Re-evaluating Everyday Life in East-Central and Southeastern Europe between the Late Eighteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Massive migration movements made the urban centers of East-Central and Southeastern Europe grow at a dazzling rate around 1900. In rural areas, the reduction in labor required people in professional sectors, such as agriculture, to enter new communities of production. Due to housing shortages in the cities as well as the massive growth of urban populations and the need to make a living despite poorer earning opportunities and stronger competition in the local markets, people shared housing spaces in various ways. Yet, to date, there have been limited inquiries into the long history of shared housing in these regions of Europe. Furthermore, the dearth of studies concerning private everyday life in the historiography of these regions has created two asymmetries in the historical narrative. On the one hand, the history of housing has not yet been explicitly discussed from the perspective of “living” as a shared undertaking between unrelated people outside of familial environments. On the other hand, alongside a biased and group-based understanding of sociability (Brubaker 2002), perpetuating “imagined non-communities” (Zahra 2010), conventional historiographic narratives enshrine so-called minorities and migrants in “private” isolation. If at all, the history is retold as one of cultural participation (e.g. the “contribution” of Jews to the making of modernity) but not of private involvement. Nevertheless, research increasingly demonstrates that there was considerable contact between non-family members in housing sites––affecting the majority of the populations of cities but also rural places (i.e., farms). People shared apartments in urban centers with subtenants and bed lodgers, middle- und upper class people shared housing with domestics and other employees, and the phenomenon of “work at home” made private homes workplaces for the production of trading goods but also for encounters with peers. In the rural context, for instance, farmers hosted their helpers in their living sites. The sharing of housing spaces thus affected people from all social strata, who participated in different ways of “living together” and engaged in this process with different backgrounds and encounter.

The present call for articles is aimed at surveying the field to create a collage of the newest approaches and findings within this area and consequently provide a state-of-the-art springboard from which to reflect on the dynamics that arose between people outside of public spaces and the less visible effects of the experience of shared living as a process and encounter on both urban and rural environments.

Research questions might include the following: Who lived with whom? How did encounters, interactions, and relationships unfold in shared living spaces? How did people with heterogeneous religious, ethnic, national, linguistic, etc. affiliations cohabit? What impact did this practice have on the everyday lives of the individuals involved? How, if at all, did cities, municipalities, and other organizations address the situation of living spaces being shared contact zones? What implications for the making of the urban fabric and sociability in the countryside arise from analyzing shared housing sites?

The studies will be assembled under a shared heading in a special issue of a well-ranked history journal (indexed by at least Scopus, ERIH+, CEEOL, etc.) seeking to examine the spatial making and relational impact of shared housing, merging urban studies and rural history between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. We invite submissions of proposals for articles that address these questions from the lens of everyday life.

Proposals, including an extended abstract (400 words) and an academic biography (max. 100 words), are invited to be submitted via email to Susanne Korbel (susanne.korbel@uni-graz.at) and Oana Sorescu-Iudean (oana.sorescu-iudean@ubbcluj.ro) by January 31, 2025. Authors of the selected proposals will be notified by the mid-February, while manuscripts will need to be submitted before October 31, 2025. We envision having an online workshop with the selected authors to discuss the articles and their progress as well as our common research interests (in September, subject to the contributors’ availability).

References:
Rogers Brubaker, “Ethnicity without groups,” European Journal of Sociology 43, no. 2 (2002): 163-189.
Tara Zahra, “Imagined non-communities. National indifference as a category of analysis,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 93-119.

Kontakt

Susanne Korbel (susanne.korbel@uni-graz.at)
Oana Sorescu-Iudean (oana.sorescu-iudean@ubbcluj.ro)

Linz, Austria
25–27 September 2025
Conference Languages: English / German

The success of decolonization in the post-World War Two Global South depended greatly on the ability of national(ist) political leaders to rally local labor movements
behind their cause. Similarly, solidarity with anticolonial movements, or the lack thereof, showed by the labor organizations and workers’ political parties in the Global North, played an important role in the “battle for the hearts and minds” inside the metropoles. Labor movements in the center and periphery were not isolated, with rich exchanges taking place via political events, international conferences, delegation visits, and material aid. Parallel to the struggle to assert their geopolitical importance, governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean sought to establish social contracts with their working classes and control trade unions domestically, while using connections with organized labor and political actors in more developed countries to attract development cooperation.

The global turn in the historiographies of decolonization and the Cold War helped move studies of labor in the Global South beyond their old focus on the formation
of national working classes. Recent research on competing labor internationalisms, communist support for decolonization, transnational developmental
entanglements, and South-South solidarities opened new vistas for thinking about the working classes of the emerging Third World as constitutive makers of global
modernity. Popularized by authors such as Łukasz Stanek (2020) and Adom Getachew (2019), the concept of ‘worldmaking’ has proven particularly fruitful in encompassing the wealth of simultaneous and often competing practices of transnational collaboration in the peripheries during the Cold War. This conference aims to look at the role of workers and workers’ movements situated in the Cold War ‘South’, ‘North’, ‘East’, ‘West’, and ‘in-between’, in these practices of worldmaking triggered by decolonization between the 1950s and the 1990s.

Most historians applying global perspectives to 20th century decolonial and anti-imperialist struggles, as well as postcolonial ‘nation-building’ recognize labor’s symbolic and actual importance in these processes. Getachew, for instance, dedicates a chapter of her book to the efforts of the leaderships of newly independent countries in the Global South to alter the international division of labor by making analogies to domestic class politics. Parallel to considering the urbanists’ imaginaries applied to decolonized urban spaces, Stanek is attentive to the labor practices of the cosmopolitan experts involved in these projects. Authors dealing with Cold War trade union networks pose the question of how the transnational contacts, mainly reserved for union functionaries, translated to rank-and-file members (see for example: Journal of Social History 53:2, 2019). In their
own ways, scholars from different historiographical fields are thus currently tackling issues traditionally pertinent to labor historians. Nevertheless, there have been very few platforms to bring these strands of scholarship together and communicate directly with historians practicing Global Labor History.

The conference seeks to address such themes, including (but not limited to):
• The interplay of labor and nationalist movements during and after decolonization: How did nationalist political leaders integrate labor into pro-independence movements? How did this relation evolve after decolonization when newly independent countries were trying to navigate the challenges posed by the radicalism of the labor movements at one end, and the pressures of global geopolitical competition of the Cold War at the other?
• Strikes, boycotts, mass mobilizations: What was the role of local organized labor and its methods in decolonization struggles? Did these methods and conceptualizations of local labor leaders differ from the metropolitan theories and repertoires of labor struggles?
• Late colonial authorities and organized labor: In the aftermath of World War Two, colonial administrators tapped labor expertise from the metropoles to assist setting up local labor institutions in attempts to reorganize colonized societies to kick-start ‘development’. How did these early exchanges shape the outlook of workers and workers’ leaders in the colonies?
• Experiences of women workers and trade unionists: Transnational connections between women workers, labor and women rights activists within the anticolonial, socialist, and non-aligned global networks. Women’s struggles to enter male-dominated realms in the workplace, union leadership, education, and training.
• Labor and development aid/cooperation: What were labor relations and conditions of work on various projects of economic cooperation in the self-professed developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America?
• Trade union internationalisms during the Cold War: The agency of unions from the Global South in finding support for their causes between rivaling international federations (WFTU, ICFTU, WCL), but also forming their own networks in the spirit of Afro-Asian, Pan-American, Pan-Arab, Pan-African and Non-Aligned solidarities.
• The intersection of labor movements with the struggles of other marginalized groups: The trajectories of labor movements in the Global South were often intertwined with anti-caste/anti-racist movements, indigenous rights, women’s movements, etc. What does the intersection, or lack thereof, between these different movements tell us about the nature of labor organizing in the Global South? Furthermore, how do the ongoing efforts to decolonize historiographical knowledge production impact the way we look at the past instances of ‘workers’ worldmaking’?

SUBMISSION
Proposed papers should include:
- Abstract (max. 300 words)
- Biographical note (continuous text, max. 200 words)
- Email address

The abstract of the suggested paper should contain a separate paragraph explaining how and (if applicable) to which element(s) or question(s) of the Call for Papers the submitted paper refers. The short CV should give information on the applicant’s contributions to the field of labour history, broadly defined, and specify (if applicable) relevant publications. For the purpose of information, applicants are invited to attach a copy of one of these publications to their application.
Proposals (in one docx-file) to be sent to Laurin Blecha: conference@ith.or.at

TIME SCHEDULE
Submission of proposals: 31 January 2025
Notification of acceptance: 3 March 2025
Full papers or presentation version: 15 August 2025
Conference (on-site) in Linz, Austria: 25–27 September 2025

PREPARATORY GROUP
Goran Musić (University of Vienna), Shivangi Jaiswal (Ca' Foscari University of Venice), Immanuel Harisch (University of Vienna), Saima Nakuti Ashipala (University of the Free State), David Mayer (University of Vienna), Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History), Therese Garstenauer (ITH), Laurin Blecha (ITH)

In the past two decades, the New History of Capitalism (NHOC) has been one of the most important innovations in U.S. historiography. Especially in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, this research field produced a vast literature that, focusing in particular on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has allowed to highlight the centrality of slavery in U.S. economic development, the industrial character of slave labor in Southern plantations, the establishment of global networks of commodities exchange, the role of the State in fostering development, in channeling growth and in regulating markets, as well as the role of finance in accelerating accumulation.

However, while carefully detailing the emergence of capitalism as an institutional, judicial and financial order, this historiography has often tended to downplay the role of class and social conflicts. Some critics argued that the NHOC has failed to account for the way in which the capitalist order was challenged, shaped and constantly reshaped by the struggles of those subjects who fought not to be dominated by capital’s command. In this respect, the NHOC has often presented a history of capital (and of capitalists) detached from the power relations that the power relations that structured it as a broader economic and social order. Accordingly, with its focus on commodities, exchange networks and finance rather than on the organization of labor (with the crucial exception of slavery), it often risked treating capitalism as a system of circulation rather than as a mode of production and social reproduction. According to others the NHOC has not offered a materialist interpretation of U.S. capitalism, remaining strongly influenced by the methods of cultural history. Another common criticism is that the NHOC has ignored previous historiographies, particularly Marxist historiography and the Black radical tradition. Furthermore, others argued for the need to bridge economic and political history by identifying an “American Developmental State” as the crucial factor in the nineteenth -century affirmation of U.S. capitalism.

The ninth issue of USAbroad will  explore strengths and shortcomings of the NHOC through articles that investigate the social, economic, political and intellectual history of U.S. capitalism. We encourage proposals exploring the social relationships underpinning American capitalism or studying how conflicts around class, race and sex contributed to forge it institutionally and ideologically. We welcome contributions that allow to broaden the chronological and methodological framework of the NHOC, for example including the twentieth and twenty-first century, as well as the intellectual history of U.S. capitalism. We invite proposals that seek to review and criticize the historiographical debate, for example by problematizing the question of the periodization and definition of capitalism, which the NHOC has largely avoided.

We invite articles from all historical disciplines and approaches, but papers addressing the following threads and sub-threads are particularly welcome:

1. Social histories focusing on the role of class and racial conflicts in shaping the institutions of U.S. capitalism, including:

• the role of African Americans, women and workers in contesting racial, sexual and class hierarchies;
• the role of unions and organized labor in challenging and transforming U.S. capitalism;
• the state’s role in addressing social and racial conflicts and in shaping capitalist development.

2. Intellectual histories investigating the ways in which U.S. capitalism has been legitimized and challenged, including:

• the legitimation of capitalism offered by U.S. social sciences, economic and political thinkers;
• feminist, anti-racist and Marxist critiques of U.S. capitalism from within and beyond the United States;
• the relationship between capitalism, conservatism and (neo)liberalism in the United States.

3. Legal histories investigating the transformation of U.S. businesses, corporations and enterprises, including:

• the legal frameworks that have shaped corporate development;
• the interplay between legal innovations and economic transformations;
• historical development of worker protections and legal transformations of business-union relationships.

4. Global and comparative histories of U.S. capitalism investigating its international, transnational and imperial dimensions, from the 19th century to the present, in particular:

• comparative studies of U.S. capitalist development in global context
• the global cultural and economic impact of U.S. capitalist models;
• circuits of capital, labor, and commodities beyond national boundaries.

5. Historiographical discussions, concerning in particular:

• the problem of defining and periodizing U.S. capitalism;
• the entanglements between the history of capitalism and other historiographies (environmental, business and labor history);
• the relationship between the NHOC and previous historiographies;
• the concept of racial capitalism within the NHOC.

Please submit your abstract (500 words max) and your CV (2 pages max) to usabroad@unibo.it by February 15, 2025. Successful applicants will be notified by March 1, 2025, at the latest.

The selection of abstracts will be based on a range of criteria including scientific originality, clarity of the proposal submitted, use of primary sources and adherence to the themes of the call for papers. Abstracts that do not clearly address these criteria will not be considered for publication.

Please note that, if your application is successful, you will need to submit a full 7000-word article by July 31, 2025.

More info can be found at http://usabroad.unibo.it/  

Les propositions de communication devront interroger l’interpénétration en l’espace de travail et l’espace de vie, ou l’espace de travail et de hors-travail. Il s’agira  de se pencher sur la manière dont les moments de travail et de hors-travail s’ancrent dans un même lieu, y sont négociés et/ou y entrent en concurrence. Quelles places le travail et le hors-travail occupent-ils dans la conception des espaces productifs, mais aussi dans la manière dont ils sont concrètement vécus, pratiqués et appropriés ? Comment la ligne de partage entre lieux (et moments) de vie et travail a-t-elle évolué depuis les époques les plus anciennes et sous quelles formes ? Dans quelle mesure est-elle véritablement opérante ? Comment se traduisent spatialement les rythmes du travail et du hors-travail ? Les moments de vie et de travail se déroulent-ils dans un seul et même lieu ou s’ancrent-ils dans des espaces spécifiques, strictement distincts ? Peut-on plus généralement dissocier la dimension temporelle de la dimension spatiale entre le travail et le hors travail ? Dans quelle mesure les lieux de travail sont-ils aussi des lieux de vie ? Comment sont-ils vécus et appropriés ? La fonction productive d’un lieu de travail peut-elle être subvertie par les acteurs qui l’occupent ?

La journée annuelle des doctorant∙es de l’Association française pour l’histoire des mondes du travail (AFHMT) portera cette année sur le thème « Travailler et vivre sur son lieu de travail ». Elle se tiendra à Paris, le 23 mai 2025.

Argumentaire

Dans L’espace ouvrier, Michel Verret évoque le débordement des normes du travail industriel dans l’intimité des foyers, au cœur de l’espace privé : « l’usine à table, l’usine au lit, le rêve du Capital… » (Verret, 1979). S’il s’agit ici du rêve jamais totalement atteint des patrons et des aménageurs, cette partition spatiale et temporelle entre travail et hors-travail n’a rien d’évident. La frontière entre lieux de travail d’une part, entendus comme des espaces dédiés aux activités productives, et lieux de hors-travail d’autre part, compris comme espaces domestiques, d’activités non productives et de sociabilités diverses, est plus ou moins poreuse. Elle est en réalité le fruit d’un processus de concentration de la main-d’œuvre et de l’appareil productif sur le temps long, s’étant traduit à partir de la fin du XVIIIe et surtout au cours du XIXe siècle dans le modèle des manufactures et des usines. Qu’on les envisage dans leur acception physique, sociale ou symbolique, les espaces de travail n’ont pas toujours été exclusivement dédiés à la fonction productive. Bien au contraire, des périodes anciennes aux plus récentes, en ville ou dans les campagnes, les espaces productifs comme les espaces domestiques sont largement multifonctionnels.

Depuis les années 1980, les études sur l’ancrage spatial du travail se sont multipliées, aussi bien en contexte urbain (Stella, 1993 ; Frey, 1995 ; Gribaudi, 2014) que dans les espaces ruraux (Pigenet, 1988). S’y sont également intéressées les monographies d’usines (Schweitzer, 1982 ; Frey, 1986 ; Cohen, 2011 ; Dewerpe, 2017), l’histoire du paternalisme industriel et du logement des travailleur∙euses, qu’il s’agisse du logement servile (Gaston, 2018), du logement ouvrier (Verret, 1979) ou du logement social (Guerrand, 1992), tandis que l’archéologie et l’archéologie expérimentale ont permis de faire l’histoire de ces « lieux de métiers » (Monteix, 2010) que sont les échoppes, les boutiques, les ateliers ou les sites industriels (Major, 1975 ; Morel, 1987 ; Jarrige et Le Roux, 2021).

Florence Weber s’intéresse quant à elle au travail à côté, à la sortie de l’usine (Weber, 1989). Qu’il s’agisse de bricole ou d’une activité paysanne, elle rappelle que la limite entre l’espace de travail et la vie privée est floue dans la mesure où les modes d’affirmation de soi pour soi et avec les autres sont connectés (voir aussi Lallement, 1990 ; Lüdkte, 1996 ; Renahy, 2015). Toutefois, si la dimension temporelle de cette limite est désormais bien connue (Maitte, Terrier, 2020), peu d’études historiques se sont pour l’heure intéressées à sa dimension spatiale. Il s’agira dès lors de se pencher sur la manière dont les moments de travail et de hors-travail s’ancrent dans un même lieu, y sont négociés et/ou y entrent en concurrence.

• Quelles places le travail et le hors-travail occupent-ils dans la conception des espaces productifs, mais aussi dans la manière dont ils sont concrètement vécus, pratiqués et appropriés ?
• Comment la ligne de partage entre lieux (et moments) de vie et travail a-t-elle évolué depuis les époques les plus anciennes et sous quelles formes ? Dans quelle mesure est-elle véritablement opérante ?
• Comment se traduisent spatialement les rythmes du travail et du hors-travail ? Les moments de vie et de travail se déroulent-ils dans un seul et même lieu ou s’ancrent-ils dans des espaces spécifiques, strictement distincts ?
• Peut-on plus généralement dissocier la dimension temporelle de la dimension spatiale entre le travail et le hors travail ?
• Dans quelle mesure les lieux de travail sont-ils aussi des lieux de vie ? Comment sont-ils vécus et appropriés ? La fonction productive d’un lieu de travail peut-elle être subvertie par les acteurs qui l’occupent ?

Ces questions pourront être abordées à partir d’études de cas menées à une échelle fine (un bâtiment, une maison, un complexe productif voire un quartier). Le lieu de travail sera appréhendé de façon dynamique, non pas comme espace donné a priori mais comme « produit » d’une pluralité d’acteur∙ices (Lefebvre, 1974). Portion d’espace perçu, conçu et « vécu » (Frémont, 1976), il pourra être cerné dans ses évolutions, de la conception à la destruction, en passant par la pratique concrète du lieu, la manière dont il est habité et les représentations symboliques dont il est investi.

Les sources mobilisées pourront aussi bien être écrites, orales, iconographiques (plans d’urbanisme, dessins d’architecture, gravures, photos, etc.) ou archéologiques (relevés topographiques, friches industrielles, analyse des sols, outils de travail, etc.). Au-delà de la documentation, les questions de méthodes soulevées par des objets d’études en lien avec l’espace pourront être intégrées à la communication, qu’elles se rapportent à l’échelle d’analyse ou bien à l’interdisciplinarité (avec la géographie, la sociologie, l’anthropologie, etc.), l’emprunt de leurs concepts, méthodes ou outils à d’autres disciplines, etc.

Axes (Dé)limiter les lieux de travail et de hors-travail : des fonctions mélangées

En dehors du strict plan des représentations, on pourra revenir sur les différentes formes spatiales entremêlant le travail et le hors-travail, au prisme de l’organisation du travail. Cette démarche permettra de questionner l’historicité et la construction des catégories de vie professionnelle et vie privée sur le temps long.

Comment les caractéristiques du travail et ses formes d’organisation remettent-elles en cause ou non la délimitation entre lieux de travail et de hors-travail ? Certaines professions et activités économiques questionnent l’apparente évidence d’une spécialisation des espaces. Dans bien des cas, un même lieu peut être investi pour des activités laborieuses, mais aussi pour d’autres moments de la vie des individus, que l’on pense aux villas de l’Antiquité (Gros, 2002 ; Trément, 2010), aux cours royales et princières (Beauchamp, 2013 ; Castelluccio, 2021), aux cités-usines (Frey, 1986 ; Gueslin, 1993) ou aux maisons consulaires (Grenet, 2021).

Certaines activités productives s’enracinent dans des lieux qui s’avèrent aussi être des lieux de vie : le domicile personnel pour une partie des ouvrier∙ères (Favot, 1985 ; Lallement, 1990 ; Avrane, 2013), celui de l’employeur pour les domestiques (Heers, 1981 ; Martin-Fugier, 1985) mais aussi les couvents et monastères, les casernes industrielles et militaires ou certains commerces. Les lieux de réclusion et de travail contraint tels que les workhouses, les prisons ou les bagnes (Castan, Zysberg, 2002), ainsi que certaines institutions charitables comme les usines-couvents ou les manufactures-internats qui croisent des fonctions d’assistance, d’hébergement et de mise au travail, pourront également constituer des points d’observation intéressants.

Plus près de nous, « l’homogénéisation des espaces » (Lallement, 1990) apparaît surtout dans les différentes formes que peut prendre le télétravail (Taskin, 2006 ; Vayre, 2022). Dans chacun de ces cas, un lieu ou une unité bâtie assurent à la fois des fonctions résidentielles et productives.

Pour d’autres professions, la mobilité à l’échelle d’une région, d’un pays, du monde, contribue à brouiller la partition spatiale entre travail et hors-travail. Dans le cas des marins, des courriers, des marchands ou des soldats, on assiste à une dilatation de l’espace de travail qui connecte des lieux remplissant des fonctions multiples. Elle invite à prendre en compte des formes spécifiques d’accueil et d’habitat temporaire étroitement liées au travail, à l’instar des caravansérails, des fondouks, des garnis (Kaiser, 2014 ; Canepari, Regnard-Drouot, 2018) ou des camps militaires (voir le récent colloque « L’intendance suivra ? Le logement militaire en Occident »).

Concevoir les lieux de travail et de hors-travail

On pourra réfléchir à la manière dont les lieux de travail et de hors-travail sont projetés, conçus et aménagés par différents acteur∙ices. Il s’agira à la fois d’envisager le point de vue du patronat, des pouvoirs publics et des aménageurs (architectes, ingénieurs, urbanistes), à différentes échelles (de l’échelle micro du logement à celle de l’usine, du quartier, voire de la ville si elle s’est développée autour d’une activité productive) et selon différentes temporalités.

Les analyses d’une « urbanistique patronale » (Frey, 1995) ou de l’aménagement d’un espace productif sont par ailleurs susceptibles d’éclairer les stratégies de leurs concepteurs : fixation de la main-d’œuvre, encadrement du hors-travail, “contrôle social” (Prohin, 2021 ; Murard, Zylberman, 1976). Dans cette perspective, il pourrait être pertinent d’interroger la façon dont les règles, les normes ou les valeurs excèdent les espaces de travail pour s’imposer dans les espaces domestiques et, en retour, d’évaluer le gradient de conformation des travailleur∙euses aux attendus des aménageurs.

La question pourra donc plus largement porter sur le degré d’adéquation entre l’aménagement de l’espace et ses modalités d’appropriation par les travailleur∙euses, mais aussi sur le rôle de l’espace productif comme « matrice de relations sociales spécifiques » (Pigenet, 1990). De fait, la juxtaposition des espaces productifs et privés peut produire des effets sur l’organisation collective (associative, syndicale, politique) des travailleur∙euses (Gay, 2021) et sur leurs formes de sociabilité, leurs identités professionnelles ou leurs représentations (de l’organisation du travail, des rapports sociaux, de la vie privée, etc.).

Habiter et s’approprier les lieux de travail

Un troisième axe propose de placer au cœur de la réflexion les modalités d’usage et d’appropriation des lieux productifs par les travailleur∙euses ou ce que Jean-Pierre Frey appelle les « pratiques de l’habiter » (Frey, 1995). A la différence des exemples cités précédemment, il s’agira ici d’étudier des lieux ne mélangeant pas, a priori, des fonctions résidentielles et domestiques, du moins pas dans la manière dont ils ont été conçus. La pratique de l’espace par les travailleur∙euses contribue-t-elle à subvertir la fonction initiale d’un lieu de travail ?

D’abord : quelle place les moments de hors travail tiennent-ils dans ces lieux ? L’entreprise ou l’usine est-elle vraiment un « espace sans murs, où, sans partage, le capital exerce sur l’ouvrier une surveillance qu’il rêverait bien encore d’étendre […] jusqu’au cœur de sa vie domestique » (Verret, 1979) ? Ou bien le regard patronal épargne-t-il certains espaces, recoins laissés dans les interstices du temps productif ? On pourra évoquer les temps de pause, de divertissement ou de changement dans les vestiaires ou les loges. Comment les rythmes du travail et du hors travail s’articulent-ils aux espaces existants, par exemple quel est le poids des distances à parcourir pour rejoindre une salle de pause ou un réfectoire ? Comment et où se déroulent concrètement les moments de réunion, de sociabilités et d’intimité sur les lieux de travail ?

Comment les travailleur∙euses se réapproprient-iels des lieux exclusivement dédiés à la production et négocient-iels certains espaces ? Développent-iels des formes d’attachement spécifiques vis-à-vis des lieux de travail ? Différents modes de réappropriation individuels et collectifs peuvent être identifiés, depuis les gestes mineurs et les pratiques informelles comme la personnalisation des caisses à outils des ouvriers de Sochaux (Hatzfeld, 2002), ou encore du poste de contrôle de la salle des machines d’un navire pétrolier (Flécher, 2023), jusqu’aux moyens d’action de plus grande ampleur mis en œuvre dans le cadre de mobilisations et de grèves. À ce titre, le cas des occupations d’usine et d’autres lieux de travail, impliquant non seulement une rupture dans les temporalités mais aussi dans l’ordre spatial du labeur, avec une réorganisation logistique et une redéfinition des rôles attribués à chacun∙e dans le cadre d’une mobilisation, sera intéressant à aborder.

Enfin, la subversion de la fonction originelle de ces lieux de travail dans le cadre de politiques patrimoniales, d’opérations de réhabilitation (par exemple la transformation d’anciennes usines en logements), c’est-à-dire par d’autres acteur∙ices que les travailleur∙euses, pourra être analysée. Quelle place les travailleur∙euses et leur mémoire des lieux occupe-t-ils dans ces processus ? Sont-ils structurants dans la perception et la pratique des espaces de travail par le reste de la société ? L’enjeu sera ainsi de comprendre comment les conceptions initiales des lieux de travail sont subverties et requalifiées.

Calendrier et modalités de soumission

Les interventions dureront chacune 20mn. Les propositions de communication (titre, auteur∙ice), affiliation institutionnelles, résumé de 300 mots et biographie de 50 mots maximum) devront être envoyées au format .doc(x) ou .pdf à l’adresse doctorants.afhmt@gmail.com

au plus tard le 28 février 2025.

Les auteurs et autrices des propositions retenues seront contacté∙es dans le courant du mois de mars. La journée pourra éventuellement faire l’objet d’une publication.

La journée aura lieu le 23 mai à Paris. 

Comité d'organisation et de sélection

• Loman-Pierre Charrier (Université Clermont Auvergne-CHEC)
• Pauline Rocca (Université Gustave Eiffel – ACP)
• Guillemette Prevot (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne – CHS)

Paris, 30 June 2025

The workshop, organized with the support of the journal Le Mouvement Social, aims to shed a new light on current discussions about archives and address methodological and epistemological issues in studying marginalized individuals and groups. First, we aim to address marginality as a category of analysis. Second, we encourage reflections on cross-reading administrative and police archives with community archives. Finally, we welcome papers that focus on the materiality of archives.

Argument

The workshop, organized with the support of the journal Le Mouvement Social, aims to shed a new light on current discussions about archives and address methodological and epistemological issues in studying marginalized individuals and groups.  

Marginality indicates the “position or condition of individuals and groups living on the physical or sociocultural margins or edges”, whether through geographical isolation or the effect of “exclusion, discrimination, or subordination” (Sigh et al. 2024). It is thus conceived as “the expression of a tension between belonging and exclusion, inherent to the system that produces it” rather than “a simple opposition to the center” (Le Dantec-Dowry et al. 2018).  Inspired by Michel Foucault (1964; 1975) and Howard Becker (1963), social history has focused on the “margins” of the social world (Geremek [1976] 2006; Vincent 1979) since the mid-twentieth century. This “social elsewhere” (ailleurs social, Kalifa 2011) has received renewed attention, in fields like Romani studies (Barany 2002), history of crime (Rodak 2013), disability studies (Rembis et al. 2018), history of homosexuality (Tamagne 2006) or the history of mental asylums (Le Bras 2024). Frequently in line with intersectional approaches (Crenshaw 1991; Kócze et al. 2015), research has underlined that marginalization is contingent and processual (Anderson 2012), touches different marginalized populations and manifests itself under varied forms (Kennedy & Weston 2024; Irvine 2022; Cronin 2021).  

Renewing the studies of social margins has an empirical component. Minority epistemologies have only recently been considered in social history. Notably, considering practices of community archiving transforms research on marginalities. While earlier works were limited to reading sources produced by the “center”, namely administrative, judicial or police records (Schmitt 1978; Farge 2010), current research tends to integrate  “popular” or “indigenous” archives (Singh et al. 2024). This is part of the “archival turn” that has permeated disciplines beyond history and the social sciences since the 2000s (Poncet 2019), influencing fields ranging from queer studies (Marshall & Tortorici 2022), feminist studies (Eichhorn 2013) to contemporary art (Callahan 2024) or law (Biber 2017).   

This workshop aims to bridge theoretical and empirical discussions on margins/marginalities:  

• First, we aim to address marginality as a category of analysis. This can encompass multiple populations, such as national, ethnic or religious minorities, gender/sexual minorities, but also criminals, vagrants, hippies, people marginalized in terms of class, education, work, residency, geography, etc. The distinction between the notion of “margins” and other related terms, such as “minorities”, “deviants” or the “excluded” may not always be explicit, and therefore needs to be criticized and historicized.   

• Second, we encourage reflections on cross-reading State archives with community archives. We invite contributions that focus specifically on records of the police and state administrations in the 20th-21st century. How can they be (re)read to study marginalized populations? What do they reveal? How can one confront them with other types of sources held by non-state actors? And what use may one make of inscriptions in the physical margins of archives in studying marginalized populations? Can cross-reading administrative and community archives help renew social history of marginalized populations? Namely, what do these archives tell us not just about their daily lives, practices, and organizations but also about state surveillance practices? How do these renewed readings lead us to rethink the category of “margins”?  

While we welcome new analyses of already well-studied groups, the aim of the workshop is to include populations for which academic interest is more recent, such as queer people or persons with disabilities. The call for abstracts is structured around three themes. It focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries and is not limited to any geographical area or political regime. By adopting broad chronological boundaries, we want to bring discussion on the diverse and evolving margins of the social world, allowing for comparison and reflection on continuities between heterogeneous populations or historical settings.  

The detailed section of the CFA (below) offers three possible axes along which contributions can be organized: 

Conceptualizing the margins. The categorization of marginalized groups in administrative and police archives 

We invite contributions with a focus on the ways in which state administrations construct the "margins” and categorize certain individuals or groups as “marginal”. The aim is to investigate the making of these groups, while highlighting the instability of the taxonomies produced in archival documents, which are also based on “popular discursive categories” (Chauncey 1994) and constitute “records of uncertainty and doubt” (Stoler 2009). By adopting a broad definition of the "margins”, we want to trigger comparison between different populations and reflect on the limits of this concept. Should we speak of "minoritization" instead of "marginalization"? How should we distinguish between marginality/centrality, minority/majority, exclusion/inclusion (Acke et al. 2023)? 

The challenge is to think of the historical construction of these concepts. How do archives reflect the ways in which diverse administrative actors (street-level bureaucrats, political representatives, police officers...) categorize individuals as "marginal" or belonging to a "minority"? What does it say about the workings of state administrations? How do these categorizations contribute to suspecting and disenfranchising certain groups? How do criteria and processes of marginalization evolve in terms of class, gender, generation, health, race, or religion? How do they vary in different contexts (national, regional, local...)? The question of categorization raises that of scale. What scale of observation is required to best analyze marginalization, stigmatization and exclusion of certain populations by administrative authorities? And how can we construct relevant categories of analysis of marginalized populations, that take their performative effect into consideration without reproducing state categories? How can we (re)think the definitions of marginalized populations based on new readings of administrative archives?

Archives of the marginalized: confronting administrative and police archives with other sources  

The second focus of this workshop will be on how the production of physical or digital archives (Bouillard 2023) by marginalized groups challenges readings of administrative and police archives and calls for rewriting the history of these groups from a new angle. 

How do marginalized communities create archival centers of their own as an alternative to state archives? How does the emergence of these archives, often conceived as a form of "epistemic struggle", “queering” (Marshall 2014, 2015; Faure 2021), or reversing stigma, invite us to re-read state archival collections from a new angle? How can we reassess the limits of archives produced by the police or state administrations by confronting them to community archives? How does that redefine what constitutes an archive (see, for example, the exhibition “Alice.x in LGBTQI+ archives’ land” at Palais de Tokyo)?  

This raises methodological questions: how to cross-read administrative and police archives with community archives? Would it allow us to grasp differences in the ways marginalized people define themselves compared to how administrative actors define them? In broader terms, how do these archives created by marginalized communities transform social history when we use them to either gather new sources or study the movements of alternative archive production? 

The production of archives by marginalized communities is not new, as demonstrated by the decades-long existence of lesbian archives (Petit 2021) and LGBTQI+ archive centers in Berlin or Bologna. It remains, however, a relevant topic on an international scale, with numerous recent examples: LGBTQI+ archives in Paris, which claim the emancipatory character of the archive, Lithuanian Queer Archive, congresses of community archives in Poland (Wiśniewska-Drewniak & Pepłowska 2022), “affective” archives (Hertzberg 2023). We invite contributions that address the creation of archives of marginalized groups, question the role of researchers in such initiatives (see Robène & Serre's “Punk is not dead” project), and discuss the role that digitalization plays in preserving archives of marginalized communities and making them visible (see Romani archives projects in Poland or the Czech Republic). 

Above all, we encourage contributors to look beyond the usual taxonomies (public/private archives) and consider the intersection of administrative and police archives with other types of sources, such as oral archives (Portelli 2003), photographic archives (About & Chéroux 2001), iconographic archives, sound archives, audiovisual archives (Andro & Le Bonhomme 2024), and everyday objects. How can we (re)read the paper archives produced by state administrations against the backdrop of these other types of sources?

Focusing on the physical margins of administrative and police archives  

Finally, we welcome papers that focus on the materiality of archives: annotations, layout, marginal notes, and signs of archive production. How does attention to the physical margins of archives contribute to the study of marginalized populations? While we do not suggest that there is a necessary link between social marginality and the material marginality of an annotation, we encourage exploring such links. Does being in the margin also entail being on the margin? How are margins of the social world and physical margins of the archives intertwined? 

Building on academic works that read peritextual annotations of bureaucrats in the margins of administrative archives (Zalc 2020), we want to discuss the ways in which reading between the lines and in the margins of police or administrative archives may renew the study of marginalization. For instance, can attention to the margins enable a change of scale in the history of the marginalized? What methods should we adopt to study information located in the margins? How can we include it in databases and quantify it (Lemercier & Zalc 2019)? 

Following Ann Laura Stoler's (2009) pioneering approach, still largely applied in (post)colonial studies (Sowry 2012; Hossain 2024), how can we read administrative and police archives “along and against the grain”? How can we rethink the study of marginalized people through questioning the materiality of archives? How does the digitization of archives affect the possibilities of reading archives through their margins? Can digitization enable the study of certain marginalized populations (Barré 2023)? 

We invite abstracts related to either of the three above-mentioned themes. The workshop is open to social historians, archivists, social and political scientists, anthropologists, and scholars coming from fields in which discussions on the use of archives are revived, such as queer studies, Romani studies, disability studies, literature, or art studies. Papers that adopt a transnational or comparative approach to archives are particularly welcome. Proposals dealing with (post)colonial and (post)imperial contexts are also encouraged. 

Submission guidelines

This workshop, aimed at early-stage researchers, is organized with the support of Le Mouvement Social, a French journal in social history.  

We invite proposals from PhD researchers and post-doctoral researchers up to 5 years after their PhD defense. The abstracts can be written in French or English and should be no more than 300 words long. Abstracts should contain your main research questions, methods, and sources. Please also add a brief biographical presentation (150 words maximum) to your submission. 

The organizing committee will set up discussion panels. 

Proposals should be sent to je.mouvementsocial@protonmail.com

before January 31st, 2025, at 23:59 (CET).  

The workshop will take place on June 30th, 2025, at the MSH Paris-Nord.  

Presentations can be held in French or English. 

The journal's editorial board offers the possibility of publishing a selection of papers presented during the workshop.

Organizing Committee 

• Gabrielle Escaich, PhD researcher in social sciences (EHESS - IRIS, ERC Lubartworld) 

• Sacha Najman, PhD researcher in arts and language (EHESS - CRAL) 

• Tymoteusz Skowroński, PhD researcher in history (European University Institute, Florence, Italy) 

• Antoine Perrier, Research Fellow at the CNRS (Centre Jean Bérard), member of the editorial board of Le Mouvement Social.  

Nel 1873 la Gotthardbahn avviò sul territorio ticinese la costruzione delle cosiddette linee di pianura: la Lugano-Chiasso, la Bellinzona-Biasca e la Bellinzona-Locarno. Si trattò di una corsa contro il tempo per rispettare la scadenza del 6 dicembre 1874 che mobilitò migliaia di lavoratori soprattutto italiani. Esse costituirono la prima ossatura di un tracciato che dovette essere completato entro il 1882 con il collegamento attraverso il Ceneri, la tratta in direzione di Luino, le rampe d’accesso al Gottardo e il grande traforo alpino per connettere il Ticino al Nord delle Alpi.

Renato Simoni ne ha studiato la storia delle implicazioni sociali, confluita nel volume La costruzione della linea ferroviaria Lugano-Chiasso (1873-1875). Aspetti di storia sociale, 2024, con la prefazione di Orazio Martinetti, che va ad accrescere la collezione online della Fondazione Pellegrini Canevascini.

Il libro di 120 pagine è strutturato in due parti. La prima inserisce le opere realizzate in Ticino nel contesto elvetico. La costruzione delle linee ticinesi di pianura costituì un primo banco di prova per la Compagnia del Gottardo. Dal punto di vista finanziario essa comportò dei deficit colossali che fecero tremare l’intera operazione. Ma ciò che più interessa lo studioso di storia sociale in questa prima sezione sono le opportunità e le ricadute che questa grande iniziativa rappresentò per il Ticino. Diversi sono gli interrogativi a cui cerca di offrire delle risposte. Chi furono gli artefici della direzione tecnica e dell’esecuzione delle opere? Quale fu l’indotto dei cantieri ferroviari e chi ne seppe approfittare? Quali ricadute ebbero per la nascente industria, gli istituti di credito, il commercio e le comunicazioni? Insomma, in quale misura quest’opera colossale seppe coinvolgere il tessuto economico e sociale locale e beneficiare ai Ticinesi?

Il secondo versante dello studio risponde ad una serie di questioni di carattere socio-sanitario. La straordinaria mobilitazione di migliaia di lavoratori su pericolosi cantieri ferroviari generò pure ferimenti e malattie a cui si dovette far fronte con i nosocomi presenti nel cantone (la Carità a Locarno, il San Giovanni a Bellinzona, il Santa Maria a Lugano e il moderno OBV a Mendrisio sorto nel 1860). I due ospedali sottocenerini furono direttamente implicati nella gestione delle condizioni di salute degli addetti alla costruzione della Lugano-Chiasso. La loro documentazione ha offerto una preziosa risorsa per studiare in modo approfondito la sfida che un’opera di tali dimensioni rappresentò per il funzionamento delle strutture sanitarie.

Lo studio si conclude con  un avvenimento emblematico dei cantieri ferroviari, quello della tragica esplosione di dinamite all’ingresso meridionale della galleria di Maroggia, il 14 febbraio 1874, che provocò quattro morti. Anche in tale circostanza la ricchezza delle fonti locali – i verbali dell’inchiesta condotta da uno scrupoloso giudice di pace – ha permesso di calarsi nel vivo della vicenda, illuminando la storia generale.

Franamenti ed esplosioni dovute alla manipolazione della dinamite, una delle grandi novità impiegate in questa grande opera d’ingegneria, provocarono infatti decine di vittime sulle linee ticinesi, che occorre sommare a quelle più note del traforo del Gottardo. Esse sono qui identificate e collocate in un preciso contesto spazio-temporale: un riconoscimento alla verità storica che le toglie dall’anonimato e restituisce loro una più nitida identità.

https://fpct.ch/la-costruzione-della-linea-ferroviaria-lugano-chiasso-1…

Portugal, 10-12 December 2025

The Congress African independences: processes, imaginaries, connections aims to constitute a moment of reflection on the knowledge already produced, enabling, at the same time, the launch of new perspectives and approaches based on an intense dialogue between all disciplinary fields.

International Conference: African independences: processes, imaginaries, connections

The year of 1975 on the African continent is marked by the independence of Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola, and Mozambique, two years after the self-proclamation, by Guinea-Bissau, of its independence. This concluded a slow, complex, and multifaceted process of maturing social, economic, and cultural conditions, forming imaginaries, struggles, and resistances where the beginnings of national projects were forged. Necessarily plural, in the diversity of paths taken and the concrete circumstances of each country, this movement represents a significant stage in the broader framework of the struggles for self-determination that defined the second half of the 20th century, with the African continent as one of its main stages.

Over these fifty years, historiography, and, in general, the social and human sciences have produced a significant volume of knowledge, debates, and interpretative proposals on multiple dimensions of this historical fact. Between the gradual opening of archives and memorial records, we have today a broad and highly diversified documentary corpus that supports an increasing body of research. New generations, using new languages, question this past in search of answers to the challenges of its contemporaneity. African independences are, therefore, living events, whose reverberations still mark the present time.

Half a century later, the Congress African independences: processes, imaginaries, connections aims to constitute a moment of reflection on the knowledge already produced, enabling, at the same time, the launch of new perspectives and approaches based on an intense dialogue between all disciplinary fields.

Themes
• Assessments, new perspectives, and future challenges for the historiography of African
independences;
• Political action projects and dynamics in the anti-colonial struggle;
• Armed struggles and resistances: choices, tensions, and conflicts;
• Imaginaries of African independences: oral, written, and visual narratives;
• African independences and the world: international solidarities.

Calendar
• Announcement of the call for papers: October 2024
• Deadline for submission of paper proposals: March 31, 2025
• Announcement of selected papers: April 30, 2025
• Congress dates: December 10th to 12th, 2025

https://plataforma9.com/congressos/congresso-internacional-independencias-africanas-processos-imaginarios-conexoes.htm;jsessionid=74CAD0C7C0530C0366A6AB87F0D164E2

Are you working on foodways, traditional foods, food systems, food sovereignty, agroecology, peasant movements or related themes? Please consider contributing to our upcoming Special Issue in the Journal of Agrarian Change. All disciplines and undisciplines welcome!

SPECIAL ISSUE Journal of Agrarian Change

Are you working on foodways, traditional foods, food systems, food sovereignty, agroecology, peasant movements or related themes? Please consider contributing to our upcoming Special Issue in the Journal of Agrarian Change. All disciplines and undisciplines welcome!

Transformations of Foodways: Coloniality, Resistance and Resurgence

Indigenous, peasant, local, and subsistence foodways have been under significant pressure for decades, as international trade, agricultural subsidies, land grabs, and the corporate industrialization of food systems have taken hold. These processes have not only resulted in the erosion of traditional foodways, but also in the commodification and commercialization of culturally significant foods, as more and more communities engage in production for the market rather than for their own sustenance or cultural and spiritual reasons. At the same time, these processes have also given rise to new forms of resistance and resurgence, as communities seek to reclaim their food sovereignty and reassert their identities through traditional foodways and their relations to the more-than-human world.

Tracing transformations of foodways in different contexts and regions, this Special Issue invites contributions that critically explore one or more of the following three processes:

• the ways in which colonialisms, in both their historical and contemporary forms, have disrupted and transformed traditional food systems, including the interruption of food systems based on hunting, fishing gathering and the curating of forests, through dispossession, land use changes, forced sedentarisation or the introduction of new crops;

• the many strategies that indigenous, peasant, and other groups have used to defend their foodways, from mobilization under the banner of food sovereignty and legal activism, to the reclamation of local knowledge, territories and seeds, as well as the promotion of alternative modes of agriculture and food producer-to-eater relationships;

• the ways in which diverse actors are making use of the commercial potential of traditional foods and the tensions and opportunities this gives rise to in an era overshadowed by the dominant logics of globalized food systems.

Submission Guidelines and Timeline

Send us your abstract of 250-350 words by March 3rd, 2025 (emails below).

Notifications of conditional acceptance will be sent back to you by March 17th, 2025.

We are happy to give you feedback on your draft paper if you send it to us by May 19th, 2025.

Full papers, targeting 7,000–12,000 words including notes and references, should be submitted by June 16th, 2025 via the journal’s submission system.

All papers submitted to this Special Issue will need to pass through the journal’s peer review process
We are aiming for publication of the Special Issue in early 2026, but any paper accepted by the journal will be published immediately as OnlineFirst with DOI and is hence fully citeable from that moment.

For more information on the aims and scope of the Journal of Agrarian Change, please visit https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14710366.

Send your abstracts and inquiries (if any) to Nina Moeller ninam@sdu.dk, Jessica Milgroom fs2mimij@uco.es and Lopa Saxena lopa.saxena@coventry.ac.uk

Contact (announcement)

ninam@sdu.dk

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14710366.

London, 7-9 January 2026

We are thrilled to announce an opportunity to contribute to the Eighth International Multidisciplinary Conference, to be held from January 7–9, 2026, at Birkbeck, University of London, and The Wiener Holocaust Library, London. This prestigious conference will bring together scholars from various disciplines to discuss and expand research on survivors of Nazi persecution and related themes. As part of this event, we are attempting to build a dedicated panel titled "Survivors, Memory, and Displacement: The Legacies of the Holocaust and Italian Colonialism."

Survivors, Memory, and Displacement: The Legacies of the Holocaust and Italian Colonialism

This panel aims to explore Italy’s intertwined histories of Holocaust persecution and colonial violence, focusing on survivor experiences, memory, restitution, and the challenges of public recognition.

We invite submissions for this panel on topics such as:
- The intersection of Holocaust and colonial histories in Italy.
- Experiences of displacement, survival, and post-war restitution efforts.
- Memory and recognition challenges for victims of racial and political persecution.
- Resilience and anti-colonial struggles in Fascist-occupied territories.

This is a unique opportunity to contribute to a panel that highlights the interconnected legacies of Holocaust persecution and Italian colonialism, offering fresh perspectives on survivor experiences and their lasting impact.
Submission Deadlines

To ensure ample time to organize the panel:
Initial Abstract Submission Deadline: 31 January 2025.
Final CfP Submission Deadline: 31 March 2025.

Submission Details

Submit a 200–250 word abstract along with a 50–100 word biography to matteo.davanzo00@gmail.com.

Conference Fee: GBP 120 for speakers. The fee includes admission to all panels and evening events, lunches and refreshments during the conference. Further information and registration details will be made available in due course.

Contact (announcement)

matteo.davanzo00@gmail.com

Liverpool University Press is pleased to inform you of the latest content in LABOUR HISTORY REVIEW, a highly regarded publication that is essential reading for those working in and researching social and political history, and the working lives and politics of 'ordinary' people.

Volume 89.3 features articles that explore Édouard Dolléans’s underrecognized yet pioneering transnational study of Chartism; the enduring myths of betrayal and incompetence stemming from the Labour Party’s 1931 crisis; and Labour’s transformation of social and welfare policies between 1975 and 1997, highlighting the party’s pragmatic adaptation to Thatcherism and the challenges of opposition.

The issue also includes a selection of book reviews and a call for entries to the Labour History Review Essay Prize.

Browse all articles >
Read a free issue >

To read content from Labour History Review, please recommend a subscription to your librarian to gain access via your institution.

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Table of contents

RESEARCH ARTICLES

ÉDOUARD DOLLÉANS: FIRST MODERN HISTORIAN OF CHARTISM?

KEVIN MORGAN 

 

EXORCIZING DYSFUNCTIONAL MYTHS: BETRAYAL, ECONOMIC INCOMPETENCE, AND THE MEMORY OF THE 1931 SECOND LABOUR GOVERNMENT’S CRISIS

GIUSEPPE TELESCA 

 

FROM OLD LABOUR TO THE THIRD WAY: THE UK LABOUR PARTY’S SOCIAL AND WELFARE POLICY EVOLUTION BETWEEN 1975 AND 1997

BEN WILLIAMS 

 

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS

 

SIÂN DAVIES - Randy M. Browne, The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery

 

ANDREW FROW-JONES - Vic Gatrell, Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London

 

ARUN KUMAR - Anna Sailer, Workplace Relations in Colonial Bengal: The Jute Industry and Indian Labour 1870s–1930s

 

JOHN MCILROY - Peter Ackers, Trade Unions and the British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg

 

EWAN GIBBS - Neville Kirk, British Society and Its Three Crises: From 1970s Globalisation, to the Financial Crash of 2007–8 and the Onset of Brexit in 2016

 

LABOUR HISTORY REVIEW ESSAY PRIZE
LABOUR HISTORY REVIEW ESSAY PRIZE

Developments since 1990 are increasingly becoming the focus of historical research. For the issue 66 (2026) of the Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, we invite authors from the fields of history and the historical social and cultural sciences to reflect with us on the processes of social change that have taken place from the 1990s to the immediate present. We are interested in the manifold upheavals after the great »epochal change« of 1989/90, a history of transformation and co-transformation that is currently the subject of intense debate. Using four analytical axes, we aim to fathom the dynamics of social change in recent contemporary history from a broader perspective.

Capitalist transformation and shifts in labour and inequality

While neoliberal ideas of order already gained influence before the caesura of 1989/90, they came to dominate the political agenda in the transformation process after the collapse of communism. But who exactly steered this process? How powerful were neoliberal interpretations for political parties and institutions, but also for trade unions or the International Labour Organisation? How did they shape the debates on the nature of capitalism in East and West? Above all, how has the neoliberal transformation of corporate policy and economic governance affected the relationship between capital and labour – whether in the context of welfare state reforms since the end of the 1990s, in the course of the European Economic and Monetary Union, through various privatisation policies, or in the disputes over deindustrialisation and competition between East and West, and North and South? In addition to changes in collective  bargaining and wage policy, and attempts to respond to the challenge of unleashed financial market capitalism with new forms of strike and protest, we are also interested in changes in the industrial world of work, and in particular the role of class, gender and ethnic inequalities in the emergence of a new »service class«, as well as the increasing digitalisation of work.

Legitimation processes of the democratic political model

At the time, the upheavals of 1989/90 were seen as the expression of a comprehensive democratic success story. There was hardly a speech that did not refer to Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the »end of history«. In order to fathom the upheavals since the 1990s, however, it seems necessary to question and historicise this narrative of success. What has underpinned the legitimacy of democratic systems in the context of socio-economic and socio-cultural change? Where did democracies prove to be stable, how did forms of political participation, communication, representation and problem-solving change, not least as a result of forced European integration – where, and by whom, was parliamentary democracy as a whole perceived to be in crisis? Here, too, the institutional change in the political systems responded to long-term shifts in social and moral milieus that took place long before 1989. Against this backdrop, the volume aims to encourage a particular focus on the pluralisation of the party system in Europe since 1990: the history of the emergence of new parties as well as the disappearance of old parties (such as the communist parties in Eastern and Central (Europe). Also relevant in this context are debates about »party disenchantment«, the relationship to the »new« social movements and the combination of state and party criticism from different camps, which, for example, fed the mixed chorus of Eurosceptic voices – right up to the rise of right-wing populist and far-right parties. Last but not least, the plurality of democratic paths in Europe and the continuation and repercussions, or rather the revival, of East-West specificities must be analysed, whether at the institutional level or at the level of political perceptions.

International cooperation and competition

In the field of foreign and security policy, the euphoria over the end of the East-West conflict in 1989/90 did not last long. The bipolar threat scenario of the Cold War was replaced by new international and security policy challenges that had a considerable impact on society. For this subject area, we invite  contributions on the history of military interventions by Western states in the 1990s and 2000s (in Somalia, Yugoslavia and elsewhere), especially with a socio-historical focus – for example, on the debates, particularly in Germany, about NATO and the increase in »out-of-area« missions by the Bundeswehr. Of particular interest are the political and social reactions to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, for example with regard to the far-reaching anti-terrorism measures. What was the tension between the threat of new forms of terrorism and the restriction of civil liberties?

After »9/11« and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the foundations of the international order gradually shifted. For example, the need for reform of the United Nations became apparent, where the veto power of the five permanent members of the Security Council often perpetuated inter-state conflicts rather than helping to resolve them. The complex problem of how multilateral organisations can become more assertive is – along with the European Union’s initial coordination in the field of foreign and security policy - another thematic area of the planned volume that could be interpreted in socio-historical terms. However, the socio-political dimensions could also be examined, for example, on the basis of the demands for participation of non-governmental organisations dating back to the 1970s. How did non-state actors enter the scene in an increasingly politically unstable world? How did these organisations network nationally and transnationally in order to strengthen comparatively powerless groups of the world’s population (refugees, people affected by climate change, etc.) and propagate resource-saving economic concepts, for example in the field of migration policy and in combating the climate crisis?

The digital revolution and the diversification of everyday culture

A central moment of social upheaval since 1990 has been the rapid transformation of the media world and communications technology. Since the late 1980s, private television, with its new talk, casting and game shows, so-called reality formats, and its own music and pay TV channels, has initially enjoyed enormous popularity, but has also reinforced social parcelling. However, the global triumph of the digital revolution began in the 1990s. Thanks to ever faster data connections, the Internet and mobile phones exponentially expanded the number of and access to communication channels and information of very different types and qualities. Contributions that analyse these changes from a cultural-historical perspective are just as welcome, as are proposals that address questions of production conditions, participation and inequalities in the new media world.

The pluralisation of lifestyles, pressure for change and new social inequalities shaped everyday life in various ways. Within Europe, restrictions were removed not only for labour markets but also for travellers. The liberalisation of air, rail and bus transport gave rise to new travel habits, characterised by low-cost airlines and package holidays, comparison portals and car-sharing platforms. Supermarket displays and, above all, the range of products offered by large online marketplaces reflect the increasing diversity of international goods production, the resounding dynamics of global price and location competition, and the widening gap between rich and poor. We are also grateful for ideas for contributions that go beyond pure discourse analysis and place recent youth and pop culture phenomena such as hip hop, techno, gaming or cosplay, with their specific live events, fan rituals and dress codes, in the
context of social, everyday and media history.

***

At a conference to be hosted by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Berlin on 26/27 June 2025, we would like to discuss and further develop ideas for contributions, topics and general questions on the subject of the Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 66 (2026) outlined above. We invite all interested scholars to submit proposals to afs@fes.de by 31 January 2025. They should not exceed 3,000 characters (including spaces). Abstracts, conference papers and subsequent contributions may be submitted in German or English. Subsequently, the editors of the Archiv für Sozialgeschichte will select contributions for the inclusion in the volume, which should be approximately 60,000 characters (including footnotes). The submission deadline for contributions is 31 December 2025. Archiv für Sozialgeschichte is edited by Claudia Gatzka, Kirsten Heinsohn, Thomas Kroll, Anja Kruke, Philipp Kufferath (managing editor), Friedrich Lenger, Ute Planert, Dietmar Süß, Nikolai Wehrs and Meik Woyke.

Contact
Archiv für Sozialgeschichte | Dr. Philipp Kufferath | afs[at]fes.de | www.fes.de/afs

Conference in Lund/Sweden, 20-22 August 2025

We encourage scholars from various fields to submit papers addressing any aspect of 20th-century or 21st-century migration and its impact on identity, culture, and social change.

The Centre for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University is pleased to announce the call for papers for the conference on migration and identity, which will be held on August 20-22, 2025, at Lund University in Lund, Sweden. The conference’s aim is to deepen our understanding of postmigrant societies in Europe through an exploration of parallels between migration experiences in the past and present by correlating the dynamics of migration in 20th-century Europe with those of the recent years.

We encourage scholars from various fields to submit papers addressing any aspect of 20th-century or 21st-century migration and its impact on identity, culture, and social change, including but not limited to the following subjects:
- negotiations and concealment of identity as a part of the migration process
- migration and urban transformation
- perceptions of migrants by the host societies
- dynamics of social inclusion and exclusion of the migrants in short and long time spans
- media and migration narratives
- migrations and identity in micro- and macro-perspective
- migrations in individual and collective memory
- global contexts of European migration
- methodological approaches to migration research

Please submit an abstract of up to 300 words and a short biography (one paragraph) to migrationpostmigrant@gmail.com by February 28, 2025, indicating if you would be in need of a travel grant (we will provide a number of such grants). All application materials must be submitted in English. Selected participants will be notified by March 31, 2025.

Contact (announcement)

Magdalena Dziaczkowska (magdalena.dziaczkowska@ctr.lu.se, CTR) and Dorota Choińska (dorota.choinska2@uwr.edu.pl, University of Wroclaw, Open University of Catalonia)
Contact Mail:
migrationpostmigrant@gmail.com

https://www.ctr.lu.se/en/about-us/calendar/event/international-conference-migration-postmigrant-society-memory-identity-and-social-inclusion/