Social and Labour History News

Conference "Exil, Medien und Erinnerung im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts" (German)

1 week 3 days ago
Berlin/Germany   Organiser: Deborah Barton, CCEAE; Fabien Théofilakis, CMB (Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin) Location: Centre Marc Bloch, Germaine-Tillion-Saal Postcode: 10117 City: Berlin Country: Germany Takes place: In person Date: 12.11.2025 Website: https://cmb.hu-berlin.de/events/exil-medien-und-erinnerung-im-deutschland-des-20-jahrhunderts/  

Der Workshop, organisiert vom Canadian Centre for German and European Studies (DAAD) und dem Centre Marc Bloch, erkundet neue Perspektiven auf Exilerfahrungen und deren Darstellung in der deutschen Moderne. Im Fokus stehen Fragen danach, wie Geschichten von Vertreibung und Transit – innerhalb, aus oder nach Deutschland – erzählt und erinnert werden, und deren Politisierung über verschiedene Medien und Zeitlichkeiten hinweg.

 

Exil, Medien und Erinnerung im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts

Ein besonderes Augenmerk liegt auf der Rolle der Medien: Wie prägen sie nicht nur die Sichtbarkeit von Exilerfahrungen, sondern auch deren narrative und politische Deutung? Gibt es eine spezifisch deutsche Form, Exil zu erleben oder zu erzählen?

Der Workshop vereint zunächst Geisteswissenschaftler:innen, gefolgt von einem musikalischen Intermezzo und dem Hauptvortrag des Fotografen Mahmoud Dabdoub. Die Veranstaltung findet auf Deutsch und Englisch statt.

Anmeldelink: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/centremarcblochev/1858036

Programm

Panel (14:00-15:30, in Präzenz)

Einführung & Moderation: Deborah Barton (CCEAE) & Fabien Théofilakis (CMB)

Aurélie Denoyer (Centre Marc Bloch), „Von antifaschistischer Solidarität zu politischer Instrumentalisierung: spanische kommunistische Flüchtlinge in der DDR“

Jennifer Lynn (Montana State University Billings), „Solidarity in Exile: Agnes Smedley, China, and the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung“

Sonja Klocke (University of Wisconsin – Madison), „Vertragsarbeiter:innen in der Textilindustrie der DDR: Zur Darstellung neokolonialer Strukturen der Ausbeutung in Kunst und Film“

Nazan Maksudyan (Centre Marc Bloch / Freie Universität), „Isolation, Mediation, and Audible Refuge: Gerhard Kessler’s Radio Days in Exile in Istanbul“

Pause: 15:30pm-16:00

Musical Intermezzo (16:00-16:30)

Musikerinnen und Musiker der Barenboim-Said Akademie (Berlin)
Key note (16:30-18:00, in hybrider Form)

Mahmoud Dabdoub (freelance photographer, Leipzig), „Erinnerung verdrängen heiß nicht vergessen!“

Moderation: Jacob Eder (Barenboim-Said Akademie, Berlin)

Kontakt

deborah.barton@umontreal.ca

fabien.theofilakis@cmb.hu-berlin.de

CfP: The British General Strike of 1926: New Directions of Research

1 week 3 days ago
Organiser: Labour & Society Research Group Newcastle University Funded by: Leverhulme Trust; Newcastle University; Labour & Society Research Group Postcode: NE1 7RU Location: Newcastle upon Tyne Country: United Kingdom Takes place: In person Dates: 07.05.2026 - 08.05.2026 Deadline: 06.02.2026 Website: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/labourandsociety/  

To commemorate the centenary of the British General Strike and miners lock-out, Newcastle University’s Labour & Society Research Group (LSRG) are organising a conference that revisits the historical experience of 1926 through the lens of new scholarship that is concerned with the global, spatial and maritime turns in labour history.

 

The British General Strike of 1926: New Directions of Research

What has emerged from these histories is a better understanding of how labour movements and political groups of various kinds have interrupted or redirected the flows of materials, capital, and people.

While there is a vast and thriving literature on the General Strike of 1926, there is still a lack of research that investigates concretely how, under what conditions, the spatial-temporal dynamics of this event disrupted the carboniferous commodity chains and wider circulation of capital during the dispute.

This conference aims to bring together papers that focus on concrete histories of solidarity and the General Strike, whether at sites of coal extraction, transportation, distribution, and everywhere inbetween.

Moreover, the conference also welcomes papers that do not exclusively focus on Britain as it seeks to address the General Strike’s global entanglements, to further understand the extent transnational networks, unions and activists participated in the labour stoppage. In view of the diverse character of labour history, the conference aims to highlight 1926’s eclectic mix of voices, namely its racial, ethnic and gender diversity.

Questions that can be addressed include:
- Contentious politics. Does global, spatial and maritime contention change our understanding of the General Strike: its chronology, spatiality, and legacy?
- Mobility. How did contested mobility over coal, commodities, water, vessels, coal staithes, ports, docks, road, railways, mines shape power relations?
- Geographies of resistance. How do these geographies of extraction, transport, and distribution shape common struggles during the strike? How did workers and communities in both rural- and urban- environments interact?
- Spatial Agency. What self-organization, spatial agency and repertoires of action did worker networks and organisations develop? What effect did this have on the government’s strike-breaking machinery? How was solidarity practiced in the distinctive spaces at the everyday and experiential level? What factors undermined this solidarity?
- Class, gender, race, and ethnicity. Did everyday experience and solidarity transcend racial, gender, and status-based fault lines in distinctive ways to stop the mobility of coal and the circulation of capital?
- Global and transnationalism. What were the strike’s global entanglements? What role did global events and transnational activism play in strengthening or restraining cooperation from below during the strike’s trajectory?
- Memory and postmemory. How has the labour movement remembered and represented their historical entanglements with the General Strike? What role have narratives of the General Strike played in shaping local, regional, and global identities? What are the legacies of the General Strike and how may they affect contemporary politics?

Please send in proposals for papers consisting of an abstract of 150-250 words, plus a short bio by 6 February 2026 to: joe.redmayne@newcastle.ac.uk. Papers should focus on 1926 and can focus on any geographic location. The organisers will promote the publication of the papers in a ‘new directions’ collection in a journal of the field (more details TBA).

As the recent General Strikes in Italy and Greece exemplified (during September-October 2025), a general stoppage of labour by workers in all or most industries remains a powerful strategy of the working-class movement. This action has coincided with a global wave of blockades, port disruptions, strikes, and slowdowns, particularly at critical nodes like transport hubs and arms manufacturing sites of Israeli militarism.

While we intend this to be a scholarly conference, we also wish to make space for an active dialogue between people studying protest and industrial disputes in the past and practitioners of solidarity in the present (including, for example, present day activists and trade unionists, and more). We are convinced that such mutual learning can generate insights that will enrich both scholarship and activism.

For this reason, we hope to include one round table, open to a public audience, where activists involved in solidarity today reflect on connections to solidarity in the past during the General Strike, based on the presentations at the conference.

People who would be interested in joining the conference based on their involvement in present-day solidarity are invited to write a short e-mail to the conference organisers explaining the nature of their work.

For more information about the Labour & Society Research Group (LSRG) and its activities, please visit: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/labourandsociety/.

Limited travel/accommodation support will be available, meant to support early career scholars or participants who cannot draw on institutional funding.

For enquiries, feel free to contact organisers: Joe Redmayne, joe.redmayne@newcastle.ac.uk.

Kontakt

Joe Redmayne, joe.redmayne@newcastle.ac.uk

CfP: Working Nature – Exploring Intersections of Labour History and Political Ecology

1 week 3 days ago
Organiser: International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH) Postcode: 4020 City: Linz Country: Austria Takes place: In person Dates: 17.09.2026 - 19.09.2026 Deadline: 30.01.2026  

The 6st International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH) will explore the theme “Working Nature – Exploring Intersections of Labour History and Political Ecology.” The conference seeks to open a dialogue between global labour history and historical political ecology, to review existing research at their intersection, and to identify new directions for future studies.

 

Working Nature – Exploring Intersections of Labour History and Political Ecology

Ever since the 19th century, the “social question” has been the fundamental cornerstone of labour and many other social movements. While the “social question” has by no means been conclusively solved – to the contrary, recent years have seen a return of its urgency (Breman et al. 2019) – the “ecological question” has arisen as an equally fundamental predicament from the 1970s on. Social movements have responded quickly to this new challenge, although those representing labour retained an ambivalent position, often adhering to the imperatives of “growth”. Meanwhile, official acknowledgement by states and other institutional actors of the ecological question has been much slower, more uneven and fluctuating (at best). By now, the bundle of human-made ecological crises have reached a point where most earth scientist see an actual breaching of ecological thresholds, not only in relation to climate change but also six of nine processes for which “planetary boundaries” have been defined.

In this context, the interdisciplinary field of political ecology (which dates to at least the 1970s) has experienced a spectacular boom. In a certain sense, it has become the interdisciplinary critical social science of our days, a field in which both academic and political concerns converge. In the English-speaking world, political ecology has proved to be strongly inflected by historical reasoning, with authors such as Timothy Mitchell, Jason Moore, or Andreas Malm highlighting the entanglements between material extraction, energy carriers (particularly fossil ones), ecological over-use, capitalist economic development, and exploitation.

While the history of work and labour relations have a place in these studies, many commentators have noticed an ongoing non-communication between labour history and political ecology. Indeed, the relationship between labour and ecological perspectives reveals several tensions. One of the reasons for this complicated relation is the long-standing reservation that has seen studies related to “labour” as fraught with an undue nature–society dualism and an obsession with “the industrial” and “production”. Nevertheless, substantial scholarship has emerged at the intersection of “labour” and “environmental history” as well as “political ecology”: Recently, for instance, the unintended consequences of focussing the ecological question on “consumption” was criticized, calling for re-centering the analysis on the interplay of the use of nature (including animals) and the exploitation of workers with both converging in (and creating resistance around) the work-process (Schaupp 2024). Others called for the need to include unpaid reproductive and care work in any analysis of the ecological implications of labour, and at the same time suggested to pay more attention to those moments in which labour activism has brought up ecological concerns, thus creating a kind of “labour environmentalism” (Barca 2024). The “commodity frontier” approach, in turn, has called for merging the perspective of global labour history with those of ecological economics, commodity chain analysis and other fields to pinpoint the complex interplay of factors at the sites of (mainly) agrarian commodity production (Beckert et al. 2021).

It thus seems both timely and necessary to bring global labour history and historical political ecology into a more structured and fruitful dialogue, to assess existing research at the intersection of both and to explore further avenues of research. This conference will insist on a differential, and thus politicized view of the major referents of past and current ecological predicaments (such as “global warming”) with “labour” appearing as one major category of differentiation. We welcome proposals on all historical periods and all world-regions as long as they relate historical labour studies to recent concerns of political ecology (and vice versa). While no definite list of possible topics can be established, papers might explore one of the following themes:

- Conceptual and theoretical discussions about the ways of bringing labour history and the different strands of political ecology into dialogue, including the debates about “anthropocene vs. capitalocene” (or “plantationocene”), social metabolism, climate and earth science vs. the humanities, differential time-scales, unequal ecological exchange, yet also “energy” as a foundational “connceptual connector” that has, from the 19th century, allowed translating work, heat, and (fossil-fuelled) into one another.
- The bio-physical properties of primary or semi-processed materials – from bio-mass through ores and non-metallic minerals to fossil and other energy carriers – and their implications for work processes and logics of labour resistance.
- Animals and/as "workers": Papers might explore conceptual and historical intersections between animal labour and human labour, and the role of animals in production processes. Contributions might address theoretical questions about the boundaries of "work," historical transformations in animal-human work relationships, or contemporary debates about animal labour rights in the context of ecological crisis.
- Labour relations and labour struggles in the first transition towards fossil fuels (19th century), both in local constellations and in relation to unequal relations between world-regions. The role of labour relations and labour struggles in subsequent shifts in primary energy provision (from coal to oil to atomic energy to alternative energy carriers) and the primary technology of propulsion (combustion, electricity).
- The interplay between labour relations and labour struggles, on the one hand, and ecological factors, on the other, in the extraction of energy carriers like coal, oil/gas, and radioactive ore. This can include both localized studies and perspectives that focus on the inter-regional and colonial entanglements in the extraction and production of energy carriers.
- The effects of environmental degradation and ecological crises on work and workers’ activism. This includes: the impact of “climate” and its concrete experimental dimension (heat, cold, extreme weather events) on work and workers; and “Labour environmentalism” and other instances in which labour and environmental struggles have intersected, including contention over issues of health hazards in workplaces and workers’ communities as well as struggles for urban renewal vis-à-vis the impact of industrial production. Here again, a focus on experiences with a transnational aspect as well as on the scalar tensions between the planetary, the global, the regional, and the local are particularly welcome.
- Discussions of temporality and futurity that examine notions like "energy/green transition" or timelines of projected catastrophe, analyzing how workers and labour movements orient themselves toward these horizons of expectation or contest them. This includes investigating intersections between planetary futures and discussions about the future of work, both conceptually and materially.
- Ecological changes and labour migration: examining the carbon footprint of labour migration patterns and the connection between the geopolitics of remittance economies and environmental degradation. Papers might explore historical and contemporary cases of environmentally-induced migration, the ecological consequences of remittance-based development, and the uneven distribution of environmental harms along migration corridors. Contributions addressing the intersection of climate justice and migrant labour rights are particularly welcome.
- The interplay of work and ecology in agrarian production both in localized subsistence agriculture, regionalized peasant production and globally connected cash crop production in the context of dynamic “commodity frontiers”. Beyond the classical cash crops such as stimulants (coffee, tea), sugar, tropical fruits, or grains, this may also include studies about livestock farming, forestry, drugs, flowers, etc. Also, studies about labour and labour struggles in the further processing of agrarian produce are welcome, for instance about meat processing.
- Intersections of species extinction/biodiversity loss and work, as evidenced in occupations like beekeeping or changes in rice, coffee, and other agricultural production systems. Papers might examine how biodiversity loss transforms labour processes, how workers adapt to or resist these transformations, and how labour movements engage with broader biodiversity conservation efforts.
- The work of geoengineering (intentional or not) as a field of ecological intervention with significant implications for labour. Papers might address the labour requirements of proposed large-scale geoengineering projects, the forms of expertise and manual labour involved, etc. Contributions that situate geoengineering within longer histories of human attempts to engineer environments through labour are especially encouraged.
- Following the French approach of collapsologie (Servigne/Stevens 2020), the potential of a future civilizational devolution through an unfettered ecological crisis and its implications from a labour history perspective, e.g. in terms of workers coping with situations of extreme environmental precarity. In a similar vein, papers could explore the labour-related dimensions of either “mitigation” or “adaptation” as well as the labour politics of “environmental emergency”.

SUBMISSION

Proposed papers should include:
- Abstract (max. 300 words)
- Biographical note (continuous text, max. 200 words)
- Full address and 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 to be sent to our conference manager Laurin Blecha: conference@ith.or.at

TIME SCHEDULE

Submission of proposals: 30 January 2026
Notification of acceptance: 2 March 2026
Full papers or presentation version: 14 August 2026

PREPARATORY GROUP

David Mayer, Marcel van der Linden, On Barak, Therese Garstenauer, and Laurin Blecha.

Kontakt

conference@ith.or.at

CfP: Objects in Transit: Dutch Trading Companies and the Circulation of Things as Knowledge Practice (17th-19th Centuries)

1 week 3 days ago
Organiser: Susanne Friedrich, FU Berlin Philip Hahn / Alexander Stoeger, Saarland University Location: Saarland University Postcode: 66123 Ciry: Saarbrücken Country: Germany Takes place: In person Dates: 25.02.2026 - 26.02.2026 Deadline: 01.12.2025

In this discussion-oriented workshop, we aim to explore how traded objects in Dutch long-distance commerce, from the VOC to its 19th-century successors, acted as agents in communicative and epistemic processes. Building on James Secord’s Knowledge in Transit, we invite contributions on how objects moved between commercial and intellectual contexts, gained new meanings through exchange, and shaped relations between traders, collectors, curators, and scholars. Works in progress are highly welcome.

 

Objects in Transit: Dutch Trading Companies and the Circulation of Things as Knowledge Practice (17th-19th Centuries)

The early modern Dutch long-distance companies such as the East India Company (VOC) and their 19th-century successors were not only economic enterprises but also key actors in the circulation of knowledge with and through objects from the 17th to the 19th century. Their trade networks facilitated the movement of goods that transcended their immediate economic value without negating their commercial roots: things collected were traded goods but gained epistemic value not only because of their rarity or curiosity, but also as tokens of Dutch trading, European and non-European epistemic-commercial interactions, and negotiation of value. The companies maintained a specific way of circulating objects that shaped discourses on value, collecting practices, and knowledge formations embedded in pre-national forms of epistemic identity-building.

In line with James Secord’s concept of Knowledge in Transit, this workshop will consider objects not merely as static entities but as integral part of larger communicative processes acting out in parallel, in combination, or in conflict. We will focus specifically on objects traded or otherwise transported by the VOC and other Dutch companies from their domains from the 17th to the 19th century, which acquired meanings beyond their collective or economic value. We are particularly interested in how this dual identity — both commercial and epistemic — was shaped by actors within the long-distance trading companies and acknowledged by their business partners and other stakeholders. In addition to negotiations within the companies, we also aim to explore how these objects gained new significance through interactions between the companies and their agents or customers, including collectors, curators, and scholars.

We aim to explore these dynamics by focusing on three interrelated issues:

Negotiating Value

Objects in trade and collections were not static commodities but actively shaped by processes of valuation, discourse, and negotiation. How and at which point of their itinerary were different meanings ascribed to goods? How were price-making mechanisms and labelling practices influenced by knowledge about materials, origins, or intended uses and vice versa? How did institutions and individuals reframe the status of objects as epistemic capital and what consequences did this have for the objects? Can changes in value attribution practices be recognised over time? We also invite contributions that examine how capitalist and institutional knowledge systems maintained and transformed these value structures and explore the ways knowledge about value was communicated, translated, and recontextualized across different settings.

Using Things

The material handling of objects was a crucial aspect of knowledge-making within a commercial context. While objects in collections were integrated into a system that recognised and treated them as epistemic artefacts, trading companies and their agents primarily dealt with objects as commercial items. Transferring these heterogeneous objects meant to transport, trade and use them within a different framework. We invite contributions that examine practices of collecting, cataloging, classifying, exhibiting, or representing objects specifically in negotiation or cooperation with Dutch trading companies. How did objects acquire new meanings through their integration into collections or auctions? How did they differ or were labelled as different from objects obtained by other means? How did these processes shape the distinction between commodity and cultural object, particularly in relation to VOC and post-VOC institutions? Did companies use such objects for their ‘image building’? Here, we particularly encourage perspectives that consider how knowledge about objects was embedded in communicative acts, whether verbally, in written form or through visual displays.

Identifying Actors

Who were the key agents involved in these processes? Beyond the VOC and similar institutions, we are interested in European as well as indigenous individuals and groups — merchants, brokers, collectors, scholars, artisans — who facilitated the movement of objects in the context of intercontinental trade. How did their practices shape the global itineraries of goods and the identity of long-distance trading companies in the Netherlands in relation to knowledge-gaining and epistemic developments? How did physical locations, such as trading hubs, company (head-)quarters or storage facilities as well as institutes and museums, contribute to these processes? We encourage discussions on how these actors functioned within broader political, scientific and economic systems and how their roles transformed in the transition from the 18th to the 19th century. We particularly welcome contributions that examine how knowledge through and about objects was not merely produced, but transported, translated, and repurposed by different actors within and in collaboration with these trade companies.

The workshop topic spans two periods, one focusing on the VOC and Dutch long-distance trade during the 17th and 18th centuries, and the other on the re-negotiation of Dutch trading companies and their role in Dutch efforts to remain competitive in international epistemic developments of the 19th century. We welcome contributions focusing on either period, as well as contributions bridging both. Our workshop can only cover a small section of the topic, but we also encourage general considerations on the possibilities and limitations inherent in this historical approach.

Please note that this workshop is designed as an open exchange and debate, based on short ten-minute introductory presentations followed by guided discussion. Works in progress are therefore highly welcome. When submitting your abstract, please provide us with the topic of your intended short presentation as well as with some remarks on your broader project and its connection to the themes outlined in the above workshop description. After evaluating all submissions, we will send a brief catalogue of preparatory questions to all participants, which will serve as the basis for the roundtable discussion.

We aim to provide feedback on the selection results in the week of 15 December.

Programm

Date: 25 & 26 February, 2026

Location: Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

Workshop format: 1.5 days, with a keynote lecture on 25 February and discussion-oriented sessions the day after (10-minute input presentations followed by a chaired discussion)

Keynote: Dániel Margócsy, Cambridge (confirmed)

Language: English

Submission: Please send an abstract of your related project (ca. 250 words) and a short CV by 1 December 2025 to Alexander Stoeger (alexander.stoeger@uni-saarland.de)

Funding: We will cover the travel and accommodation costs

Organisers: Susanne Friedrich (FU Berlin), Philip Hahn (Saarland University), Alexander Stoeger (Saarland University)

Kontakt

alexander.stoeger@uni-saarland.de

CfP: Zwei Kulturen? – Der Umgang mit der NS-Vergangenheit in den Geistes- und den Naturwissenschaften (German)

1 week 3 days ago
Munich/Germany   Organiser: Peter Hoeres / Susan Splinter / Stefan Jordan, Abt. NDB-online, Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, München (Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften) Location: Alfons-Goppel-Str. 11, Munich Postcode: 80539 City: München Country: Germany Takes place: In person Dates: 21.10.2026 - 22.10.2026 Deadline: 15.12.2025  

1959 veröffentlichte C. P. Snow seinen Artikel „Two Cultures“, in dem er die These aufstellte, dass sich Geistes- und Naturwissenschaften bzw. nomothetisch und idiografisch verfahrende Wissenschaften diametral gegenüberstehen und eine Verständigung angesichts unterschiedlicher Denkstile kaum möglich sei. Diese These wird seit Jahrzehnten diskutiert, historisiert und problematisiert (Fabian Krämer; Otto Gerhard Oexle; Helmut Bachmeier/Ernst Peter Fischer).

 

Zwei Kulturen? – Der Umgang mit der NS-Vergangenheit in den Geistes- und den Naturwissenschaften

Am Beispiel des Umgangs mit der disziplinären NS-Vergangenheit soll – mit besonderem Blick auf Artikel in biografischen Lexika – der Frage nachgegangen werden, welche Spezifika es in der Historisierung der Disziplinen zwischen den Geistes- und den Naturwissenschaften gibt. Die Naturwissenschafts-, Technik- und Medizingeschichte untersucht seit Ende der 1970er Jahre Forschungsinhalte und -praktiken, das disziplinäre Handeln von Personen(gruppen) und Institutionen sowie die Geschichte von Strukturen und Denkweisen während der NS-Zeit. Herbert Mehrtens‘ und Alan Beyerchens Publikationen gelten als Ausgangspunkt für eine sich zunehmend differenzierende und breitenwirksame Auseinandersetzung der Geschichte von Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin vor, während und nach der nationalsozialistischen Zeit.

In der Geschichtswissenschaft gaben die von Winfried Schulze und Otto Gerhard Oexle als Aufsätze publizierten Beiträge auf dem Deutschen Historikertag in Frankfurt am Main 1998 der Erforschung der Disziplin und ihrer Vertreter während der NS-Zeit starke Impulse. In der Folge erschienen mehrere Dissertationen und Handbücher. Ähnliches lässt sich zu gleicher Zeit für die Literaturwissenschaft und Philosophie beobachten. Auch hier bildet die Zeit um das Jahr 2000 einen Ausgangspunkt für die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Geschichte der eigenen Wissenschaft, wie der Band „Literaturwissenschaft und Nationalsozialismus“, 2003 herausgegeben von Holger Dainat und Lutz Danneberg belegt.

Im Rahmen des Workshops soll geklärt werden, ob sich der Umgang mit der NS-Vergangenheit in den einzelnen Fachdisziplinen unterscheidet. Lassen sich zeitlich, inhaltlich und sozial Unterschiede oder Gemeinsamkeiten feststellen?

Dabei soll ein besonderes Augenmerk auf biografische Lexika und die Frage gelegt werden, wann Forschungen zur NS-Vergangenheit von Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern in die entsprechenden Lexikonartikel eingingen bzw. ob von solchen Artikeln Impulse für die Forschung ausgingen. Dass biografische Nachschlagewerke Debatten auslösen können, zeigte die Veröffentlichung des „Internationalen Germanistenlexikons 1800–1950“ (2003) eindrücklich, die durch den Nachweis einer Mitgliedschaft in der NSDAP Diskussionen um bis dahin als politisch unbescholten geltende Persönlichkeiten wie Walter Jens, Walter Höllerer und Peter Wapnewski verursachten.

Diesen und weiteren Fragen wird bei dem Workshop „Zwei Kulturen? – Der Umgang mit der NS-Vergangenheit in den Geistes- und Naturwissenschaften“ nachgegangen, der am 21. und 22. Oktober 2026 von der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in München veranstaltet wird. Für die Diskussionsbeiträge sind jeweils rund 20 Minuten Zeit vorgesehen, damit ausreichend Raum für den interdisziplinären Austausch bleibt. Geplant ist im Anschluss ein Sammelband mit den Beiträgen der Tagung.

Bitte senden Sie Beitragsvorschläge bis zum 15. Dezember 2025 an susan.splinter@ndb.badw-muenchen.de und/oder stefan.jordan@ndb.badw-muenchen.de. Reisekosten (Übernachtung und Fahrtkosten im üblichen Umfang) können übernommen werden.

Kontakt

susan.splinter@ndb.badw-muenchen.de
stefan.jordan@ndb.badw-muenchen.de

CfP: Transition and Renewal: Progressive Utopias and Leftist Reorientation, 1970s–1990s

1 week 3 days ago
Organiser: Knud Andresen, Hamburg; Detlef Siegfried / Mads Jedzini, Copenhagen (University of Copenhagen, Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg) Location: University of Copenhagen Postcode: 1172 City: Copenhagen Country: Denmark Takes place: In person Dates: 12.05.2027 - 14.05.2027 Deadline: 15.01.2026  

The conference will examine how utopias and visions of the future have changed within the European Left. between the 1970s and the 1990s.

 

Transition and Renewal: Progressive Utopias and Leftist Reorientation, 1970s–1990s

The pervasive sense of ongoing economic, political and everyday crises in contemporary Western societies has prompted attempts at reorientation within the political left. While the Left has traditionally drawn its legitimacy from the promise of progress, the visions of the contemporary Left today seem largely informed by and rooted in the past. What has become of the labour movement's once-radiant future?

To contextualise the transformation of the European Left's visions of the future, it is worthwhile examining the long 1970s. Following the end of the Trente Glorieuses (Jean Fourastié), whose consequences for the party system were encapsulated in Andrei S. Markovits's and Philip S. Gorski’s study Red, Green, and Beyond, utopian visions of the future and perspectives of social progress lost much of their appeal, and the 'utopian energies' (Jürgen Habermas) were exhausted. Whether interpreted as the emergence of a 'presentist present' (Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht) or a time when 'the world fell out of joint' (Aleida Assmann), the political left became increasingly characterised not by hope for a radiant future society, but by a desire to preserve the status quo. This conference will explore the strategies and practices through which the European left responded to the loss of its social utopia, and the extent to which comparable attempts at reorientation can be observed during this period.

We proceed from the assumption that scepticism about the future did not entirely replace the progressive utopia; rather, reorientations varied across social domains and milieus. Our focus encompasses the entire spectrum of the left, including left-liberal currents, social democracy, trade unions, communism and the radical left. As well as Western European countries, we also consider reorientation processes within state socialism. The temporal scope extends from the 1970s to the 1990s.

We invite scholars interested in the history and present of the Left to exchange ideas on this significant yet underexplored transnational phenomenon. We welcome national case studies as well as broader comparative and analytical contributions from transnational and European perspectives. Relevant approaches include inter alia intellectual history, the history of social movements as well as economic, social, and cultural history.

Contributions could address (while not being limited to) the following thematic areas:
- The influence of the new social movements on the formation of left-wing political fields since the 1970s is unmistakable. What visions of the future were represented in these movements, for example in the women’s movement? Were overarching societal utopias formed, and how widespread were they? How did left-wing parties respond to these new challenges?
- How did the semantics of the term “progressive” change since the 1970s?
- In the 1990s, a resurgence of nationalism can be observed. How did left-wing groups react to this development? Was a left-wing nationalism strengthened? To what extent can anti-national counter-reactions be observed?
- How did the developments of the 1990s – the collapse of state socialism and the dominance of neoliberalism – influence left-wing conceptions of progress?
- In 1979, the first European Parliament was elected, and the European integration process was intensified after the collapse of the socialist states. To what extent were demands for a “social Europe” implemented, and was the integration process generally welcomed or rejected?
- Technological progress in the form of automation and computerization, which had promised of a future without physical toil, lost its appeal during the long 1970s. Instead, scepticism towards technology prevailed, especially on the Left. To what extent did this coincide with nostalgic tendencies and “Heimat” discourses?
- Was the emergence of history workshops (“Geschichtswerkstätten”), that emerged primarily from the Left and dealt with the history of the labor movement, resistance against National Socialism, Jewish history, etc., a reaction to the erosion of the utopia of progress, or did it reinforce it?
- The Left fundamentally understood itself as internationalist. European labour migration as well as refugee migration influenced societies in their own countries. What conceptions of the future arose from this? How did, for example, trade unions react to the increasing relocation of production sites to non-European countries?
- To what extent can solidarity with liberation movements in countries of the Global South (e.g. Nicaragua, El Salvador, South Africa etc.) be seen as compensation for the loss of utopias in European countries?
- On these and other thematic areas, the earlier semantics of progress of the labour movement seem to have been redefined. What forms and variations can be observed? How did the balance shift between the “old” and the “new” Left?

We kindly request the submission of abstracts of up to 2,400 characters by January 15, 2026, to Knud Andresen (andresen@zeitgeschichte-hamburg.de) and Mads Jedzini (mje@hum.ku.dk).
Submitters will be informed of the results by mid-February 2026.
We will seek external funding for the conference to cover travel and accommodation costs.
In case of any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the organizers via email.

Programm

Overview:
Deadline for abstracts: January 15, 2026
Length of abstract: max. 2,400 characters
Decisions by: Mid-February, 2026
Conference date: 12–14 May, 2027
Conference venue: University of Copenhagen
Contact: Knud Andresen (andresen@zeitgeschichte-hamburg.de) & Mads Jedzini (mje@hum.ku.dk)

Kontakt

Knud Andresen (andresen@zeitgeschichte-hamburg.de) & Mads Jedzini (mje@hum.ku.dk)

CfP: Gender and Environment (English and French)

1 week 3 days ago
Aix-en-Provence/France   Organiser: RUCHE - Réseau universitaire de chercheur.es en histoire environnementale (UMR 7303 TELEMMe; UMR 8529 IRHiS; UMR 1048 SADAPT) Location: UMR 7303 TELEMMe – Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme Aix-en-Provence (France). 5 rue du Château de l'Horloge, CS 90412 Postcode: 13097 City: Aix-en-Provence Cedex 2 Country: France Takes place: In person Dates: 11.06.2026 - 12.06.2026 Deadline: 15.12.2025 Website: https://leruche.hypotheses.org/quest-ce-que-le-ruche   This conference integrates gender history and environmental history to achieve two objectives. Firstly, it aims to highlight approaches that have remained relatively marginal in France, despite having been debated for several decades elsewhere, particularly in the English-speaking world. Secondly, it aims to empirically investigate these approaches through case studies ranging from antiquity to the present day, given that contemporary history still dominates the historiography of gender–environment relations.  

Both environmental history and women’s history, along with gender history later on, were institutionalised in the United States in the early 1970s. Paradoxically, however, there has been little dialogue between these two fields until recently, as has been pointed out more generally with regard to environmental history and social history (Mosley 2006). Yet these two fields of historical scholarship have shared a common goal from the outset: giving a voice and agency to those forgotten by official history. Their aim was to take on new subjects of study (women, non-humans) or, more ambitiously, to re-interpret the past in terms of gender power relations or environmental issues (Fressoz et al. 2014; Quenet 2014; Mathis 2018). Against the backdrop of struggles for civil rights and gender equality, as well as the development of environmental movements, a sometimes militant academic commitment was another feature these two currents had in common. Some 30 years later, environmental historians sought to provide their field with a theoretical framework to demonstrate its centrality to history as a discipline and to the social sciences more broadly. Gender history then provided a template for those who wanted to treat the environment as a category of analysis comparable to race, class and gender in order to uncover power relations and asymmetries (Scott 1986; Steinberg 2002; Stroud 2003; Quenet 2014).

However, the intersection between gender history and environmental history has remained relatively limited to date, particularly outside the English-speaking world and beyond Indian historiography, despite repeated calls to integrate gender perspectives into the conceptual apparatus of environmental history (Guha 1989, 2000; Merchant 1990; Leach and Green 1997; Scharff 2003; Unger 2014; Holmes and Morgan 2021; Morgan and Cook 2021). Work in this area over the past 20 years has mainly focused on North America, reflecting the dual American tradition in these two fields of history, and on India, where the convergence of social and environmental issues has been central to subaltern studies. This research has largely prioritised the contemporary era. Furthermore, in the English-speaking world, a significant proportion of these studies have centred on the experiences and concerns of the Western male elite in line with the specificities of US history (e.g. the conquest of the American West, masculinity and wilderness), to the detriment of considering the roles of women, Indigenous peoples and enslaved populations. Concerning the latter, academic accounts have often focused on environmental struggles (Unger 2012; Barca and Guidi 2013) and the preservation of botanical or agricultural knowledge that colonisation would have dispossessed them of (Carney 2001; Morgan 2004; Carney and Rosomoff 2009; O’Leary 2024).

Beyond the historical discipline, the use of gender as an analytical tool cannot be considered in isolation from other relationships of domination (social or cultural) and other modes of assignment (such as race or class). Research on environmental injustices has amply demonstrated the intersections and convergences between environmental and social inequalities, including gender discrimination (Massard-Guilbaud and Rodger 2011), and has highlighted discrepancies in access to and control of natural resources, as well as related environmental changes, in various contexts (Elmhirst 2015).

Numerous studies in the humanities and social sciences have also revealed antagonistic forms of relationship with the environment, based on different conceptions of nature (Haraway 1989). The following opposition has been particularly emphasised: on the one hand, white Western male elites tend to view nature as an appropriable resource and/or an enclosed space in need of protection; on the other hand, exploited minorities, especially women in poorer countries, see it as a common good and an integrated whole of which the human species is merely a part (Laugier, Falquet and Molinier 2015). At the crossroads of ecological struggles and the fight for women’s rights, ecofeminism has, for half a century, sought to deconstruct the interconnected dominations of women and nature (d’Eaubonne 1974; Merchant 1980; Warren 1990; Plumwood 1993; Federici 2004; MacGregor 2017; Benquet and Pruvost 2019; Larrère 2023; Hache 2024, 2026), while seeking to avoid the pitfall of essentialism (Shiva 1988; Agarwal 1992, 1994; Mies and Shiva 1993; Leach and Green 1997). Recent gendered re-interpretations of the Anthropocene encourage us to make visible marginalised groups, including women, excluded from positions of power and therefore often reduced, at best, to mere victims of environmental damage. Another approach is to examine the causes of the environmental crisis to highlight the patriarchal determinants of the degradation of the living world (Ruault et al. 2021).

This conference integrates gender history and environmental history to achieve two objectives. Firstly, it aims to highlight approaches that have remained relatively marginal in France, despite having been debated for several decades elsewhere, particularly in the English-speaking world. Secondly, it aims to empirically investigate these approaches through case studies ranging from antiquity to the present day, given that contemporary history still dominates the historiography of gender–environment relations.

The value of such an approach lies not only in reintegrating women as environmental actors in their own right into historical analysis. It also raises the issue of the sources required to access silenced voices and to bring to light forms of knowledge and practices that have been largely overlooked. Most importantly, it involves considering gender as an essential lens – composed of habits, social norms and behaviours related to sex, which vary across time and space – through which individuals’ relationships with the rest of nature are constructed (Scharff 2003; Morgan and Cook 2021). At the same time, it is crucial not to ignore the diversity of gender categories and the complex interweaving of elements that make up identity.

Mobilising concepts that are important to both fields, such as agency (both human and non-human) (Thomas 2016), allows us to question, in a dialectical way, the impact of gender – understood as the social construction of sex differences and the associated power relations – on the environment. It also enables us to consider the reverse: the effect of the relationship with ‘nature’ on social gender relations. From this perspective, gender history can inform environmental history, encouraging us to re-examine, from the margins, grand narratives such as those concerning domestication, slavery, colonisation, scientific ‘revolutions’, the rise of capitalism and industrialisation. This approach also invites us to take a fresh look at classic themes that have recently been revisited, such as labour, the commons, or environmental protection, and even to explore new areas of research. Reflections will focus on both the materiality of the relationships that historical actors maintain with their environment (e.g. access to natural resources and the effects of their actions on environments and socio-environmental dynamics) and the gender norms that shape these relationships or that these relationships, in turn, help to construct or transform.

Conference Themes

1. Labour, (Re)production, Subsistence

Since at least the Middle Ages (Charpentier and Lett 2024), the gendered division of labour (whether described as ‘subsistence’ or professional labour) has been accompanied by disparities in access to land (Agarwal 1994), tools (Tabet 1979; Cockburn 2004), resources (water, minerals, forest products, animals etc.), as well as to environmental knowledge and governance (Morera and Le Roux 2018). Contributions may consider these inequalities in the light of broader historical dynamics of resource commodification and appropriation, notably the enclosure of the commons (Elmhirst 2015), and in relation to the rise of industrial capitalism and colonial expansion. Contributions may also address differentiated responsibilities in the management, exploitation and protection of the environment, along with the resulting ecological consequences. Case studies might serve to historicise or critically reassess concepts introduced by ecofeminist perspectives, such as ‘subsistence work’ and the process of ‘housewifization’ (Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen 1997), or to propose narratives that reconceptualise categories of labour and reproduction (Barca 2024) by integrating activities related to care and environmental restoration, which are still often overlooked.

2. Vernacular Knowledge, Expertise and Professionalisation

Carolyn Merchant has analysed the impact of the scientific ‘revolution’ and the resulting nature/culture divide through the lens of the (mechanistic) understanding of living beings and (utilitarian) conception of resources (Merchant 1980). Numerous studies have highlighted how, from the early modern period onwards, processes of professionalisation and the scientification of disciplines contributed to the marginalisation of feminine, vernacular knowledge (Pépy 2018; Benharrech 2020). These works also shed light on the strategies women developed to preserve or gain access to environmental knowledge, including in colonial contexts (Schiebinger 2004). These strategies included autodidactic learning, participation in public and private education, involvement in amateur, learned and agricultural societies, the production of natural history publications, the development of networks and intellectual circles and the founding of institutions and enterprises.
Women’s marginal positions also enable them to develop critical perspectives on dominant epistemologies and scientific practices, from challenging the centrality of botanical extraction and hunting in natural history culture (Beinart and Hughes 2007) to opposing vivisection, which became increasingly central to physiology from the 19th century onwards (Finn 2012). This section seeks to explore both these critiques and the alternative epistemologies and human–nature relations advocated by women. It will also examine the growing role of women in institutionalised environmental sciences from the 20th century, as well as their role in shaping and transforming these disciplines (Haraway 1989).

3. Nature(s) and Gender Categories: Femininities, Masculinities and Queer Ecologies

Nature plays a symbolic role in the construction of gender identities, from the naturalisation and animalisation of women to the association of so-called natural’ attributes, such as physical strength, with masculinity. Simultaneously, nature itself is metaphorically feminised: from Gaia to ‘Mother Nature’ (Gaard 1993). This section explores the cultural construction of gender identities, their material and symbolic implications in specific contexts (Girault 2022), and their strategic instrumentalisation, from so-called ‘fertility goddesses’ to contemporary narratives.
It also considers how feminist movements have reclaimed, reworked or subverted historical associations between gender and nature: as seen, for example, in the analogies drawn between women and (laboratory) animals by 19th-century anti-vivisectionist activists (Carrié 2018) or in the ways environmentalist activists have invoked a gendered disposition towards care and consideration for others (Engels 2002; Porhel 2018).
Furthermore, echoing the growing body of work on queer ecologies in the humanities and social sciences, which interrogate how non-heteronormative spaces challenge dominant (bio)power structures (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010; Rimlinger 2024), this section aims to highlight the historical intersections between queer–environmental struggles (Unger 2021), as well as how they challenge binary categorisations of both gender and nature.

4. Environmental Exploitation and Gender Inequalities
Intersections between environmental, racial, social and gender inequalities have been widely studied. Scholarship has shown, across varied historical contexts, an increased burden of women’s domestic labour in polluted environments (Mosley 2001) and in economies based on the intensive exploitation of wildlife (Isenberg 2000). It has also documented women’s differential exposure to pollutants and, since the first third of the 20th century, to agrochemicals (Elmhirst 2015; Van Melkebeke 2020). Conversely, certain groups of women have been targeted for their involvement in environmentally destructive practices linked to appearance-focused consumer habits, such as the use of feathers or fur (Kean 1998). This section aims to analyse the intersections of gender, resource control and environmental exploitation, with particular attention to their impact on health and bodies.

5. Activism, Emancipation, Politicisation
Research has highlighted the central role played by women in animal and wildlife protection, as well as environmental advocacy, all of which gained momentum from the 19th century onwards. Their involvement took various forms, including the founding of environmental organisations (Winiwarter 2017), participation in environmental movements (Guha 2000) and whistleblowing, as exemplified by the work of Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962) and Ruth Harrison (Animal Machines, 1964), as well as the theorisation of ecofeminism (Cambourakis 2018). These engagements often – though not always – coincided with broader aspirations towards emancipation, public participation, and even political influence (Unger 2012; Mathis 2018).
In connection with section 4, this section investigates the intersections between environmentalism, social reform, civil rights movements and political activism (Guha 2000). It further seeks to explore how women’s commitments were shaped by, and at times challenged, socially constructed gender norms, such as the defence of sentient beings, domestic spaces and family health (Engels 2002) while also recognising the specificities of activist struggles.

6. Sources, Methodologies, Historiography
Since antiquity, women, especially from lower social backgrounds, have left behind few written records. Modes of appropriation and preservation of writing have reproduced and amplified their invisibility in human–environment interactions. For instance, normative and statistical sources in both European and colonial contexts often fail to account for women’s agricultural labour and its economic significance (Gubin 1996; Likaka 1997; Benharrech 2020). However, recent research drawing on judicial, literary and practical sources has proposed methodological strategies to circumvent this invisibility (Montenach 2017).
This conference welcomes contributions that address the challenges and opportunities offered by historical sources in the context of gender and environmental history. It seeks to foster reflexive debate on the impact of source-related biases and gendered constructions on historical scholarship. For instance, as several historians have noted, the idealisation of women as custodians of rural life and key actors in (proto-)ecological practices has contributed to obscuring their role in agricultural and industrial modernisation (Gubin 1996). Finally, while scholars in political ecology have drawn attention to the pitfalls of gendered approaches that lead to the essentialisation of binary perspectives and, in practice, place the burden of environmental repair on women (Elmhirst 2015), this section also aims to explore the historical construction, mobilisation, transformation and potential transcendence of gender categories in relation to environmental issues.

Practical Information
Paper proposals (including a title, a summary of no more than 2,000 characters and a short CV) should be sent to genre.environnement@gmail.com by 15 December 2025.
Notification of acceptance will be given by 15 February 2026.
The working languages of the conference are French and English. Submissions from early-career researchers are particularly encouraged. Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered in line with the available budget.

References
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- Montenach, Anne, Femmes, pouvoirs et contrebande dans les Alpes au XVIIIe siècle, Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 2017.
- Morera, Raphaël, Le Roux, Thomas, “Blanchisseuses du propre, blanchisseurs du pur. Les mutations genrées de l’art du linge à l’âge des révolutions textiles et chimiques (1750-1820),” Genre & Histoire, 22, 2018, https://doi.org/10.4000/genrehistoire.3706.
- Morgan, Jennifer L., Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender and New World Slavery, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
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- Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, Erickson, Bruce, “Introduction. A Genealogy of Queer Ecologies,” in Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Bruce Erickson (eds), Queer Ecologies. Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010, 1–48.
- Mosley, Stephen, The Chimney of the World. A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester, Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2001.
- Mosley Stephen, “Common Ground: Integrating Social and Environmental History,” Journal of Social History, 39/3, 2006, 915–933.
- O’Leary, Jessica, “The Uprooting of Indigenous Women’s Horticultural Practices in Brazil, 1500-1650,” Past & Present, 262, 2024, 45–83.
- Pépy, Émilie-Anne, “Les femmes et les plantes: accès négocié à la botanique savante et résistance des savoirs vernaculaires (France, XVIIIe siècle),” Genre & Histoire, 22, 2018, https://doi.org/10.4000/genrehistoire.3654.
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- Plumwood, Val, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge, 1993.
- Quenet, Grégory, Qu’est-ce que l’histoire environnementale?, Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2014.
- Rimlinger, Constance, Féministes des champs. Du retour à la terre à l’écologie queer, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2024.
- Ruault, Lucile, Hertz, Ellen, Debergh, Marlyse, Martin, Hélène, Bachmann, Laurence, Androcène, special issue Nouvelles questions féministes, 40/2, 2021.
- Scharff, Virginia J., “Man and Nature! Sex Secrets of Environmental History,” in Virginia J. Scharff (ed.), Seeing Nature through Gender, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.
- Schiebinger, Londa, Plants and Empire. Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World, Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2004.
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- Tabet, Paola, “Les mains, les outils, les armes,” L’Homme, 19/3,‎ 1979, 5–61.
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- Unger, Nancy C., Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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- Van Melkebeke, Sven, Dissimilar Coffee Frontiers: Mobilizing Labor and Land in the Lake Kivu Region, Congo and Rwanda (1918-1960/62), Leiden: Brill, 2020.
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Organising Committee
Anne Montenach (Aix-Marseille Université, TELEMMe)
Céline Pessis (Université Paris–Saclay, SADAPT)
Violette Pouillard (CNRS, IRHiS)

Scientific Committee
Fabien Bartolotti (Aix-Marseille Université, UMR 7303 TELEMMe)
Cécile Beghin (INSPÉ de l’académie de Versailles, UMR 8264 ECHELLES)
Laurent Brassart (Université de Lille, UMR 8529 IRHiS)
Katja Doose (Université Lumière-Lyon 2, UMR 5190 LARHRA)
Christopher Fletcher (Université de Lille, UMR 8529 IRHiS)
Clémentine Girault (Université Paris Cité - EHESS)
Romain Grancher (CNRS, UMR 5136 FRAMESPA)
Adeline Grand Clément (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, PLH)
Rémi Grisal (Aix-Marseille Université, UMR 7303 TELEMMe)
Pauline Guéna (CNRS, UMR 7303 TELEMMe)
Ulrike Krampl (Université de Tours, UR 6298 CETHIS)
Matti Leprêtre (Sciences Po Paris/EHESS, UMR 8211 Cermes3/CAK)
Charles-François Mathis (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, UMR 8066 IHMC)
Bibia Pavard (Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas, EA 2293 CARISM)
Émilie-Anne Pépy (Université Savoie-Mont Blanc, EA 3706 LLSETI)
Iva Peša (University of Groningen)
Dominique Picco (Université Bordeaux-Montaigne, UR 2958 CEMMC)
Vincent Porhel (INSPÉ Université Lyon 1, UMR 5190 LARHRA)
Tiphaine Robert (FNS, Université de Berne)
Marguerite Ronin (CNRS, UMR 7041 ArScAn)
Lucile Ruault (CNRS, UMR 8211 Cermes3)
Benedikte Zitouni (Université catholique de Louvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles, CESIR)

Kontakt

genre.environnement@gmail.com

CfP: Between Practice and Research: Democratization of Work in the Realm of Transfer Research

2 weeks ago

EuroDem Conference
Location: Ruhr-University Bochum, Institute for Social Movements, Clemensstraße 17-19, 44789 Bochum
Date: 26-27 February 2026

The production of discourses around workplace democracy has historically oscillated between hopes for radical transformation and cynical diagnoses of symbolic politics. One could argue, reality often unfolded somewhere in between. In the wake of current debates on the digital transformation of work, automation, AI-driven reorganization of production, and a declared polycrisis (Reckwitz & Rosa 2021, William & Erickson 2024) - i.e. the perception of social crises as overlapping, mutually reinforcing structural phenomena - similar tensions are re-emerging, frequently perceived as entirely novel, though they are deeply rooted in past experiences. Looking back at earlier waves of structural change and transformation – especially since the 1980s – and the industrial-sociological debates they triggered, reveals patterns of friction between institutional, academic, and workplace-level understandings of democratization. Whether under the label of “Humanisation of Work” in Germany, post-Fordism, or lean production, democratic aspirations have often confronted complex realities of economic restructuring, managerial resistance, and changing labor relations. While diagnoses of current transformations in work and production abound, they often focus on isolated phenomena – such as digitalization, AI, or economic restructuring – and address them as singular crises or disruptions. This fragmentation overlooks the historical entanglements and systemic continuities that shape today’s challenges. What remains underexplored is how these developments intersect, reinforce, or contradict one another within broader trajectories of workplace democratization. By bridging past and present, theory and practice, and singular diagnoses with structural analysis, this conference aims to address this gap and foster a more integrated understanding of democratic potentials and limitations in the evolving world of work. This conference seeks to revisit these past and present contradictions through the lens of research that not only observes but aims to shape practice and vice versa to ultimately explore how democratic concepts of work have been transferred, translated and transformed across contexts: from theory to application, from one workplace or country to another, and from one era of change to the next. We are pleased to invite submissions for an interdisciplinary conference exploring the evolving and contested terrain of workplace democracy – between visionary renewal and practical contradiction, between academic discourse and labor experimentation. This on-site conference is organised in the framework of the research project Workplace democracy: a European ideal? Discourses and practices about the democratization of work after 1945 (EURO-DEM) funded by the ANR and DFG.

We welcome contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:
Conceptual and Methodological:
• Methods and methodological challenges of transfer research in the field of work and labor.
• Forms and conceptions of transfer research: What does it mean to “transfer” democratic ideals into practice? What are the possibilities and pitfalls?
• Theoretical contributions exploring multi-level or systemic understandings of democracy at work.
Empirical Approaches:
• Case studies exploring how democratic forms of work organization have been imagined, implemented, or resisted.
• Tensions between participatory and representative models of workplace democracy.
• The role of academic discourse in shaping labor policy, union strategies, and workplace reforms.
• Critical analyses of failed, partial, or co-opted democratization processes.
Historical Comparisons:
• Historical reconstructions of labor policy debates and democratization initiatives in times of transformation (e.g. post-Fordism, digitalization, deindustrialization). Comparative perspectives on democratization efforts across sectors or national contexts.
Future Challenges:
•New forms of workplace participation in the digital age: hype or real empowerment?

Submission Guidelines:
We welcome contributions from scholars, practitioners, unionists, and early-career researchers across disciplines including (but not limited to) sociology, labor studies, history, political science, organization studies, and industrial relations. Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words, along with a short biographical note by 30 November 2025 to Sophia.friedel@rub.de. Accepted contributors will be notified early December 2025. Selected papers may be considered for inclusion in an edited volume or special journal issue following the conference.

Contact: Sophia Friedel, Sophia.friedel@rub.de Institute for Social Movements and Joint Research Centre Ruhr-University Bochum / IG Metall Suttner-Nobel-Allee 4, 44803 Bochum

CfP: Transition and Renewal: Progressive Utopias and Leftist Reorientation, 1970s–1990s

2 weeks ago

Call for Papers
Conference: “Transition and Renewal: Progressive Utopias and Leftist Reorientation, 1970s–1990s”
Date: 12–14 May, 2027, Venue: University of Copenhagen
Organizers: Knud Andresen (Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg), Mads Jedzini (University of Copenhagen), Detlef Siegfried (University of Copenhagen)

The pervasive sense of ongoing economic, political and everyday crises in contemporary Western societies has prompted attempts at reorientation within the political left. While the Left has traditionally drawn its legitimacy from the promise of progress, the visions of the contemporary Left today seem largely informed by and rooted in the past. What has become of the labour movement's once-radiant future?

To contextualise the transformation of the European Left's visions of the future, it is worthwhile examining the long 1970s. Following the end of the Trente Glorieuses (Jean Fourastié), whose consequences for the party system were encapsulated in Andrei S. Markovits's and Philip S. Gorski’s study Red, Green, and Beyond, utopian visions of the future and perspectives of social progress lost much of their appeal, and the 'utopian energies' (Jürgen Habermas) were exhausted. Whether interpreted as the emergence of a 'presentist present' (Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht) or a time when 'the world fell out of joint' (Aleida Assmann), the political left became increasingly characterised not by hope for a radiant future society, but by a desire to preserve the status quo. This conference will explore the strategies and practices through which the European left responded to the loss of its social utopia, and the extent to which comparable attempts at reorientation can be observed during this period.

We proceed from the assumption that scepticism about the future did not entirely replace the progressive utopia; rather, reorientations varied across social domains and milieus. Our focus encompasses the entire spectrum of the left, including left-liberal currents, social democracy, trade unions, communism and the radical left. As well as Western European countries, we also consider reorientation processes within state socialism. The temporal scope extends from the 1970s to the 1990s.

We invite scholars interested in the history and present of the Left to exchange ideas on this significant yet underexplored transnational phenomenon. We welcome national case studies as well as broader comparative and analytical contributions from transnational and European perspectives. Relevant approaches include inter alia intellectual history, the history of social movements as well as economic, social, and cultural history.

Contributions could address (while not being limited to) the following thematic areas:

  • The influence of the new social movements on the formation of left-wing political fields since the 1970s is unmistakable. What visions of the future were represented in these movements, for example in the women’s movement? Were overarching societal utopias formed, and how widespread were they? How did left-wing parties respond to these new challenges?
  • How did the semantics of the term “progressive” change since the 1970s?
  • In the 1990s, a resurgence of nationalism can be observed. How did left-wing groups react to this development? Was a left-wing nationalism strengthened? To what extent can anti-national counter-reactions be observed?
  • How did the developments of the 1990s – the collapse of state socialism and the dominance of neoliberalism – influence left-wing conceptions of progress?
  • In 1979, the first European Parliament was elected, and the European integration process was intensified after the collapse of the socialist states. To what extent were demands for a “social Europe” implemented, and was the integration process generally welcomed or rejected?
  • Technological progress in the form of automation and computerization, which had promised of a future without physical toil, lost its appeal during the long 1970s. Instead, scepticism towards technology prevailed, especially on the Left. To what extent did this coincide with nostalgic tendencies and “Heimat” discourses?
  • Was the emergence of  history workshops (“Geschichtswerkstätten”), that emerged primarily from the Left and dealt with the history of the labor movement, resistance against National Socialism, Jewish history, etc., a reaction to the erosion of the utopia of progress, or did it reinforce it?
  • The Left fundamentally understood itself as internationalist. European labour migration as well as refugee migration influenced societies in their own countries. What conceptions of the future arose from this? How did, for example, trade unions react to the increasing relocation of production sites to non-European countries?
  • To what extent can solidarity with liberation movements in countries of the Global South (e.g. Nicaragua, El Salvador, South Africa etc.) be seen as compensation for the loss of utopias in European countries?
  • On these and other thematic areas, the earlier semantics of progress of the labour movement seem to have been redefined. What forms and variations can be observed? How did the balance shift between the “old” and the “new” Left?

We kindly request the submission of abstracts of up to 2,400 characters by January 15, 2026, to Knud Andresen (andresen@zeitgeschichte-hamburg.de) and Mads Jedzini (mje@hum.ku.dk).
Submitters will be informed of the results by mid-February 2026. 
We will seek external funding for the conference to cover travel and accommodation costs.
In case of any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the organizers via email.

Overview:
Deadline for abstracts: January 15, 2026
Length of abstract: max. 2,400 characters 
Decisions by: Mid-February, 2026
Conference date: 12–14 May, 2027, Conference venue: University of Copenhagen 
Contact: Knud Andresen (andresen@zeitgeschichte-hamburg.de) & Mads Jedzini (mje@hum.ku.dk)

Recent project of the ABMO (Genoa): Biographical dictionary of the participants of the 1921-1922 Congress of Communist and Revolutionary Organizations of the Far East in Russia

2 weeks ago

The Biographical Archive of the Workers' Movement from Genoa, Italy (www.abmo.it) is working on a biographical dictionary of the representatives who attended the Congress of Communists and Revolutionary Organizations of the Far East in Russia in December 1921. This Congress, which began in Irkutsk in December, continued in Moscow and Petrograd in January and February of the following year. We have not yet compiled a definitive list of participants; for now, we have about 200 names; for this reason, we are asking all scholars for information on the event and, especially, on the individuals who participated.

If you have any information, please contact Massimo Repetto at mr.abmo@abmo.it

Spoken Truths; a workshop for and by spoken word artists

2 weeks ago
Welcome to Spoken Truths; a workshop for and by spoken word artists.   A workshop by spiritchild and  Fatih about the power of the Word in understanding, shaping  and resisting our political realities. In two sessions, participants will first be introduced to the hip-hop movement in relation to migration and social justice around the globe, and second, they will be invited to write and perform their own texts, guided by experienced and renouned mentors.   📆 When? 5th and 6th of November 2025
🕰️ Hours? 10 AM - 1 PM (NYC time) / 17:00 - 20:00 (BE time)
📍Where? Online via this link https://app.gather.town/app/f8RRYmIL1LRzMxDP/Digidaar
✍️ FREE UPON REGISTRATION This workshop comes in the context of Fatemeh Khezri's residency at Digidaar. Drawing from her work,  titled Perceptual Other, where she explores Afghan oral literature, this workshop aims to showcase the people's need for words, be it poetry, rap or storytelling, in order to preserve culture and resist the daily injustices they face.    Inspired by the freestyle essence of Hip-Hop, this workshop is no regular classroom but rather an open stage to meet, learn, perform, listen, speak up, and be heard. Participants of all levels are very welcome to join!    Kindly, DIGIDAAR team

Making History. Zu Geschichte von links und zur Geschichte von Linken (German)

2 weeks ago

by Susanne Boehm, Jule Ehms, Bernd Hüttner und Robert Kempf

Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsdeutung sind Teil von Herrschaft. Ab wann Marxismus, meist in der Form des Marxismus-Leninismus, zu einer verdinglichten "Theorie" wurde, ist Teil der Auseinandersetzung mit der Geschichte der Linken. Im Realsozialismus wurde "Sozialismus" zum Herrschaftswissen, das mühsam vom Eispanzer befreit werden musste und muss, während zugleich in den kapitalistischen Staaten Frauen und andere das Nebenwiderspruchsdenken linker Theorie und die patriarchalen Strukturen in linken Gruppen und Parteien bekämpften. Eine Auseinandersetzung/Kampf, der bis heute andauert.

Eine Abwendung vom Marxismus ist zumindest in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts ein politisch-ideologisches transnationales Momentum bei Neuen Sozialen Bewegungen, egal ob es sich dabei um Umweltbewegungen, die den linken Fortschrittsoptimismus kritisierten, die autonomia operaia in Italien oder die niederländische Schwulen- oder Frauenbewegung handelte.

Doch stellt sich insgesamt die Frage: Was ist eigentlich "Geschichte von links"? Und wie lassen sich die Auseinandersetzungen darum in "die Geschichte von/der Linken" einordnen? In den vorliegenden   historischer Reflexionen werden zum einen Herausforderungen beleuchtet, die herrschaftskritische Geschichtsarbeit mit sich bringt. Und zum zweiten werden konkrete Beispiele für vier "Bewegungen" exemplarisch dargestellt.

Über die Herausgeber:innen

Susanne Boehm, Historikerin, ist wiss. Mitarbeiterin im SFB 1567 Virtuelle Lebenswelten der Universität-Bochum; Forschungs- und Lehrtätigkeiten in den Feldern Geschlechtersoziologie und Bildungswissenschaften mit den Schwerpunkten Scientific Reasoning und Wissenschaftskonzepte, forschungsorientierte Lehr-Lernsettings, Politiken Neuer Sozialer Bewegungen, Intersektionalität, Bildung und Inklusion.
Jule Ehms studierte Geschichte und Philosophie an der LMU Halle, der Universität Wien und an der University of Notre Dame (USA) und promovierte 2021 am Institut für Soziale Bewegungen zur Betriebsarbeit der syndikalistischen Freien Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands; weitere Forschungs- und Lehrtätigkeiten in den Bereichen Geschichte und Theorie der Arbeiter:innenbewegung, Erinnerungsgeschichte und marxistische
Philosophie.
Bernd Hüttner, geb. 1966, Politikwissenschaftler, Referent für Zeitgeschichte und Geschichtspolitik der Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. Koordinator des Gesprächskreises Geschichte der RLS. Interessengebiete: Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung der neuen sozialen Bewegungen und der undogmatischen Linken, freie Archive der sozialen Bewegungen, künstlerische Avantgarden 1890-1933.
Robert Kempf, promovierter Historiker, verdient seinen Lebensunterhalt außerhalb der Wissenschaft. Er wünscht sich, dass das gesellschaftskritische Potenzial der Geschichtswissenschaften stärker genutzt und reflektiert wird. Über die realen Verhältnisse im akademischen Betrieb macht er sich jedoch keine Illusionen.

Open access: https://www.dampfboot-verlag.de/de/bucher/making-history

CfP: 61st ITH Conference Working nature – exploring intersections of labour history and political ecology (English and German)

2 weeks ago

Linz/Austria

Date: 17–19 September 2026

CALL FOR PAPERS

Ever since the 19th century, the “social question” has been the fundamental cornerstone of labour and many other social movements. While the “social question” has by no means been conclusively solved – to the contrary, recent years have seen a return of its urgency (Breman et al. 2019) – the “ecological question” has arisen as an equally fundamental predicament from the 1970s on. Social movements have responded quickly to this new challenge, although those representing labour retained an ambivalent position, often adhering to the imperatives of “growth”. Meanwhile, official acknowledgement by states and other institutional actors of the ecological question has been much slower, more uneven and fluctuating (at best). By now, the bundle of human-made ecological crises have reached a point where most earth scientist see an actual breaching of ecological thresholds, not only in relation to climate change but also six of nine processes for which “planetary boundaries” have been defined.
In this context, the interdisciplinary field of political ecology (which dates to at least the 1970s) has experienced a spectacular boom. In a certain sense, it has become the interdisciplinary critical social science of our days, a field in which both academic and political concerns converge. In the English-speaking world, political ecology has proved to be strongly inflected by historical reasoning, with authors such as Timothy Mitchell, Jason Moore, or Andreas Malm highlighting the entanglements between material extraction, energy carriers (particularly fossil ones), ecological over-use, capitalist economic development, and exploitation. While the history of work and labour relations have a place in these studies, many commentators have noticed an ongoing non-communication between labour history and political ecology. Indeed, the relationship between labour and ecological perspectives reveals several tensions. One of the reasons for this complicated relation is the long-standing reservation that has seen studies related to “labour” as fraught with an undue nature–society dualism and an obsession with “the industrial” and “production”. Nevertheless, substantial scholarship has emerged at the intersection of “labour” and “environmental history” as well as “political ecology”:
Recently, for instance, the unintended consequences of focussing the ecological question on “consumption” was criticized, calling for re-centering the analysis on the interplay of the use of nature (including animals) and the exploitation of workers with both converging in (and creating resistance around) the work-process (Schaupp 2024). Others called for the need to include unpaid reproductive and care work in any analysis of the ecological implications of labour, and at the same time suggested to pay more attention to those moments in which labour activism has brought up ecological concerns, thus creating a kind of “labour environmentalism” (Barca 2024). The “commodity frontier” approach, in turn, has called for merging the perspective of global labour history with those of ecological economics, commodity chain analysis and other fields to pinpoint the complex interplay of factors at the sites of (mainly) agrarian commodity production (Beckert et al. 2021).
It thus seems both timely and necessary to bring global labour history and historical political ecology into a more structured and fruitful dialogue, to assess existing research at the intersection of both and to explore further avenues of research. This conference will insist on a differential, and thus politicized view of the major referents of past and current ecological predicaments (such as “global warming”) with “labour” appearing as one major category of differentiation. We welcome proposals on all historical periods and all world-regions as long as they relate historical labour studies to recent concerns of political ecology (and vice versa). While no definite list of possible topics can be established, papers might explore one of the following themes:
- Conceptual and theoretical discussions about the ways of bringing labour history and the different strands of political ecology into dialogue, including the debates about “anthropocene vs. capitalocene” (or “plantationocene”), social metabolism, climate and earth science vs. the humanities, differential time-scales, unequal ecological exchange, yet also “energy” as a foundational “connceptual connector” that has, from the 19th century, allowed translating work, heat, and (fossilfuelled) into one another.
- The bio-physical properties of primary or semi-processed materials – from bio-mass through ores and non-metallic minerals to fossil and other energy carriers – and their implications for work processes and logics of labour resistance.
- Animals and/as "workers": Papers might explore conceptual and historical intersections between animal labour and human labour, and the role of animals in production processes. Contributions might address theoretical questions about the boundaries of "work," historical transformations in animalhuman work relationships, or contemporary debates about animal labour rights in the context of
ecological crisis.
- Labour relations and labour struggles in the first transition towards fossil fuels (19th century), both in local constellations and in relation to unequal relations between world-regions. The role of labour relations and labour struggles in subsequent shifts in primary energy provision (from coal to oil to atomic energy to alternative energy carriers) and the primary technology of propulsion (combustion, electricity).
- The interplay between labour relations and labour struggles, on the one hand, and ecological factors, on the other, in the extraction of energy carriers like coal, oil/gas, and radioactive ore. This can include both localized studies and perspectives that focus on the inter-regional and colonial entanglements in the extraction and production of energy carriers. 
- The effects of environmental degradation and ecological crises on work and workers’ activism. This includes: the impact of “climate” and its concrete experimental dimension (heat, cold, extreme weather events) on work and workers; and “Labour environmentalism” and other instances in which labour and environmental struggles have intersected, including contention over issues of health hazards in workplaces and workers’ communities as well as struggles for urban renewal vis-à-vis the impact of industrial production. Here again, a focus on experiences with a transnational aspect as well as on the scalar tensions between the planetary, the global, the regional, and the local are particularly welcome.
- Discussions of temporality and futurity that examine notions like "energy/green transition" or timelines of projected catastrophe, analyzing how workers and labour movements orient themselves toward these horizons of expectation or contest them. This includes investigating intersections between planetary futures and discussions about the future of work, both conceptually and
materially.
- Ecological changes and labour migration: examining the carbon footprint of labour migration patterns and the connection between the geopolitics of remittance economies and environmental degradation. Papers might explore historical and contemporary cases of environmentally-induced migration, the ecological consequences of remittance-based development, and the uneven distribution of
environmental harms along migration corridors. Contributions addressing the intersection of climate justice and migrant labour rights are particularly welcome.
- The interplay of work and ecology in agrarian production both in localized subsistence agriculture, regionalized peasant production and globally connected cash crop production in the context of dynamic “commodity frontiers”. Beyond the classical cash crops such as stimulants (coffee, tea), sugar, tropical fruits, or grains, this may also include studies about livestock farming, forestry, drugs, flowers, etc. Also, studies about labour and labour struggles in the further processing of agrarian produce are welcome, for instance about meat processing.
- Intersections of species extinction/biodiversity loss and work, as evidenced in occupations like beekeeping or changes in rice, coffee, and other agricultural production systems. Papers might examine how biodiversity loss transforms labour processes, how workers adapt to or resist these transformations, and how labour movements engage with broader biodiversity conservation efforts.
- The work of geoengineering (intentional or not) as a field of ecological intervention with significant implications for labour. Papers might address the labour requirements of proposed large-scale geoengineering projects, the forms of expertise and manual labour involved, etc. Contributions that situate geoengineering within longer histories of human attempts to engineer environments through
labour are especially encouraged.
- Following the French approach of collapsologie (Servigne/Stevens 2020), the potential of a future civilizational devolution through an unfettered ecological crisis and its implications from a labour history perspective, e.g. in terms of workers coping with situations of extreme environmental precarity. In a similar vein, papers could explore the labour-related dimensions of either “mitigation” or “adaptation” as well as the labour politics of “environmental emergency”.

SUBMISSION

Proposed papers should include:
- Abstract (max. 300 words)
- Biographical note (continuous text, max. 200 words)
- Full address and 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 to be sent to our conference manager Laurin Blecha: conference@ith.or.at

CONFERENCE PUBLICATION

The ITH aims, depending on the coherence on quality of the conferences paper, to publish edited volumes arising from its conferences. Since 2013 the ITH conference volumes have been published in Brill’s Studies in Global Social History Series, edited by Marcel van der Linden. The ITH encourages the conference participants to submit their papers to this publication project. High-quality papers will be selected by the volume’s editors.

TIME SCHEDULE

Submission of proposals: 30 January 2026
Notification of acceptance: 2 March 2026
Full papers or presentation version: 14 August 2026

PREPARATORY GROUP

David Mayer
Marcel van der Linden
On Barak
Therese Garstenauer
Laurin Blecha

THE ITH AND ITS MEMBERS

The ITH is one of the worldwide known forums of the history of labour and social movements. The ITH favours research pursuing inclusive and global perspectives and open-ended comparative thinking. Following its tradition of cooperating with organisations of the labour movement, the ITH likewise puts emphasis on the conveyance of research outside the academic research community itself. Currently ca. 100 member institutions and a growing number of individual members from five continents are associated with the ITH.
Information on ITH publications in the past 50 years:
https://www.ith.or.at/en/publications/
Online ITH membership application form:
https://www.ith.or.at/de/mitgliedschaft/

CfP: Vulnerability and Power in Late Antiquity (4th-9th centuries)

2 weeks 1 day ago

Vulnerability and Power in Late Antiquity (4th-9th centuries)
Second International Postgraduate Conference of the Ghent Centre for Late Antiquity (GCLA) 
27-29 April 2026, Ghent (BE)

Understanding the dynamics of vulnerability and power is important for the study of any period, not least for Late Antiquity (broadly defined here as spanning the fourth to ninth centuries, across a wide geographical scope), where we see significant negotiations of power in a time of great transformation.

While power has often been the focus of scholarly attention on Late Antiquity (e.g., in the spheres of religion, politics, and literature), vulnerability, closely intertwined with power, has received less sustained attention. By focusing on vulnerability, we seek to provoke a reassessment of ongoing research on power in Late Antiquity, and invite a reconsideration of power from fresh perspectives.

We are interested not only in larger late antique institutions of power, but also the more vulnerable groups of society. Contemporary fields shaped by the insights of vulnerable communities, including decolonial and intersectional thought, have reimagined resilience, agency and systemic vulnerability; thus we seek to bring late antique society into conversation with contemporary approaches drawn from the studies of migration, gender and sexuality, disability, childhood, family structures, socioeconomic inequalities, and so on. Another important area for consideration is environmental vulnerability, including, for example, the significance of extreme weather events and climate change on the levels of ecology, society, and culture. A more literal understanding of vulnerability (i.e., the potential to be wounded), is also relevant here: war, violence, illness, and the vulnerable body are rich fields for inquiry. Furthermore, as researchers, we are part of institutions that are shaped by dynamics of vulnerability and power. We therefore think that inquiries into Late Antiquity can enrich and deepen meta-disciplinary reflections on academia as a sphere of vulnerability and power.

Postgraduate researchers from the following fields are especially invited to participate: Arabic Studies, Archaeology, Art History, Biblical Studies, History, Jewish Studies, Linguistics, Literary Studies, Reception Studies, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Theology. We welcome researchers working with languages such as Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Georgian, Gothic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Persian, Slavonic, Sogdian, Syriac.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

  • The dynamics of vulnerability associated with Late Antiquity specifically – e.g., interrogating conceptions of Late Antiquity as a period of vulnerability, decline, and crisis; reflecting on the historical vulnerability of Late Antiquity as a discipline
  • Theories and practices of vulnerability and power in literature, philosophy, and politics; how individuals or groups in power dealt with their own vulnerabilities.
  • Representations of vulnerability and power in art, literature, architecture, and so on.
  • Negotiations of vulnerability and power in a variety of social contexts, such as in the family, church, city, state, or on an imperial level.
  • Attitudes towards tolerance, exclusion or persecution of vulnerable groups, such as religious, ethnic, and linguistic minorities, or those experiencing poverty, illness, or disability.
  • Resilience and the power of resistance among vulnerable groups.
  • Management of and responses to environmental risks such as drought, earthquake, fire, and so on.

We invite applications from postgraduate researchers (PhDs and advanced Master’s students). To be considered for a 20-minute paper, please send an email to gclaphdconf@ugent.be with a paper title, an abstract of max 300 words, a short bibliography (max 10 titles), and a brief academic biography by 7 January 2026.

Applicants will be notified by early February 2026. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

The organizing committee
Carlo Emilio Biuzzi, Justine De Rouck, Tanguy Desimone, Angelo Gargiulo, Thomas Girault, Giovanni Gomiero, Karl Robinson, Ricarda Schier, Leila Williamson

Discount on book Working in Greece and Turkey

2 weeks 2 days ago

Publication, discount until 7 November 2025

The volume Working in Greece and Turkey. A comparative labour history from Empires to nation-states, 1840-1940, eds. Leda Papastefanaki & M. Erdem Kabadayi, (Series: International Studies in Social History, Vol. 33, New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2020) has a 35% discount on the occasion of the 2nd International Conference "From Tobacco Workers' Movements to Contemporary Social Movements" (Kavala, Greece, 18-19 October 2025).

The publisher, Berghahn Books has offered to anyone interested a 35% discount for the book valid until November 7th, 2025. Although the discount is limited in time, I would like to share this information with you. If in case that you, colleagues or especially your academic institutions are interested, you or they can follow up and use the promotion code “PAPA35” at  https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/PapastefanakiWorking for the discount (from 138 GBP to 89.70 GBP)..

CfP: Scattered, Tracked, Connected: New Approaches to Dispersed Heritage

3 weeks 6 days ago

The National Museum of Lithuania invites proposals for the international conference Scattered, Tracked, Connected: New Approaches to Dispersed Heritage, to be held in Vilnius, 29–30 April 2026.

How do we work with heritage that is no longer whole, no longer here – or perhaps never truly was? The conference seeks to explore the fragmented, displaced, or deliberately dispersed nature of cultural heritage, and how museums and memory institutions reassemble meaning through research, digital tools, and collaboration. 

We welcome 20-minute papers on topics including: 

  • Mapping dispersed heritage through provenance and documentation 
  • Ethics, restitution, and shared authority 
  • Digital reconnections and virtual reunification 
  • Exhibiting loss and absence 
  • Curatorial and community approaches to scattered collections 

Abstracts (250–300 words) and short biographies (up to 100 words) should be submitted by 19 December 2025 via the registration form
Deadline for submissions: 19 December 2025

Letters of acceptance will come out by 16 January 2026. 

Participation is free of charge; travel and accommodation are self-funded. 

A peer-reviewed publication will follow the conference. 

More information: https://lnm.lt/en/events/international-conference-scattered-tracked-con…;

Contacts: conference2026@lnm.lt 

The Social History Archive launches new Primary Source Series

4 weeks ago

The Social History Archive launches curated collections of primary source material for researchers

  • The Social History Archive has launched new ‘Primary Source Series’ - a set of curated collections of primary source material to aid research and teaching
  • The collections offer direct access to millions of historical records and newspapers, tailored to research themes
  • Collections include both archival materials and historical newspapers, curated in partnership with leading repositories and publishers

The Social History Archive, the most comprehensive collection of British, Irish and former Empire historical resources online, has launched its new Primary Source Series, a major digital initiative designed to offer tailored support to academic research, teaching and learning.

These curated collections bring together digitised historical records and newspapers and offer direct access to the voices, documents, and experiences that shaped the past.

Developed to include materials from leading institutions including The National Archives and the British Library, the Primary Source Series are organised thematically—by topic, region, or time period—making it easier for researchers and educators to locate and explore original source material.

The collections span centuries of history and include millions of pages of content, from illustrated journalism and regional newspapers to military service records, crime records, emigration documents, and colonial publications.

Twenty-four Primary Source Series are already available, with more planned in the future. Key Series include:

  • Women and War in Britain in the Twentieth Century: This series delves into the experiences of women taking on essential roles during First and Second World Wars in Britain, both within the military and on the Home Front. It brings together images and transcripts from original records held at The National Archives related to the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS or Wrens), the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF), and the Women’s Land Army (Land Girls).
  • Voices of Empire: Newspapers from British Colonial Territories 1771-1962: Discover over 55 newspaper titles from the British Library’s British Newspaper Archive collection offering insight into the British Empire, its expansion, and the narratives that shaped its rule. Covering territories across multiple continents, this collection reveals how the British press was used as a tool of imperial control and influence to justify colonisation under the guise of ‘progress’ and ‘civilisation’, and highlights the complex ties between colonialism, slavery, and race, among many other topics.
  • Crime, Prisons and Punishment in England and Wales 1770-1935: This series consists of more than 1.9 million images from The National Archives related to individuals who passed through the justice system in England and Wales between 1770 and 1935. Revealing information on trials, sentences and prison life can be found within.

Designed specifically for use in higher education, Primary Source Series enable academics to conduct original research using authentic historical evidence, while also providing educators with rich resources for teaching source analysis and historical thinking. Students benefit from hands-on access to primary materials, fostering independent inquiry and deeper engagement with the past.

Primary Source Series are fully searchable and supported by structured metadata, allowing users to navigate complex archives with ease. Whether exploring societal developments, political change, cultural history, or the legacy of empire, the series opens up a wealth of data and new possibilities for study and scholarship.

Nick Stewart, Lead of The Social History Archive, said: “We’re delighted to launch our new Primary Source Series. These thematic content collections offer faculties exactly what their academics and researchers need: tailored, high quality primary source data for their area of study. And there are more to come – we’re developing these on an ongoing basis so we can cater to multiple specialisms.

For more information or to request a free trial, please email sales@thesocialhistoryarchive.com or visit https://www.thesocialhistoryarchive.com/primary-source-series

CfP: The British General Strike of 1926: New Directions of Research

4 weeks ago

Labour & Society Research Group (LSRG)
7-8 May 2026
Newcastle University
Armstrong Building, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU

The British General Strike of 1926: New Directions of Research

To commemorate the centenary of the British General Strike and miners lock-out, Newcastle University’s Labour & Society Research Group (LSRG) are organising a conference that revisits the historical experience of 1926 through the lens of new scholarship that is concerned with the global, spatial and maritime turns in labour history.

What has emerged from these histories is a better understanding of how labour movements and political groups of various kinds have interrupted or redirected the flows of materials, capital, and people.

While there is a vast and thriving literature on the General Strike of 1926, there is still a lack of research that investigates concretely how, under what conditions, the spatial-temporal dynamics of this event disrupted the carboniferous commodity chains and wider circulation of capital during the dispute.

This conference aims to bring together papers that focus on concrete histories of solidarity and the General Strike, whether at sites of coal extraction, transportation, distribution, and everywhere inbetween.

Moreover, the conference also welcomes papers that do not exclusively focus on Britain as it seeks to address the General Strike’s global entanglements, to further understand the extent transnational networks, unions and activists participated in the labour stoppage. In view of the diverse character of labour history, the conference aims to highlight 1926’s eclectic mix of voices, namely its racial, ethnic and gender diversity.

Questions that can be addressed include:

  • Contentious politics. Does global, spatial and maritime contention change our understanding of the General Strike: its chronology, spatiality, and legacy?
  • Mobility. How did contested mobility over coal, commodities, water, vessels, coal staithes, ports, docks, road, railways, mines shape power relations?
  • Geographies of resistance. How do these geographies of extraction, transport, and distribution shape common struggles during the strike? How did workers and communities in both rural- and urban- environments interact?
  • Spatial Agency. What self-organization, spatial agency and repertoires of action did worker networks and organisations develop? What effect did this have on the government’s strike-breaking machinery? How was solidarity practiced in the distinctive spaces at the everyday and experiential level? What factors undermined this solidarity?
  • Class, gender, race, and ethnicity. Did everyday experience and solidarity transcend racial, gender, and status-based fault lines in distinctive ways to stop the mobility of coal and the circulation of capital?
  • Global and transnationalism. What were the Strike’s global entanglements? What role did global events and transnational activism play in strengthening or restraining cooperation from below during the strike’s trajectory?
  • Memory and postmemory. How has the labour movement remembered and represented their historical entanglements with the General Strike? What role have narratives of the General Strike played in shaping local, regional, and global identities? What are the legacies of the General Strike and how may they affect contemporary politics?

Please send in proposals for papers consisting of an abstract of 150-250 words, plus a short bio by 6 February 2026 to: joe.redmayne@newcastle.ac.uk. Papers should focus on 1926 and can focus on any geographic location. The organisers will promote the publication of the papers in a ‘new directions’ collection in a journal of the field (more details TBA).

As the recent General Strikes in Italy and Greece exemplified (during September-October 2025), a general stoppage of labour by workers in all or most industries remains a powerful strategy of the working-class movement. This action has coincided with a global wave of blockades, port disruptions, strikes, and slowdowns, particularly at critical nodes like transport hubs and arms manufacturing sites of Israeli militarism.

While we intend this to be a scholarly conference, we also wish to make space for an active dialogue between people studying protest and industrial disputes in the past and practitioners of solidarity in the present (including, for example, present day activists and trade unionists, and more). We are convinced that such mutual learning can generate insights that will enrich both scholarship and activism.

For this reason, we hope to include one round table, open to a public audience, where activists involved in solidarity today reflect on connections to solidarity in the past during the General Strike, based on the presentations at the conference.

People who would be interested in joining the conference based on their involvement in present-day solidarity are invited to write a short e-mail to the conference organisers explaining the nature of their work.

For more information about the Labour & Society Research Group (LSRG) and its activities, please visit: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/labourandsociety

Limited travel/accommodation support will be available, meant to support early career scholars or participants who cannot draw on institutional funding.

The conference is kindly supported by the Leverhulme Trust, Newcastle University, the Labour & Society Research Group.

For enquiries, feel free to contact organisers: Joe Redmayne, joe.redmayne@newcastle.ac.uk

CfP: Peace in the Age of Forever Wars

4 weeks ago

Call for Abstracts
Peace in the Age of Forever Wars
Temple University, Philadelphia, USA

April 3–4, 2026

We invite submissions for an interdisciplinary symposium, which will bring together academics from the humanities and social sciences to present new scholarship on how to achieve and maintain peace in the age of forever wars. The hope is to reexamine old frameworks and to bring to light new ones, to understand more deeply the core questions of peace and conflict in historical and transnational context. The symposium is organized under the auspices of Temple’s Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy (CENFAD). We will cover the cost of travel and accommodations for all participants.

Questions of interest may include:

  • What is the aim of forever wars? Can forever wars aim at or produce peace?
  • Does understanding peace require a separate and distinct framework from war?
  • Can war still be defended as a means for promoting a stable international order? For example, as the EU pledges to increase its military spending, should we predict a corresponding increase in stability?
  • How does the examination of historical precedents of peace processes (both failures and successes) help us to understand what a viable peace process might look like in Israel/Gaza and in Russia/Ukraine?
  • What are the conditions, if any, under which victory in war can produce peace? What are the conditions, if any, under which losing a war can produce peace?
  • Why has peace acquired a bad reputation – as a weak position, as akin to appeasement, as utopian?
  • What kinds of mechanisms can international law and global human rights organizations develop to promote peaceful cooperation among states?

Interested participants are warmly invited to submit abstracts of approximately 500 words and a short CV (1–2 pages) to Profs. Lee-Ann Chae at leeannchae@temple.edu and Petra Goedde at pgoedde@temple.edu, by November 21, 2025.

More information can be found on the Challenging War website.

CfP: A social question before the Social Question: Addressing poverty in the long eighteenth century

1 month ago

The Call for Papers for the international conference A social question before the Social Question. Addressing poverty in the long eighteenth century, organized by Damiano Bardelli (EHESS, CRH-GEHM/University of Oxford, Visiting Researcher at the Voltaire Foundation) with the support of the Voltaire Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation, aims to shed light on the innovations introduced by Enlightenment reformers in the way of understanding and addressing poverty, and thus to highlight their role in the emergence of the conceptual framework of the social question in the 19th century.

University of Oxford, 22-23 October 2026

Argument

Precariousness and hardships were inescapable features of the life of the lower orders in early modern European society. In the Age of Enlightenment, just like in previous centuries, the majority of the population either lived in poverty or faced the constant risk of becoming unable to meet basic needs. Throughout the long eighteenth century, rulers and reformers alike showed sustained interest in the problem of poverty, with the purpose of improving the condition of their poorer subjects and countrymen and indirectly stabilising the social order. This concern took on multiple forms, ranging from the introduction of new institutions of confinement and labour to the critique of long held systems of relief like the English Poor Laws, and is testified by the widely participated academic prize contests on poverty and indigence of those years. At the same time, traditional conceptions of charity were redefined in secular terms – e.g. bienfaisance, Gemeinnützigkeit, philanthropy – while the French Revolution and radical movements inspired innovative approaches that resonated well into the nineteenth century.

Yet the attention paid to poverty by eighteenth-century rulers and reformers cannot be reduced to a pragmatic response to pressing social needs. Those concerns were also closely tied to broader philosophical developments, including the emergence of a secular conception of history in which human beings, rather than divine providence, were seen as major agents of change. This new perspective made progress in the human condition conceivable, stimulating novel interest in society and encouraging the development of new solutions aimed to reform existing institutions. At the same time, the decline of manorial serfdom and the emergence of a “free” labour market, alongside the transition from mercantilism to political economy, brought about new ideas of population, scarcity, social mobility, and work discipline. Unlike their predecessors, Enlightenment reformers no longer viewed poverty as part of a godly plan but rather as a consequence of human institutions and practices. Whereas some of them considered it as an injustice standing in stark contradiction with natural law theories of equality, others saw it as the unavoidable outcome of the dynamics of production, which mandated the existence of poverty as a necessary spur to industry. Breaking with the past, Enlightenment thinkers thereby framed poverty as a distinctively social question well before the nineteenth century made the Social Question a crucial political issue.

This international conference seeks to shed light on the innovations introduced by Enlightenment debates on poverty that paved the way for the later emergence of the Social Question. It solicits presentations on reform projects developed – and occasionally applied – in the long eighteenth century that were aimed to address poverty as the key social issue of the age, breaking with traditional approaches based on Christian theology and morals. Of special interest will thus be Enlightenment reform projects that sought to find a solution to the social consequences of contemporary economic dynamics and questioned existing institutions and theoretical frameworks of poor relief. Participants will be encouraged to reflect on the novelty of these eighteenth-century schemes, their relation to both older systems, modern notions, and novel disciplines (including natural law and political economy), and their potential impact on and legacy in early nineteenth- century reflections on pauperism and the development of the Social Question.

Papers will ideally (but not exclusively) deal with the following topics:
Reform projects aimed at eradicating poverty, mitigating or governing its social consequences, reducing inequality, and reframing practices of assistance
Reflections on the concept of poverty in its interpenetration with notions of property, social (in)equality, natural law, and “the rights of man”
Proposals for the introduction of new property regimes (e.g. privatisation of communal properties, redistribution and/or communalisation of private property)

  • Social schemes aimed to promote the independence of the lower orders and minimise their risk of falling into poverty (e.g. pedagogical institutions, mutual organisations, savings banks), and their disciplinarian implications
  • Critiques of traditional forms of solidarity, either vertical or horizontal (e.g. feudal social relations, guilds, mutual help, fraternal societies, confraternities)
  • Reflections on practices of assistance and the notions that sustained them (e.g. charity,
  • bienfaisance, Gemeinnützigkeit, philanthropy)
  • Radical perspectives on poverty and solutions to it “from below”
  • Case studies on the interrelation between poverty, race, and gender
Organization

The conference is organised by Damiano Bardelli (University of Oxford, Voltaire Foundation visiting fellow) with the support of the Voltaire Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Calendrier et modalités de soumission

Proposals in English, including an abstract of 250 words and a short biography and list of selected publications, should be sent to damiano.bardelli@ehess.fr by 31 December 2025.

Applicants will be notified about the outcome of their submission by 31 March 2026.

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