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Organiser: Maastricht University Location: Maastricht University Brussels Hub, Av. des Arts 47 Postcode: 1000 City: Brussels Country: Belgium Takes place: In attendance Dates: 03.06.2027 - 04.06.2027 Deadline: 30.10.2026   As Michael Rothberg has persuasively shown, memories interact across national borders and political regimes, and tend to cross-fertilize each other in intriguing and consequential ways (Rothberg, 2009). The proposed workshop intends to analyze how memories of European colonialism, Soviet communism, and fascism have become intertwined, and with what effects.

Notwithstanding the fact that the Nazi-Soviet war of 1941-45 was the centerpiece of the devastating aggression the Axis powers launched, conducting comparisons as well as suggesting facile equivalences between fascism and Soviet communism have become something of a commonplace within the European mainstream – first in Western Europe during the Cold War and then, in the post-Cold War decades, across Eastern Europe too. Such comparisons – as well as those facile equivalences – have often been suggested via regime typologies, especially through the concept of totalitarianism (Geyer–Fitzpatrick, 2009). Links between European colonialism, on the one hand, and fascist movements and regimes, on the other, have repeatedly been dissected as well, not least via studies on imperialism, racism, and mass violence (Mazower, 2009). Such links have at times become the subject of public debates too, primarily though far from exclusively in Germany (Zimmerer, 2025). European colonialism and Soviet communism have mostly been understood as antagonistic forces in history since Soviet communist regimes tended to be vocal opponents of West European colonialism and empires. At the same time, Soviet communism, and the Soviet Union in particular, have also been repeatedly critiqued as forms of imperialism (Slobodian–Mark, 2018). It might therefore strike us as rather ironic that memories of the two within current European memory regimes seem largely disconnected, or may even have become implicit competitors, with the “crimes of Soviet communism” entering the EU’s mainstream politics of history earlier than the memory of European colonial history and colonial crimes (Sierp, 2020).

A starting point for the planned discussions is indeed that the intertwined histories and memories of all three sides of this memory triangle have recurrently been discussed already, however, the triangle itself – its history and present shape – has surprisingly rarely been conceptualized and even less often studied. Centering this crucial memory triangle is precisely where our workshop intends to provide new impulses and launch more comprehensive explorations. To close the aforementioned analytical gap, we shall aim to combine approaches from intellectual and conceptual history with those in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies; further approaches, or combinations of them, are most welcome too. In terms of our temporal and geographic scope, we are primarily interested in memories under such rules as well as in liberal democratic environments, especially within the European Union, over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
A special issue of a leading academic journal is being planned. Beyond the analytical and the critical, we also aim at developing policy-relevant insights.

Subjects of particular interest include but are not restricted to

- Studies of historical actors and memory activists who have interconnected memories of European colonialism, Soviet communism, and fascism – and may have personally experienced all three

- Studies of intellectual products, including works of professional historiography, that analyze and reflect on the histories and memories of all three

- Studies of artistic engagement with these pasts across the generations, especially in public spaces, i.e. through sites of remembrance, museums, monuments etc.

- Studies that compare bilateral memories, or how have memories interacted on a bilateral basis, and what do we gain by comparing those bilateral relations – i.e., the three sides of our triangle – to each other?

- Studies that analyze and compare memory regions in Europe, i.e., how have memories of the three interacted in different parts of Europe? What are specific issues of mediation or perhaps conflict between the three in various parts of Europe? How have – (post)colonial and post-conflict – migrations impacted memory narratives on the regional level and beyond?

- Presentations that offer policy-relevant insights responding to questions such as the following: how have debates on the European level been shaped by national and regional specificities and their interactions? What memory issues might need to be addressed in different regions of Europe first? How to deal with the memory triangle on the European level today, how could European remembrance include memories of all three in a equitable manner?

Conveners: Ferenc Laczó, Diana M. Natermann, and Aline Sierp (Maastricht University)
Date and location: June 3 and 4, 2027 at the Brussels Hub of Maastricht University combined with a public panel at the House of European History co-organized by the latter institution

Please apply by sending an abstract of 250 to 300 words and a brief CV of max. two pages to Ferenc Laczó ( f.laczo@maastrichtuniversity.nl ) no later than Friday, October 30, 2026.
We will make sure to notify all applicants before the end of November.

References
Geyer, Michael and Sheila Fitzpatrick (eds.). Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.
Mark, James and Quinn Slobodian. “Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018.
Mazower, Mark. Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. London: Allen Lane, 2009.
Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Redwood City: Stanford UP, 2009.
Sierp, Aline. “EU Memory Politics and Europe's Forgotten Colonial Past.” In: Interventions – International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 22/6 (2020), 686-702.
Zimmerer, Jürgen (ed.). Germany's History Wars: Contesting Memory and Identity Today. Berlin: de Gruyter – Oldenbourg, 2025.

Dates: July 4, 2027 - July 10, 2027 Location: Gwangju, South Korea Subject Fields: Black History / Studies, Intellectual History, Labor History / Studies, Sociology, World History / Studies

The abolition of racial slavery in the nineteenth century aligned with universal liberal norms of human freedom and equality but did not merely fulfill those norms. Processes of slaves’ emancipation resulted instead in the reconstitution of racial hierarchies and subjugation constraining or impeding the self-determination of newly freed or colonized Black populations. The labor contract and production systems it structured within globalizing capitalism were key sites of renewed racialized domination to the extent that, when applied to blackness, laboring status was shaped by institutions that prevented actual political citizenship and social inclusion. Liberal ideas and modes of governance were therefore adapted to the task of combining normative universality with practical modalities of racial domination. Blackness thus confronted what Saidiya Hartman called “the afterlife of slavery.” This session will discuss the continuing subordination of formerly enslaved and newly colonized Black and Afro-descended populations within the labor regimes—intended as articulations of employment systems, accumulation patterns, laws, and ideas—of the post-abolition world. The session will also focus on how governments, experts, and social actors conceptualized, enforced, and institutionalized the racial subordination of post-slavery blackness in settler colonialism and evolving modalities of plantation or extractive capitalism. Analyses of and comparisons between cases from the Atlantic world, Africa, West and South Asia, societies along the Indian and Pacific oceans, and the Mediterranean are especially welcome, as are contributions on how the historically long duration of racialized labor regimes shapes social stratifications in today’s racial capitalisms.

Contact Information

Franco Barchiesi, Department of Comparative Studies, Ohio State University

Contact Email barchiesi.1@osu.edu

by Marília B.A. Ariza, Maria Helena P.T. Machado, and Cassia Roth

This special issue brings Brazil squarely into the centre of the recent trend on gender, slavery, and capitalism in the global history of slavery. The articles here  – from scholars working in American, Brazilian, and European universities at all career stages – are specifically dedicated to the study of Brazilian slavery and gender. The articles emphasize different aspects of enslaved women’s lives in Brazil during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Topics range from pregnancy, breastfeeding, child rearing, and other reproductive experiences to varied labour regimes including both field and domestic labour, to enslaved people’s use of the judicial system and their fights for freedom. The articles also bring the topic of indigenous slavery in its varied forms in frontier areas during the colonial and imperial periods into dialogue with histories of African slavery. Together, they demonstrate how Brazilian historiography is evolving in its consideration of the importance of gender in defining slavery and illuminating the history of the most persistent and varied system of slavery in the Americas.

Table of Contents

Part I: Enslaved Reproduction in Legislation, Custom, and Practice

Cassia Roth, Rethinking Borders and Birth: Free Womb and Free Soil in Portugal and Brazil

Daniele Weigert, Between Civilization and Slavery: Dispossession and Racial Mixing in Brazilian Nation Formation

Maria Helena P. T. Machado & Antonio Alexandre Isidio Cardoso, A Freedwoman and Her Enslaved Children: Terror, Motherhood, and Death in Northern Brazil amid Slavery’s Decline

Part II: Health, Body and Gender in Slavery

Tânia Salgado Pimenta & Flavio dos Santos Gomes, Diseases, African Women and Atlantic Demography in Rio de Janeiro, c. 1830–1855

Lorena Telles, Childbirth in the Slave Quarters: Midwives, Doctors and Afro-Descendant Culture in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Brazil

Caroline Passarini Sousa, Slavery and Reproduction: Enslaved Women in Medical and Plantation Manuals in Brazil and Cuba

Part III: Motherhood and Slavery: From Frontiers to Plantations

Izabel Barros, Beyond the Ledger: The Story of Enslaved Women on a Swiss-Owned Plantation in Nineteenth-Century Ilhéus

Mariana Muaze, The Private Sphere of Domination: Gender Relations, Domestic Slavery, and Violence in Paraíba Valley during the Nineteenth Century

Part IV: Gendering Freedom

Karoline Carula, The Maternal Experiences of Enslaved and Freed Women in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1880-c.1888

Luciana da Cruz Crito, Sabina da Cruz: Fabulations About the Life of the Woman Who Denounced the Malê Uprising

Marília B.A. Ariza, On Being a Freedwoman: Gender Relations, Gendered Violence and a Woman’s Perspective in Southeastern Brazil During the 1880s

Contact Information
Cassia Roth   Contact Email cassia.roth@ucr.edu

The aim of this international conference is to more fully elucidate the relational nature of the distinction between refugees and migrants, its function in the wider field of migration, and its genealogy. While chiefly historical in focus, the conference will also foster interdisciplinary approaches and reflections.

Organisers

• Bastiaan Bouwman (Utrecht University, the Netherlands),
• Fabrice Langrognet (CNRS, France),
• eremy Adelman (University of Cambridge)

Funders

Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (Fung Global Network Fund), Gates Cambridge Trust

Registration

Attendance is in-person only. Registration is possible (capacity allowing) by sending an email to fgnf.cambridge@gmail.com.

Programme

Thursday 15 October

8:30-9:00  Registration

9:00-9:15  Opening remarks Bastiaan Bouwman, Fabrice Langrognet, and Jeremy Adelman (Utrecht University, CNRS, and University of Cambridge)

9:15-11:15  Panel 1: Refugees, migrants, or alternative categories?

Moderation and discussion: Mia Bay (University of Cambridge)

• Aytek Soner Alpan (British Institute at Ankara) – “From Treaty Category to Identity Claim: Mübadil and the Uneven Making of the Refugee-Migrant Divide”
• Mae Ngai (Columbia University) – “Refugees, History, and the Human”
• Catherine Nolan-Ferrell (University of Texas at San Antonio) – “‘Unrecognized Refugees’ and Alternate Citizenships in Chiapas, Mexico”

11:30-12:00  Discussion: Archival access in uncertain times

Moderation: Jeremy Adelman (University of Cambridge)

Speaker: Heather Faulkner (Senior Archivist, UNHCR)

12:00-13:00  Lunch (Bradfield Court) – speakers only

13:00-15:00  Panel 2: Repatriation and the end of refugee status

Moderation and discussion: Irial Glynn (University College Dublin)

• Noel Mariam George (London School of Economics) – “Across a Sea of Papers: Repatriation, Treaties, and the Afterlives of Post-Imperial Displacement in South Asia”
• Tosin Durodola (School of Advanced Study, University of London) – “Ending Refugeehood: Cessation and the Historical Production of the Refugee–Migrant Divide”
• Wolfgang Thiele (Free University of Berlin) – “Refugees’ Authenticity on Trial: Forced Repatriations and Transnational Activism in Cold War Japan”

15:30-17:30  Panel 3: Labour, security, and precarity

Moderation and discussion: Christoph Rass (Osnabrueck University)

• Laura Robson (Yale University) – “The ‘Nansen Passport’ and the Birth of the Modern Guest Worker”
• Jiajia Duan (University of California, Irvine) – “Walk the Line: The Golden Venture and the Making of Chinese Asylum in the Post–Cold War United States”
• Laura Madokoro (Carleton University) – “‘Dust Bowl’ Refugees: Citizenship, Mobility and the Hardening of Rhetorical Strategies”

18:15-19:45  Reception at Gates Cambridge Sr. House (17 Mill Lane) – upon registration

20:00  Conference dinner – speakers only

Thursday 16 October

8:30-9:00  Walk-in (coffee/tea)

9:00-11:00  Panel 4: The evolution of international norms and concepts

Moderation and discussion: Tugba Basaran (University of Cambridge)

• Leo Lucassen (Leiden University) – “In The Eye of The Beholder, The Fuzzy Boundary between ‘Normal’ and Refugee Migrants. A Global Historical Approach”
• Yulia Ioffe (University College London) – “Complementary Protection and the Changing Boundaries of the Refugee–Migrant Distinction”
• Esther Brito (Pontifical University of Comillas) – “Concretizing the Tensions of Queer Mobility: Migration and Asylum as Sites of Contradiction”

11:30-13:30  Panel 5: Agency and refugee claim-making

Moderation and discussion: Anne Irfan (University College London)

• Anna Deriugina (University of Vienna) – “From Political Exile to Managed Mobility: Russian Émigrés in the Age of Displaced Persons”
• Nadia Latif (Mount Holyoke College) – “Towards A Micro-History of The Forced-Voluntary Distinction through The Experiences of Palestinian Refugees in Burj al-Barajneh Camp”
• Farhana Afrin Rahman (University of Warwick) – “Claims Without a Category: Legal Non-Status and the Gendered Politics of Belonging in Rohingya Displacement”

13:30-14:30  Lunch (Bradfield Court) – speakers only

14:30-16:30  Panel 6: Ending empires and intergroup dynamics

Moderation and discussion: Ria Kapoor (Queen Mary University of London)

• Ana Guardião (University of Coimbra) – “Addressing Forced Displacement: Migration and ‘Refugeedom’ within Portuguese Decolonisation (1960s-1970s)”
• Michal Frankl (Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe) – “(Un)defining Refugees in Postimperial Austria and Czechoslovakia”
• Arnab Dutta (University of Groningen) – “The Foreshadowing of Refugee Politics before the Postcolonial Moment: Jewish Exiles in British Bengal, 1930s-40s”

17:00-18:00  Concluding discussion

Chairs: Bastiaan Bouwman, Fabrice Langrognet, and Jeremy Adelman (Utrecht University, CNRS, and University of Cambridge)

Location

• Bradfield Court - Silver St
  Cambridge, Großbritannien (CB3 9EU)

Takes place: in attendance

Keywords

• refugee, migrant

Contact

• Fabrice Langrognet
  courriel : fabrice [dot] langrognet [at] cnrs [dot] fr

Saint-Denis/France

Ce séminaire de recherche du Centre de recherches sociologiques et politiques de Paris (Cresppa) explore les rapports de pouvoir dans les musiques hip-hop sous les angles esthétique, politique et professionnel. Il y est question des rapports de pouvoir qui configurent les industries musicales et les trajectoires des artistes et personnels de renfort des musiques hip-hop, des contestations sociales portées dans et hors des mondes du hip-hop, notamment du point de vue des rapports sociaux de classe, de sexe et de race. Les musiques hip-hop y sont abordées en tant que phénomène français mais aussi international, en dialogue avec les collègues étrangers invité·e·s au sein du Cresppa ou de passage en France.

Présentation

La sixième saison du séminaire « Fight the power ? Musiques hip hop et rapports sociaux de pouvoir » (CRESPPA / Cemti / ACTE) reprend cette année ! Les séances auront lieu principalement à l'Université Paris 8, en salle A2-201 ou A2-204, les vendredi après-midi de 15h à 17h30 (sauf exception signalée). 

Les inscriptions sont obligatoires et se font ici. Un lien visio pourra être envoyé aux participants inscrits qui en font la demande mais sans garantie de la qualité de la connexion internet.

Programme Séance n°1 - Jeudi 8 octobre 2026 (15h)

Pour la première séance, nous aurons le plaisir d'accueillir Ismael Allem (rappeur et comédien) pour une discussion avec Marie Sonnette-Manouguian (Paris Nanterre / Cresppa-CSU) intitulée « Patrimonialisation et médiation du rap : la transmission des histoires et pratiques du hip-hop » en salle A2-201.

Nous vous invitons ensuite à découvrir le spectacle d'Ismaël Allem – Cie Trou d’mémoire « Le rap est une musique de vieux » de 18h à 19h30 à La Coupole de la Maison de l'Etudiant.

« Le Rap Est Une Musique De Vieux « mêle narration, musique et vidéo, dans une forme iconoclaste proche des conférences gesticulées... avec du rap dedans. Destiné aux plus fins connaisseurs comme aux novices, le spectacle propose de décrypter les origines de cette musique, et d’apporter des éléments de réponse à ce paradoxe : le rap est à la fois une musique très méconnue, et la plus écoutée en France aujourd’hui.

Séance n°2 - Vendredi 11 décembre 2026 (9h30-13h)

Demi-journée d'étude consacrée au rap en Asie centrale « Digitalisation hip-hop knowledge and musical innovation : Central asian european dialogue » en partenariat avec le projet « MAJIC : Memories, arts and social justice in central asia ».

• Présentations de Dilda Ramazan (Sorbonne Université), Lucia Direnberger (CNRS, IFEAC), Florian Coppenrath (Humboldt, Berlin) et Karim Hammou (CNRS, Cresppa-CSU).

Séance n°3 - Vendredi 5 février 2027 (15h-17h30)

Présentation de l'ouvrage « Géographie du rap : Villes et scènes en France et aux Etats‑Unis » (PUR, 2026) par son auteur Severin Guillard (Université Picardie Jules Verne, Habiter le monde), discussion par Keivan Djavadzadeh (Paris 8, CEMTI).

Séance n°4 - Vendredi 2 avril 2027(15h-17h30)

Présentation de l'ouvrage « Reflexivity in French Rap : More than a Mirror to the Republic » (Oxford, 2026) par son autrice Emily Q. Shuman (Radboud University), discussion par Emmanuelle Carinos Vasquez (Sorbonne Université, Institut ACTE).

Séance n°5 - Vendredi 11 juin 2027 (15h-17h30)

Présentation du dossier de la revue French Cultural Studies « Race and the cultural industries in France » par ses directeur·ices, Karim Hammou (CNRS, Cresppa-CSU) et Emily Q. Shuman (Radboud University) et par l'auteur de l'article « La race dans le rap français, un signifiant flottant ? Diam's et la construction d'une persona en clair-obscur », Keivan Djavadzadeh (Paris 8, CEMTI), discussion par Princia Andrianirina (Paris 8, Cresppa-CSU).

Informations utiles

Les séances sont en français. Merci de prévoir d'arriver 15 minutes avant à l'Université Paris 8, le temps de vous diriger vers le bâtiment de la maison de la recherche. 

Vous trouverez le programme en corps du mail et bientôt (dès que le site fonctionnera à nouveau) sur https ://fight-the-power·sciencesconf·org/. Pour rappel, nous encourageons toutes les personnes intéressées par les recherches sur le hip-hop à rejoindre la liste de diffusion H-Herc, afin de recevoir et de diffuser l'actualité de la recherche sur cet objet.

Lieu

• A2-201/A2-204 (Bâtiment A, attenant à la Maison de la Recherche) - 2 rue de la liberté
  Saint-Denis, France (93200)

Format de l'événement

• Événement hybride

Appendices

• affiche ftp 2026.png
• affiche ismael.png

Mots-clés

• hip hop, rap, pouvoir, intersectionnalité, culture

Contact

• Mail des organisateur-ices du séminaire
  courriel : fight-the-power [at] sciencesconf [dot] org

Inscription

• Lien d'inscription 2026-2027

The mainstream historiographies of industrialisation habitually emphasise the novel energy sources and materials that powered this transformative era, such as coal, steel, steam and electricity, implicitly assuming that wood, an important pre-industrial resource, was destined for an inevitable decline. Histories of industrialisation also disproportionately focus on Europe and North America. Stemming from the research vectors of the ERC Starting Grant “Industrial Wood: European Industrialisation as Seen from the Forests (1870-1914)”, this conference aims to rethink the relevance of wood in an unevenly industrialising world throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It follows more recent interpretative paths, which draw attention to the material diversity of industrial metabolism, in order to achieve a more complex understanding of the social, economic and environmental histories of industrialisation. The conference also seeks to geographically decentre the research perspective and discover the links between forests and industrialisation in the global context.

Industrialisation, understood as a systemic social and economic transformation underpinned by technological innovations and leading to changes in production regimes, was an uneven and chronologically mis-aligned process within Europe and globally, stretching from the late 18th century far into the 20th century. Consequently, the relationship between industrialisation and forest exploitation varied depending on the national and international politics, markets, law regulations, access to technology, environmental movements, property and labour regimes, imperial dynamics and colonial power. Attentive to these complexities, the organisers have approached industrialisation as an a-synchronous, multi-focal and globally encompassing social and economic process, activated by a confluence of economic impetus and political agenda.

Even if in the course of industrialisation wood has been marginalised as a combustible, it maintained its significance in industrial economies as a construction material. Moreover, innovations in technology and transportation – both the drivers and the outcomes of industrialisation – made forests increasingly accessible for large-scale extraction, thus bringing industrial logging into the furthest reaches of the woods and fundamentally reshaping them economically, socially and ecologically. Recent historical, anthropological and archeological studies, focusing mostly on North America and Europe, show that extractivism, (im)migration and environmental degradation were a part of this process. They also reveal that industrialisation of timber production did not mean a complete break with rural economies, and that the demand for wood as fuel or production material (for paper or packaging, for example) changes depending on the historical moment. Through this conference, we aim to broaden the conversation geographically to include global histories of industrialisation and to answer these questions: how did industrialisation change the world’s forests? What kinds of new relationships, dependencies and hierarchies did the arrival of industrialisation within the forest context instigate with regards to natural environments and the working lives linked to their transformation? How does our understanding of industrialisation change when we cease to read it as a sequence of substitutions and instead view it as a process of persistence, accumulation and re-articulation, wherein old material and energy flows are not erased by new ones but are intricately woven into them, undergoing profound transformation? Ultimately, what does the industrialisation of forests mean? And how do we adjust our research methodologies to answer these questions?

The conference seeks to explore cases, with a double focus on forests and industrialisation, in various political contexts and across different geographies throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The papers should relate to but do not have to be limited to the following themes:

• industrialisation and wood consumption
• labour, migration, gender and ethnicity
• empires, colonialism and decolonisation
• industrial wood uses, wood-based businesses and geographies of timber flow
• networks, circulation of ideas and technology
• industrial timberscapes (timber production complexes, workers settlements, infrastructure)
• deindustrialisation and its impact on livelihoods
• environmental effects of industrialisation in forests

Scholars in humanities and social sciences, interested in these topics, are welcome to apply. Ultimately, the conference aims to foster an interdisciplinary confluence between environmental history, social history, economic history, environmental anthropology and related sub-disciplines. We invite contributions from doctoral students, post-doctoral researchers and senior scholars.

ORGANISATION, SUBMISSION AND DEADLINES:

To apply for the conference, please submit a single PDF-file consisting of:

• an abstract of the presentation with a title (max. 500 words)
• name, institutional affiliation, and a list of relevant publications

The applications should be sent to inwood@unito.it.

The organisers will cover meals, travel (economy-class flight or train) and accommodation expenses. The conference will be held in person.

Deadline for submissions: 30 November 2026.

The notifications about the participation in the conference will be sent by the end of January 2027.

Successful applicants will be asked to submit the drafts of their papers (6,000 words) by 15 June 2027.

The organisers plan to publish the papers as an edited volume or a special issue of a journal.

Conference date: 6-8 July 2027

Host: 
University of Turin

Organisers:
Giacomo Bonan, Kateryna Burkush, Vincenzo Colaprice, Csongor Jánosi, Claudio Lorenzini, Silvia Pizzirani

by Bernhard H. Bayerlein

Mit der Pariser Wochenzeitung Die Zukunft (1938–1940) gründete Willi Münzenberg, der einflussreichste antifaschistische Medienmacher der Zwischenkriegszeit, ein visionäres Sprachrohr aller Hitler-Gegner. Unterstützt wurde er dabei von Arthur Koestler und Manès Sperber sowie progressiven Christen und Sozialisten. Noch kurz vor dem Einbruch des Zweiten Weltkriegs entstand ein deutsch-französisches und europäisches Netzwerk, eine neue demokratische Alternative zum Kampf gegen das Hitlerregime und seinen Helfer Stalin: eine neue christlich-sozialistische Symbiose für ein neues Deutschlands in einem
vereinten Europa.
Anhand neuer Archivfunde erzählt das Buch eine beinahe untergegangene Geschichte: Die der letzten Kohorte von Dissidenten, Revolutionären und Christen; Literaten, Wissenschaftlern und Kulturschaffenden, die noch bis in den Zweiten Weltkrieg hinein den Traum von Hitlers Sturz verwirklichen wollten. Ans Licht kommt die bisher verborgene Saga europäischer Freiheitskämpfer, Mittler und Expats zugleich, die nicht am Scheitern der politischen Parteien vor Hitler verzweifelten.
Begleitet werden Dutzende Akteure aus Kultur und Politik wie Alfred Döblin, Fritz von Unruh, Günter Thormann, Otto Klepper, Babette Gross und Anna Siemsen, René Schickele, Josef Roth, Hermann Rauschning, Emmanuel Mounier, Pierre Viénot, Manès Sperber und Arthur Koestler. Sie schufen transnationale Netzwerke und Passagen zur Bekämpfung des Nationalsozialismus und gründeten die Deutsch-Französische Union „um Frankreich zu retten und Deutschland mit ihm“.
Das „Münzenberg-Imperium“ erweist sich als Paradigma für die fruchtbare Vernetzung aller Teile der Gesellschaft, gegen ihre Zerstörung durch totalitäre Herrschaft und für eine gelebte Demokratie.

Open Access: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/de/document/doi/10.1515/9783111086576/ht…

Organizer: Joseph M. Snyder, Editor-in-Chief of World History Bulletin ZIP: - Location: - Country: United States Takes place: Digital From - Until: 15.10.2026 - Deadline: 15.10.2026 Website: https://www.thewha.org/world-history-bulletin  

World History Bulletin is seeking quality research essays, experiential learning case studies from graduate reading and seminar coursework, and GA/TA/lecturer classroom activities for inclusion in its upcoming issue on the Industrial Revolution in World History.

The Industrial Revolution marks a pivotal era of profound global economic, technological, and social change, transforming societies from predominantly agrarian economies into industrial powerhouses. Historians continue to debate several key aspects of this period, including its precise starting point—some argue for the late 18th century, while others suggest earlier or later dates—and the reasons why the revolution began in Great Britain rather than elsewhere. These debates often focus on factors such as natural resources, political stability, colonial markets, and innovative culture. Another central topic of debate is the uneven spread of industrialization: while Britain and, subsequently, parts of Western Europe and North America reaped significant benefits in terms of wealth and power, other regions experienced slower growth and, in many cases, increased exploitation. Questions about who benefited most—industrial capitalists, workers, or entire nations—remain at the heart of historical analysis, highlighting the complex legacy of the Industrial Revolution.

The Bulletin is interested in a range of topics related to the theme of the Industrial Revolution in World History, including (but not limited to):
- Perspectives on the Origins of the Industrial Revolution, which might explore key political, economic, and sociocultural developments (e.g., ethics and morality, evolving legal doctrine, etc.).
- Comparative Case Studies on the Global/Transregional Impacts of the Industrial Revolution, which might contrast the socioeconomic, cultural, and political changes wrought by the First Industrial Revolution (centered on Britain and Western Europe) with those of the Second Industrial Revolution (as it spread and evolved across Eurasia and the Atlantic World from the latter-19th century).
- Empire-Building and the Industrial Revolution, which might explore the linkages between industrialization and the global exploitation of non-industrialized states and territories for natural resources and/or as a result of the competition for markets (e.g., Leopold II and the Congo Free State, the Opium Wars, etc.).
- The “Great Divergence” or “European Miracle,” which might explore the deeper sociocultural underpinnings (e.g., religious moral frameworks, corporate structures, etc.) of the Industrial Revolution which led to the shift in global economic dominance from the Early Modern centers (e.g., Qing China, the Ottoman Empire, etc.) to European (Western) states (including their colonies and territories).
- Historiographic Surveys of Scholarship on the Industrial Revolution and/or the Great Divergence, including the so-called “California School” and its challengers (e.g., Peer Vries).
- Pedagogical Essays on Coursework/Instruction Centered on the Industrial Revolution or the Great Divergence, including unique research projects, role-playing games (short- or long-term), and related exercises/assignments.

The World History Bulletin therefore invites submissions on the topic of the Industrial Revolution in World History. We are especially interested in articles that share fresh research or historiographical perspectives which explore the questions of Industrial Revolution in world-historical perspectives; present innovative teaching at all levels that employs techniques related to sociocultural and economic contexts foundational to, or arising from, industrialization in world history; or explore the connection between student engagement and world history as a result of coursework related to the theme the Industrial Revolution in World History. We also welcome short interviews with designers, artists, writers, and scholars and small roundtables on a book, film, or other work.

Submission Guidelines:
Articles should range between 1,500 and 6,000 words in length, including endnote text. Book reviews should be around 1,000 words in length. The Bulletin accepts submissions that adhere to the style, format, and documentation requirements as outlined in the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (18th). The Bulletin uses endnote citations, rather than footnote citations. Text of submissions should be spelled according to American English standard usage (e.g., favorite, rather than favourite). Submissions should be written in the past tense, rather than the literary present, and passive voice should be avoided. Submissions should be formatted in 11-point Garamond type font.

Submission Deadline: October 15, 2026

Essays and questions should be directed to Joseph M. Snyder, Editor-in-Chief of World History Bulletin, at jmsnyder@semo.edu

Contact (announcement)

jmsnyder@semo.edu

Organiser: Bianca Schumann Host: Department of Musicology and Performance Studies, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna Postcode: 1010 City: Vienna Country: Austria Takes place: Hybrid Dates: 07.04.2027 - 08.04.2027 Deadline: 15.10.2026 Website: https://www.mdw.ac.at/imi/internationale-musikwettbewerbe/#English  

In the light of numerous anniversaries of internationally renowned classical music competitions that will be celebrated in 2027, the workshop aims to conduct an interdisciplinary and cross-sectional exploration of international music competitions over the past century as sites where art, society, and politics intersect.

The workshop is conceived as preparation for a special issue of the double-blind peer-reviewed Journal of Musicological Research.

“Le producteur de la valeur de l’œuvre d’art n’est pas l’artiste mais le champ de production”. With this statement, Pierre Bourdieu succinctly encapsulates his theory of the intricate relationship between artistic value and socio-institutional structures, as elaborated in Les Règles de l’art (1992). This sociological perspective on the conditions of artistic value has also left its mark on cultural studies-oriented musicology. This is evident in the growing emphasis on social, political, and institutional contexts in reflections on musical-cultural practices and aesthetic norms.

A sociocultural approach is equally valuable for examining international music competitions. After all, these events constitute cultural spaces in which (aesthetic) judgments about artistic performances are negotiated through institutionally regulated procedures, which in turn are significantly shaped by social and political contexts. Thus, while music competitions ostensibly serve as stages for assessing artistic excellence, they also simultaneously function as showcases for social values and cultural representation.

The numerous anniversaries that several internationally renowned classical music competitions will celebrate in 2027 provide an auspicious opportunity for deeper exploration. For instance, 2027 marks the centenary of the first International Chopin Piano Competition. Additionally, the 65th anniversary of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and the 50th anniversary of the Sydney International Piano Competition highlight how the culture of international music competitions has long since spread beyond European borders and established itself as a global phenomenon. This expanded scope is also reflected in the World Federation of International Music Competitions, which will celebrate its 70th anniversary in 2027.

With this in mind, the workshop aims to conduct an interdisciplinary and cross-sectional exploration of international music competitions over the past century as sites where art, society, and politics intersect, with no geographical restrictions.

Potential topics may include (but are not limited to):
- Political contexts: Cultural policy and geopolitical conflicts; international representation and national profiling; globalisation and renationalisation.
- Social structures and career development: Social selection (gender, class, origin); professionalisation and visibility.
- Aesthetic evaluation: Evaluation criteria and logics; comparability of musical performance.
- Repertoire: Programme design; canon formation; interpretation.
- Institutional networks: Transnational cooperation in times of (geo)political crisis.
- Media and the public: Communication of jury assessments; representation of cultural-political interests.

Contributions from all sub-disciplines of musicology, as well as related fields (e.g., cultural studies, social sciences, gender studies, political science, and history), are welcome for both the workshop and the special issue.

The workshop is conceived as preparation for a special issue of the double-blind peer-reviewed Journal of Musicological Research. Guest-edited by Bianca Schumann, the issue will assemble a selection of contributions presented during the workshop.

Interested scholars are invited to submit an abstract (max. 250 words) and a short biography (max. 120 words) in German or English by October 15, 2026 to schumann-b@mdw.ac.at. Notifications of acceptance for the workshop will be sent by November 15, 2026. The workshop’s languages are German and English. The workshop will take place in person; hybrid participation may be possible in justified cases. Early career researchers may apply for financial support to cover accommodation and travel expenses.

Abstracts for the special issue are due by May 15, 2027. Submissions must be in English. After an initial review, selected authors will be invited to submit full manuscripts by June 15, 2027. Final manuscripts must be received by December 31, 2027 with publication in Journal of Musicological Research scheduled for July 2028.

Contact

schumann-b@mdw.ac.at

Organiser: Institute of Culture Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences; University of Humanistic Studies Utrecht Funded by: Austrian Academy of Sciences Postcode: 1010 City: Vienna Country: Austria Takes palce: In attendance Dates: 08.10.2026 - 09.10.2026 Website: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/ikw/detail/events/decolonization  

Decolonization has become a buzzword in academia, but what, precisely, is “decolonization”? The conference brings together scholars whose research expands the geographies, methods, and vocabularies through which decolonization is understood. By examining the “promises, problems, and practices” involved in defining decolonization, this conference frames it as both a practical and an epistemic challenge.

The conference pursues three main objectives. First, it seeks to reassess the historical and geographical boundaries of decolonization and to open new perspectives of research on its postcolonial forms. Second, it aims to uncover underexplored narratives by encouraging reflection on archival sources, fieldwork practices, and epistemic reflexivity. Third, it examines how the shift from decolonization to decoloniality takes shape across different academic and institutional contexts. Ultimately, this conference seeks to address the “so what?” question by asking how debates on decolonization can help us take the next step: to think about ‒ and conduct ‒ research differently.

Programm

THURSDAY 8th OCTOBER

13:00–13:15 Welcome

Anaïs Angelo / Austrian Academy of Sciences
Nicole Immler / University of Humanistic Studies Utrecht
Johannes Feichtinger / Austrian Academy of Sciences

13:15–14:30 Keynote
Chair: Anaïs Angelo / Austrian Academy of Sciences

Frederick Cooper / New York University
Decolonizations: Possibilities and constraints

14:30–15:00 BREAK

15:00‒16:30 Expanding the frontiers of histories of decolonization
Chair: Anaïs Angelo / Austrian Academy of Sciences

Cassandra Mark-Thiesen / University of Regensburg
Prismatic discourses on decolonization in immediate post-independence journals from Africa

Florian Wagner / University of Erfurt
‘Du bon usage de la décolonisation’? (Mis-)Appropriations of decolonization in the journal Civilizations (1950s-2000s)

16:30–17:00 BREAK

17:00‒18:30 Central Europe as a space of discussion on decolonization
Chair: Sophie Schasiepen / The House of Austrian History

Angela Kóczé / Central European University
Europe’s internal colony? Romani women and the decolonial critique of Central Europe

Bolaji Baolgun / SOAS University of London
Varieties of European colonialism: Locating and contextualising Central-Eastern Europe within the 'colonial orbit'

FRIDAY 9th OCTOBER

09:00‒09:15 Welcome

09:15‒10:30 Keynote
Chair: Antje Daniel / University of Vienna

Kodzo Gavua / University of Ghana
Decolonizing the colonized

10:30‒11:00 BREAK

11:00–12:00 Visualizing decolonization? Artistic and research practices

Disscussion with Noémie Étienne / University of Vienna
Memory Biwa / Independent Researcher
Places flooded with sound: Outa !Nanseb’s letters as counter-archival listening practices

12:00–13:30 LUNCH

13:30–15:00 Decolonizing knowledge production through state institutions?
Chair: Kerstin Klenke/ Austrian Academy of Sciences

Chibuike U. Uche / University of Leiden
Knowledge, state power, and revisionist scholarship

Valérie Rosoux / Max Planck Institute Luxembourg
Coming to terms with Belgium’s colonial past: The failure of the parliamentary commission

15:00–15:30 BREAK

15:30–17:00 Transformative justice ‒ decolonial reparations?
Chair: Valérie Rosoux / Max Planck Institute Luxembourg

John Njenga Karugia / Humboldt University Berlin
Provincialising decolonization: Institutionalising responsible cosmopolitanism

Nicole L. Immler / University of Humanistic Studies Utrecht
Dialogics of justice: towards a decolonial approach to repair

17:00–17:15 SHORT BREAK

17:15–18:15 Which future to decolonization?
Chair: Anaïs Angelo ‒ Nicole Immler ‒ Johannes Feichtinger

Closing debate with input by A. Dirk Moses / City College of New York & Central European University

Dirty Laundry is an architectural and feminist inquiry into how washing reveals the spatial organisation of social life and environmental relations. From rivers and communal wash places to social housing laundries, domestic interiors, laundromats, industrial facilities, and global textile infrastructures, washing connects bodies, materials, water, labour, technologies, and landscapes. Yet despite its fundamental role in sustaining everyday life, laundry has rarely occupied a central place within architectural histories and theories. It has not been invisible; rather, the spaces, practices, and labour relations through which washing is organised have often been naturalised, feminised, displaced, or excluded from architectural narratives.

Moving from river to machine, this volume examines washing as a spatial practice through which social, political, and ecological relations are mediated by architecture and the built environment. It explores how relations of labour, gender, class, ownership, coloniality, welfare, public health, wealth, whiteness, hygiene, cleanliness, technology, water, detergents, chemicals, and waste systems become organised through space — shaping the distribution of bodies, resources, responsibilities, and forms of belonging. Washing reveals how ideas of modernity, health, respectability, domesticity, and care are not only social values and economic conditions but spatial arrangements, materialised through buildings, infrastructures, landscapes, and everyday environments.

While the Frankfurt Kitchen became an emblematic architectural response to domestic labour, efficiency, and the organisation of everyday life, it also generated feminist counter-imaginaries that challenged the spatial confinement and unequal distribution of domestic work. The kitchen became not only an object of architectural reform but a site from which feminist activists, artists, and practitioners reimagined relations between labour, care, and space. Laundry offers a different but equally significant field of inquiry. There is no equivalent canonical figure through which washing has entered architectural history. This absence raises questions about how laundry has been imagined, designed, and spatially organised, and what forms of architectural and feminist counter-planning might emerge when washing becomes the starting point. Dirty Laundry seeks to examine architects, designers, and practitioners who have engaged explicitly with spaces of washing — from rivers and communal wash places to collective laundries, domestic environments, laundromats, and industrial infrastructures — and to consider how these spaces have shaped both the realities and imaginaries of labour.

Rather than approaching laundry as merely a private domestic activity, Dirty Laundry considers washing as a spatial practice and a form of labour through which societies organise maintenance, social reproduction, and environmental relations. The volume examines communal washing places and rivers; welfare-state laundries and shared infrastructures within social housing across different political and historical contexts in a wide range of geographies; public washing facilities that continue to sustain everyday life in many parts of the world; laundromats as urban spaces of encounter, necessity, and visibility; and industrial systems through which washing becomes entangled with global economies, technologies, and ecological transformations. Dirty Laundry considers the hidden environmental cost in the form of detergent pollutants and microplastics entering water bodies and discarded in far away locations and also the weary and sick bodies of people who perform the often arduous labour.

Bringing together architectural history, feminist scholarship, spatial theory, decolonial approaches, and environmental humanities, the volume investigates the architectures and ecologies of washing across diverse geographical contexts and economic conditions. It asks how cleanliness and hygiene have shaped spatial practices, how ownership and access have structured relations between private and collective provision, and how colonial, capitalist and state socialist systems have organised the movement of water, textiles, labour, and waste. At the same time, it attends to situated forms of knowledge, collective practices, and alternative arrangements of care through which washing sustains communities and environments.

The volume invites contributions from scholars, architects, designers, and practitioners working across different regions, histories, and economies. It seeks to expand architectural discourse beyond canonical buildings and authorship toward the everyday spaces, infrastructures, landscapes, technologies, and labour practices through which worlds are maintained. By attending to laundry, Dirty Laundry examines architecture not only as the production of form, but as the mediation of relations among bodies, materials, environments, and the unequal conditions through which everyday life is sustained.

Dirty Laundry: Architecture, Labour, and the Spatial Politics of Washing
Edited by Chloé Darmon, Marianna Janowicz, and Elke Krasny
Abstract Submission: 1000 words
Deadline: October 15, 2026
Send to: dirtylaundry.arch@gmail.com

The project will culminate in a peer-reviewed edited volume featuring selected contributions.
Indicative timeline: Full chapters due Fall 2027;
manuscript submission Summer 2028.

Organiser: Fondazione Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica “F. Datini”; European School for Training in Economic and Social Historical Research (ESTER) Postcode: 59100 City: Prato Country: Italy Takes place: In attendance Dates: 09.05.2027 - 15.05.2027 Deadline: 15.10.2026 Website: https://www.istitutodatini.it/ester/htm/call_for_papers_2027.htm  

Fondazione Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica “F. Datini” and the European School for Training in Economic and Social Historical Research (ESTER) will organise their 13th jointly-organized Datini-ESTER Advanced Seminar for economic and social historians on 9th-15th May 2027, in Prato (Italy) on the theme of: “The Role of Foreigners in Economic and Social History”

The topic of the Datini-Ester seminar is closely related to the theme of the yearly congress organized by the "F. Datini" International Institute of Economic History and devoted in 2027 to “The role of foreign communities in the economic growth of pre-industrial Europe and the Mediterranean Area (13th-18th centuries)”.

The 2027 Datini-Ester seminar will deal with the role of foreigners in economic and social history.

Foreigners - merchants, craftsmen, professionals, and labourers - occupied intermediate legal and social positions that made them both vulnerable and indispensable within historical societies. They also were central to economic growth, trade networks, and cultural exchange. Their mobility enabled the circulation of skills, capital, and innovations, fostering transregional integration in history.

We invite papers on legal status, professional roles, networks, and institutional frameworks, as well as conflict, xenophobia, generation of trust, adaptation, and cultural transfer. Comparative perspectives are encouraged to deepen understanding of economic interdependence.

We welcome scholars working on both the macro and micro level. Papers can cover any relevant aspect and any period from Antiquity until today.

Participants in the Datini-ESTER advanced seminar can receive 4 ECTS credits.

Organiser: Prof. Nicole Immig / Ioannis Terezakis / Emelie Bosselmann, Chair of Southeast-European Studies Host: Justus Liebig University Giessen Postcode: 35390 City: Giessen Country: Germany Takes palce: In attendance Dates: 09.12.2026 - 11.12.2026 Deadline: 15.10.2026  

The study of Greek labor migration to the Federal Republic of Germany begins from the observation that, despite its long history and social significance, the field remains comparatively under-researched and has so far developed in fragmentary ways. It represents a field that - also compared to other destinations where Greeks settled abroad - is in significant respects still in an early stage of development, as historical research on the topic remains limited in scope and reach and has not yet found the sustained scholarly attention it deserves. Nevertheless, Greek labor migration offers a productive point of departure precisely because it cannot be understood in terms of labor recruitment alone. Rather, it points to wider migratory processes of departure, transit, settlement, community formation, and everyday negotiation that often unfolded in multi-ethnic and multi-religious settings and shaped social life well beyond the workplace in the receiving society of Germany.

Current research on Greek labor migration is constrained by several critical gaps and the field still lacks systematic and sustained exchange across disciplinary boundaries, leaving key thematic areas under-analyzed. By relying predominantly on official state archives and top-down institutional categories, current research misses alternative identity classifications and informal social structures that emerge from below. Furthermore, it constitutes a field whose sources are often dispersed across public archives, community collections and privately held materials across various regions in Germany, Greece, and elsewhere, while Oral-history interviews have yet to be professionally produced, at a time when many of the first Greek labor migrants who came to Germany in the early 1960s will soon no longer be among us.

This workshop aims to bring together scholars working on Greek labor migration to Germany from the post-war period to the present, in order to take stock of ongoing work and identify relevant source bases and archival holdings. Ultimately, its core objective is to map what exists, by creating a forum where existing projects can be brought into closer conversation and a shared framework for future inquiry can be established, while building sustainable networks that contribute to a wider interdisciplinary conversation.

The workshop encourages reflection on the methodological challenges of the field, offering new analytical tools for researching labor migration, while welcoming perspectives that explore, but are not restricted to, the following dimensions:

- The lived experience of departure, arrival, and settlement, including practices of coexistence and conflict.
- The role of migrant organizations, networks, and political participation within both sending and receiving societies.
- The organization of leisure time, the shaping of neighborhoods, and micro-level social interactions.
- The construction of migrant infrastructures (associations, institutions) and how belonging is organized in local contexts.
- The role of religious communities and orthodox practices in structuring communal life.
- Administrative processes prior to departure from Greece, including the role of personnel and recruitment dynamics (specifically in rural areas).
- Comparative perspectives on how individuals navigate environments in rural villages versus major urban centers.
- Family and generational relations through the lens of loss, vulnerability, and structural failure, moving beyond linear "success stories" of integration.
- The historical links between different forms of mobility (e.g., exile and forced labor) and their evolution into labor migration.
- Interrelations between the Greek state administration and German companies, including corporate initiatives to source labor.
- The influence of media on public discourses in both Greece and Germany.
- Practical and methodological approaches to the collection, preservation, and sharing of primary source data.

The workshop specifically invites Early Career Researchers —including advanced Master's students, PhD candidates, and postdoctoral researchers—from disciplines across the humanities and social sciences whose work engages with these themes. The workshop aims to produce a peer-reviewed publication based on the contributions and discussions.

Submission Guidelines and Organisation

Interested participants are invited to submit an abstract (approx. 300 words) outlining the research question and methodology along with a short academic CV. Proposals should be sent by email no later than October 15, 2026, to ioannis.terezakis@uni-giessen.de or emelie.zoe.bosselmann@protonmail.com. Accepted participants will be notified by November 1, 2026.

The workshop will take place in English at Justus Liebig University in Giessen from December 9 to 11, 2026. Accommodation and travel expenses will be covered. Participants are kindly asked to indicate in their application whether they require travel costs.

Contact

ioannis.terezakis@uni-giessen.de, emelie.zoe.bosselmann@protonmail.com

Between Global Standards and Unequal Treatment
The International Labour Organization and Racialised Labour, 1920s–1950s
- Fabiana Kutsche

This book investigates the development and impact of racialised labour policies and discourses within the International Labour Organization (ILO) from 1919 to the late 1950s. Drawing on concepts from Critical Race Theory and Postcolonial Theory, it explores how beliefs about racial difference became linked to assumptions about suitability for capitalist production and were articulated internationally by bureaucrats, colonial experts, politicians, employers and trade unionists. While colonial labour forms a central focus, the study also considers the role of independent member states with predominantly non-white populations in Asia and Africa. A detailed case study of India highlights its unique position as the ILO’s only non-sovereign member and traces its transition through decolonisation into a post-colonial state. Offering new insights into the racial foundations of international labour governance, the book brings together Colonial and Global Labour History while advancing debates on racialised knowledge production in international organisations, imperial internationalism, epistemic inequality and the history of knowledge.

Download this book at De Gruyter Brill in Open Access

Futures in the History of Deindustrialisation
Edited by Eloisa Betti, Liliosa Azara, Stefan Moitra, Francesca Sanna, Christian Wicke

Deindustrialisation has placed the societies affected in a state of crisis. When industrial closure threatened their very existence, established “horizons of expectations” were called into question, as new collective memories and visions of the future emerged. Deindustrialisation has therefore generated fears and hopes about what the future might hold and what could be done, individually or collectively, to come to terms with transformation. While the consequences of industrial restructuring may be considered traumatic, exposure to socioeconomic change has also opened up new ways of imagining the future as a space of possibilities. Individuals, communities, and political and social agents have engaged in envisioning future prospects, seeking ways to respond to closure and shape what is to come. This volume brings together historical studies of futures in deindustrialising regions of Italy, Germany, Poland, Spain, and the United States, demonstrating how historical actors – including political and administrative bodies, trade unions, artists, and educators – anticipated what lay ahead, from ecological sunrise to cultural dystopia.

Book available at Bologna University Press - Open Access

Dates: 22-23 October 2026

Location: Somerville College, Oxford (Margaret Thatcher Centre)

Convenors: Damiano Bardelli (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford) and Matilde Cazzola (DiSCi, Bologna and mpilhlt), with Joanna Innes (Faculty of History Oxford)

 

THURSDAY, 22 October

13:30 Welcome and Introduction

 

14:00 Session 1 – Rural Poverty

Joanna Innes (University of Oxford): The Invention of Rural Poverty in England, from 1760

Aris Della Fontana (Università della Svizzera italiana): ‘Combien de pauvres elle sauveroit de l’indigence?’: Small-Scale Agriculture as an Antidote to Rural Poverty in Late Eighteenth-Century France –

 

15:20 Session 2 – Poverty and Society

Nicholas O’Neill (Arizona State University): Laissez Faire, Laissez Manger: The Economics of Boisguilbert’s Antipoverty

Masano Yamashita (University of Colorado Boulder): Accidental Poverty and Merit

Jacopo Bonasera (Gerda Henkel Stiftung): Population, Luxury and Poverty: The Political Economy of James Steuart

Marek Maj (European University Institute): Making the Poor ‘Useful’ in Late Eighteenth-Century Cracow

 

FRIDAY, 23 October

9:00 Session 3 – In the Parish

Gabi Wüthrich (Universität Zürich): Poor and Power in the Parish: Bargaining for a Collective Poor Relief Strategy during the 1771 Famine

Rūta Miškinytė (Vilnius University): Between Intentions and Practice: Dealing with Poverty in a Rural Lithuanian Parish

Ellen Gallimore (University of York): Memories of the Medieval Church: Critiques of Parish Poor Relief and Tithe Reform in Early-Nineteenth-Century England

 

11:00 Session 4 – Between Assistance and Confinement

Julie Marfany (Durham University): ‘Since it is the Spirit of the Present Government to Favour Hospitals and Workhouses’: Conflicts over Poor Relief in Eighteenth-Century Spain

Nathalie Dahn-Singh (Université de Lausanne): Materiality and the Confinement of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Switzerland

Adrien Schwartz (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne): A Social Problem and a Financial Conundrum: Funding the Care of Foundlings in Eighteenth-Century France

 

13:30 Session 5 – Reforming Poor Relief

Laurence Fontaine (EHESS): Agreements and Disagreements among Reformist Elites in Addressing Poverty: The 1777 Châlons Competition on ‘How to Eradicate Begging by Making Beggars Useful to the State without Making them Unhappy’

Francesca Ferrando (Università di Verona): Reforming Poor Relief in Eighteenth-Century Genoa: Ideas, Practices and Female Benefaction

Damiano Bardelli (University of Oxford): Work and Education: Reforming Poor Relief in Late Eighteenth-Century Switzerland

Matilde Cazzola (Università di Bologna): Claiming Philanthropy from Below: British Radicalism and the Ragged-Trousered Lovers of Mankind

 

16:00 Concluding discussion

 

Supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Max Planck Institute, and the Voltaire Foundation.

Photo credits: Francisco Goya, Alegoría de la Industria, tempera on canvas, ø 227 cm, c. 1805 (detail). © Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Paris/France

Argument
Poser la question de l’exposition du « monde industriel », à travers l’emblème de l’usine, du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours revient tout d’abord à définir le cadre dans lequel un lieu (l’usine mais aussi l’atelier, la fabrique, le lieu du travail et de la production), des femmes et des hommes (ouvriers.ères, ingénieurs.es, entrepreneurs.ses), des machines, des objets manufacturés (dont le design) et des représentations (peinture, arts graphiques, estampe, photographie, vitrail, sculpture, plan, maquette, film) ont fait l’objet d’une mise en visibilité. Tout en étant conscient que toute exposition peut soutenir des images : celle d’une marque façonnée par les industriels, d’un territoire, d’une branche, d’un mécène, d’une figure ou d’une institution. Cette exposition de l’usine par la sphère culturelle, à travers l’accélérateur de visibilité qu’est l’exposition (pérenne ou temporaire) et dans le cadre institutionnel du musée, n’a jamais tenu de l’évidence. Les témoignages de conservateurs et de commissaires d’exposition, même récents, illustrent bien la difficulté de cette monstration restée marginale, hors des lieux spécialisés et du phénomène de l’innovation. Une innovation dont l’histoire de la promotion compte plusieurs manifestations spécifiques et des espaces dédiés, comme les salons. L’innovation et la performance ne sont toutefois pas les seuls biais d’interprétation du monde industriel, car ils ont tendance à effacer des phénomènes plus pérennes comme la copie, l’achat de brevet, la production ordinaire, l’éclatement des modes de fabrication, la coexistence technologique ou la résistance au progrès.

Notre cadre d’interrogation pour cette journée d’études est le « musée » au sens large, c’est-à-dire s’éloignant de son usage courant contemporain (ICOM, 24 août 2022) pour embrasser tous ses accents et situations durant les siècles de la période observée. Spécialisé ou non, éphémère ou pérenne, inséré (dans l’espace industriel par exemple) ou indépendant, transdisciplinaire ou non, le « musée » est entendu ici sur le temps long comme le lieu vitrine d’une volonté de visibiliser l’effort de rationalisation ou de mécanisation du monde, à travers l’icône qu’est l’usine. Cette réflexion intègre donc, par exemple, les musées des Beaux-Arts, les musées d’arts appliqués, les musées des arts décoratifs, les conservatoires et musées des arts et métiers, les musées de société et de civilisation, les musées d’art moderne et contemporain, les FRAC, les centres d’art, les fondations d’art, les usines reconverties en musée, les écomusées, les cités des sciences, de l’industrie et du design, les expositions régionales, internationales et universelles, les musées d’entreprises, les musées des techniques et les salons professionnels. Les musées éclatés, de sites et « hors-les-murs » sont également concernés.
De ce fait, nous nous intéressons à l’exposition de façon élargie en observant les cadres institutionnels, les lieux, les mécènes, les publics, les voix, les réseaux et transferts, les objets, machines et représentations exposés dans leur diversité, les résistances et les mécanismes d’invisibilisation, le tout à l’échelle internationale, dans le but d’esquisser un premier paysage historique de ce phénomène. Loin de figer définitivement le constat d’une sous-représentation de l’usine – et même parfois d’un refus plus global de l’industrie dans le champ culturel –, nous tenterons de réfléchir à sa place et à ses représentations dans la sphère muséale en tenant compte des différentes actions qui environnent l’exposition : prospecter, acquérir, commander, collectionner, documenter, étudier et promouvoir.
Le point commun ici recherché est dans l’image, transmise et perçue, de l’usine dans sa diversité d’installation, de programme et d’équipement. Le terme est donc entendu ici dans son épaisseur historique comme un espace construit (avec édifice ou non) ou organisé en vue d’une production, regroupant homme, force, matériaux et machine. Nous nous intéressons ainsi à toutes les représentations de l’usine – réaliste, globale, partielle, simulée, fantasmée – quelle que soit la nature du processus industriel à l’oeuvre, les définitions applicables aux sites observés (architecture industrielle, bâtiment-machine, zone d’extraction comprenant des bâtiments non pérennes) ou le symbolisme associé à l’image (promotion, revendication, contestation).
Si le phénomène de l’exposition doit nécessairement appartenir à une période allant du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours, l’usine présentée peut quant-à-elle remonter à des périodes plus anciennes tout en trouvant certains échos (concentration de l’espace du travail, usage d’une force motrice, sérialité) dans le moulin, l’officine, la fabrique, la manufacture ou l’atelier. L’ancienneté des sites est en soi un enjeu de la mise en visibilité à l’époque contemporaine ; il suffit de penser par exemple à la « forge catalane » de l’Exposition internationale de Barcelone en 1929-1930, dans le contexte d’affirmation du nationalisme catalan. Les reconstitutions d’usines antiques et médiévales méritent ici d’être interrogées, y compris dans leurs visées pédagogiques, comme c’est le cas pour les moulins de Barbegal au musée départemental Arles Antique.
En questionnant le musée, à la fois filtre et récepteur du monde industriel, incarné par l’usine, nous cherchons à déterminer la place de cet espace dans l’énorme production culturelle et informationnelle (musique, littérature, imprimés, arts de l’image fixe, cinéma) associée à l’industrie. Suivant les travaux de Nathalie Grande et Chantal Pierre sur la littérature, nous cherchons à comprendre dans quelle mesure l’image de l’usine est fabriquée par l’exposition et par le musée. Qu’en disent-ils, cachent-ils, trahissent-ils ? Comment accompagnent-ils les évolutions, les bienfaits et les maux de phénomènes profondément ancrés dans la construction des sociétés depuis le XVIIIe siècle. Quels récits de l’industrialisation et de ses conséquences ont-ils construits ? De quels discours, notamment politiques, sont-ils l’expression ? De quoi l’usine est-elle le symbole ? De quels imaginaires est-elle l’attribut ?
Le but étant de saisir les enjeux d’un phénomène peu théorisé et pourtant soutenu, sur une période qui a déjà connu plusieurs « révolutions industrielles » : mécanisation, extractivisme, naissance et affirmation du mouvement ouvrier, colonisation, américanisation, rationalisation, automatisation, informatisation, intégration des évolutions contemporaines de l’usine au temps de la décarbonation, de l’anthropocène et du « 4.0 », de l’usine verte à l’usine réenchantée. Ceci afin d’établir comment l’image et la perception de l’usine ont évolué dans un champ parallèle à ceux de la patrimonialisation des archives de l’industrie et des sites, notamment grâce aux travaux de l’Inventaire, des Monuments historiques et de l’archéologie industrielle.
Cette journée d’études s’intéresse enfin à la scène que représente le musée, dans son acception plus contemporaine, lorsqu’il s’agit d’évoquer des thématiques allogènes à la pratique artistique : l’usine, l’industrialisation, le monde industriel dans ses lieux et artéfacts.

Nous souhaitons ici mettre en valeur des études de cas permettant de cartographier, d’historiciser et de comparer les lieux où ces thématiques et cet objet « usine » (son contenant et/ou son contenu) se développent depuis le XVIIIe siècle, de préciser les enjeux singuliers et récurrents de ces expositions, d’en saisir les périodes clés où l’exposition résonne avec des évolutions en cours et enfin d’enrichir les connaissances sur ses promoteurs. Si une approche chrono-thématique sera sans doute finalement adoptée pour le programme des deux journées, nous proposons aux intervenants plusieurs axes transversaux de réflexion :

- Histoire institutionnelle : la création mais également l’évolution de certains musées intègrent le monde industriel dans leurs thématiques privilégiées puis dans leur projet culturel et scientifique dont, par exemple, le Victoria and Albert Museum, le musée de l’Histoire allemande à Berlin, l’Union centrale des Arts décoratifs, le Centre de création industrielle, le musée d’Orsay ou l’éventail des musées de société irriguant les territoires. Le but ici n’est pas de revenir sur l’histoire de ces institutions mais de comprendre comment la thématique industrielle et l’objet usine les traversent. Quels sont les moments clés de cette affirmation ou de son refus ? Par quels concept, vocabulaire et idée cette affirmation prend-elle forme ? Quelle vision du « monde moderne » associé offrent-elles ?

- Les promoteurs et leur mobilité professionnelle : la mobilité professionnelle des conservateurs.rices, attachés.ées, chercheurs.ses et commissaires d’exposition nous intéresse particulièrement car nous postulons que ces trajectoires disent beaucoup du développement de la thématique, de son acculturation comme de son rejet. Leurs projets d’exposition peuvent ici être mis en regard avec leur enseignement, leur recherche, leur proximité avec le monde industriel/entrepreneurial ou leur formation. Nous nous intéressons également aux mécènes de la promotion de l’usine, à leur désir de monstration et aux discours qu’ils cherchent à transmettre.

- L’exposition comme projet, temps de recherche et événement : l’exposition comme événement est au centre de la journée d’études, qu’elle fut inaugurée ou restée à l’état de projet. La micro-histoire événementielle permet ici de questionner le contexte, les acteurs, le financement, la mise en oeuvre, la liste d’oeuvre, le discours, la scénographie, le public et la réception, immédiate et différée, de la manifestation muséale.

- Fétiche et mythe : en lien avec l’axe précédent, cet aspect interroge le statut, la valeur, la patrimonialisation et les fantasmes associés aux objets exposés et aux lieux visibilisés : l’objet/l’image devenu icône d’un monde complexe. Nous souhaitons notamment interroger le passage de l’objet manufacturé à « l’oeuvre d’art » grâce au cadre du musée et à sa mise, ou non, en collection. Il s’agira ainsi de questionner le collectionnisme privé et public, le phénomène de l’acquisition et de la documentation de « l’oeuvre » au sein du musée. Quels furent les obstacles ou encouragements administratifs, politiques et culturels à l’acquisition d’images ou d’objets permettant d’exposer l’univers de l’usine ?

- L’usine, un emblème ? : cet axe interroge de façon resserrée la place du bâtiment usine et de ses chaînes opératoires dans les expositions muséales en essayant de saisir la.les manière.s de montrer les sites, les édifices, les installations et les manières de produire. Quels sont les dispositifs mis en place pour rendre la complexité de sites qui évoluent dans le temps ? Comment se construit et s’émancipe l’image iconique, gravée ou dessinée puis photographique, de l’usine ? Comment ces images circulent-elles et croisent-elles des campagnes photographiques et des politiques de l’image plus larges ?

- L’artiste de l’industrie : L’une des caractéristiques de ce champ de production d’expositions est l’émergence d’une figure particulière d’artiste : l’artiste de l’industrie. Cette partie cherche à déterminer quel est le rôle du musée/de la collection dans l’ancrage historiographique de cet artiste de l’entre-deux mondes qui naît avec l’industrie et quel rôle joue le bâtiment usine (vue de l’intérieur ou de l’extérieur) dans le champ de ses représentations. Quels artistes de l’industrie (peintre, photographe, cinéaste, designer) ont déjà été mis sur le devant de la scène et lesquels restent dans leur ombre ? Quelles sont ses caractéristiques ? N’est-il qu’un observateur attentif ou doit-il participer lui-même de l’effort productif pour mériter ce qualificatif ? Quelle place ses productions hors de l’espace industriel ont-elles dans la réception de son oeuvre ? Quel segment occupent-ils dans une histoire de l’art qui se renouvelle fortement depuis le début des années 2000 ? Enfin, l’ingénieur/l’inventeur, promu dans ce même cadre, ne peut-il pas être considéré comme l’autre « artiste de l’industrie » ?

Comité scientifique
Anne-Laure Carré (musée des Arts et Métiers), Olivier Cinqualbre, Julie Corteville (ministère de la Culture, service des musées de France), Élise Dubreuil (musée d’Orsay), Lionel Dufaux (musée d’Orsay), Astrid Fontaine (Universcience), Marie-Laure Griffaton (musée de l’Air et de l’Espace), Yohann Guffroy (université de Genève), Odile Lassère (musée historique de Strasbourg), Ariane Mak (université Paris-Cité, ECHELLES), Pierre Maurer (Ensa Nancy), Christophe Morin (université de Tours, InTRu), Marie Thébaud-Sorger (CNRS, Centre Alexandre Koyré).

Comité d’organisation
Liliane Hilaire-Perez (université Paris-Cité/EHESS, ECHELLES/Centre Koyré), Audrey Jeanroy (université de Tours, InTRu), Nicolas Pierrot (service Patrimoines et Inventaire de la Région Île-de-France)
Informations complémentaires
Les propositions d’interventions (400 mots maximum) sont à envoyer aux membres du comité d’organisation avant le 30 octobre 2026.
Les deux journées consécutives se dérouleront à Paris en mars 2027. Les interventions pourront être en français ou en anglais et une traduction automatique (par IA) est envisagée.
Une aide pour les déplacements et le logement des intervenants.es est possible, mais la visioconférence est envisageable pour les intervenants.es qui le souhaitent.
Une publication est prévue à l’issue de ces journées. Les textes (en français ou en anglais) seront sollicités rapidement.

Pour toutes questions, contactez :
liliane.hilaire-perez@u-pariscite.fr
nicolas.pierrot@iledefrance.fr
audrey.jeanroy@univ-tours.fr

 

Organizer: Rüdiger Graf; Michael Homberg; Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş; Isabella Löhr; Christopher Neumaier; Carolyn Taratko Host: Leibniz-Centre for Contemporary History Venue: ZZF Potsdam ZIP: 14467 Location: Potsdam Country: Germany Takes place: In Attendance From - Until: 09.06.2027 - 11.06.2027 Deadline: 09.10.2026  

On June 9-11 2027, the conference at ZZF Potsdam will examine how different types of infrastructural actors (system builders, service and maintenance personnel, users, and activists) created and transformed the mobility, energy, digital, and communication infrastructures, which were essential for the creation of contemporary, highly mobile societies.

Infrastructural Actors and Activism in Contemporary History

Over the last few decades, political debates on infrastructure have intensified and commanded greater attention. Digital infrastructures expand at a breathtaking pace, older transport infrastructures collapse, while energy and mobility transitions depend on the provision of new infrastructures which are highly contested. Critical infrastructure is a potential and actual target in wars and conflicts. Globally, extractive infrastructures have become sites of contestation between multinational corporations, state actors, and indigenous communities. Climate activists try to block or even sabotage infrastructures, and awareness of their exclusionary effects has risen. These developments have helped propel the history of material infrastructures from esoteric topic in the history of science and technology to a topic of mainstream interest to historians seeking to examine the “matter that enables the movement of other matter” (Brian Larkin). Infrastructures enable and influence the functioning of the highly mobile economies and societies that emerged over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and, thus, their analysis is crucial to understanding economic, social, cultural, and political developments in contemporary history.

Historians have long shown that the creation and design of large technological systems depend on economic, political, cultural, and social factors. Accordingly, they are not neutral but express values by enabling and facilitating certain forms of mobility and interaction while impeding and excluding others (Stephen C. Slota/Geoffrey C. Bowker). In this sense, it may even be tempting to bestow them with agency. Yet, concrete infrastructures are the product of both material characteristics and actors who invent, build, maintain, use, subvert or contest them. This conference proposes to focus on these infrastructural actors and their agency in the creation and transformation of mobile societies. We distinguish between four different types of actors and invite papers examining their agency with respect to specific infrastructures, above all focusing on mobility, energy, digital, and communication infrastructures:
1. Since the publication of Thomas Parker Hughes’ seminal study Networks of Power, system-builders have long been subjected to scrutiny. We invite papers that examine their position and agency within the context of engineering, economic, and political forces from the top-level to the ground. How does their agency differ across infrastructure types and scales?
2. Some infrastructures need constant monitoring by human actors to sustain them; all of them may break down and then need to be fixed. Operators, along with service and maintenance personnel, are thus crucial to their functioning. What is their agency in these processes? In how far can they influence not only if but also how infrastructures work?
3. In social and cultural studies, users have received great scholarly interest. Across various types of infrastructure, we want to examine if and how material structures and devices determine user behavior and how socio-political factors influence the ways in which users engage with them. Do people use infrastructures creatively for different purposes than those intended by the system-builders? What are the effects of unintended uses, manipulations, and disruptions?
4. The construction of large infrastructures is always contested. Historically, it has often set off NIMBY protests, but with the rise of the environmentalist movement, a broader anti-infrastructural activism emerged. Why and how do infrastructural activists and protests challenge infrastructures? What factors determine whether they block or sabotage? How has political activism itself changed as a result of rapidly changing infrastructures? Concentrating on infrastructural actors and activism, will examine the changing boundaries and opportunities for human agency in increasingly technological, mobile, energy-intensive societies.

We invite original contributions dealing with one or several of these groups of infrastructural actors from both junior and senior scholars. To allow ample time for discussions, presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. The conference will take place on June 9-11, 2027, and the conference language will be English. We intend to cover travel and accommodation costs for participants.

If you are interested in participating, please submit an abstract of 300 words and a short author bio to Carolyn Taratko (taratko@zzf-potsdam.de) by October 9. Participants will be notified of their selection soon after, with additional information relating to logistics to follow. Questions may be addressed to the conference organizers.

Contact (announcement)

Rüdiger Graf (graf@zzf-potsdam.de)
Carolyn Taratko (taratko@zzf-potsdam.de)

Organiser: Karen Oslund, Towson University; Lachlan Fleetwood, LMU Munich Postcode: 81675 City: Munich Country: Germany Takes place: In attendance Dates: 25.02.2027 - 26.02.2027 Deadline: 15.10.2026  

In recent years, the history of science and adjacent fields have shifted from a focus on individual scientists and formal scientific societies to considering larger communities of practice as instrumental in making knowledge. At the same time, we have moved away from histories of individual scientific disciplines – such as physics, chemistry, and biology – to examinations of knowledge formation, construction and the co-mingling of different types of practices. As our understanding of science has moved into the field from the salon and laboratory, and as these fields have become increasingly varied and global, more and more individuals, objects, animals and plants, have been enrolled in the practice of making science. This workshop seeks to make visible 'the knowledge and skills of the people who had collected specimens for their masters or for the market … and the local meanings of objects wrenched from one context and reassigned to another'. [1]

In particular, the workshop will focus on the role of labour in making knowledge and scientific practice. This includes the labour of people who did not see themselves as 'scientists' or 'natural historians', such as sailors who collected natural-history specimens, artists who sketched plants and animals, and Indigenous peoples who, among other things, enabled scientific expeditions to survive in unfamiliar environments, operate their instruments and trace changes of climate. Additionally, we will consider papers examining the work of artists and artisans in both shaping and disseminating this knowledge. In so doing, we will address in conversations throughout the workshop methodological issues that present themselves with this expansion in the global reach of science and the corresponding expansion of the nature of scientific practice.

We invite submissions along the lines of the following questions, among others:
- How do we write these less-visible histories? How do archival concerns, including gaps, silences and absences, shape how this labour can be traced? What other sources outside of the archive can be enrolled in making everyday labour visible?
- How does tracing 'everyday' labour reveal the dis:connections and erasures in stories of global circulation and knowledge making?
- How does a focus on 'everyday' labour complicate older debates about professional and amateur contributions to scientific practice?
- How does a focus on communities and 'everyday' forms of labour help counter or reframe the 'great-man' or 'lone-genius' narratives still prevalent in the history of science and global knowledge making?

While primarily historical in its methodological focus, this workshop also welcomes contributions from adjacent disciplines, including art history, anthropology, geography and literary studies. Papers from both early career and more established researchers dealing with the questions about everyday labour and knowledge-making practices from the 17th to the 21st centuries in any part of the world are welcome.

The workshop will take place in person on 25 and 26 February 2026 at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre in Munich. Meals and accommodation will be provided for the duration of the workshop, and we may subsidise travel costs where required.

If you are interested in contributing a paper, please send your proposal (including your name, institutional affiliation, place of residence and title of the paper; abstract no longer than 500 words) and a one-page CV to the conveners at the following addresses by 15 October 2026: koslund@towson.edu and lachlan.fleetwood@gmail.com.

[1] Adriana Craciun and Mary Terrall, Curious Encounters: Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 12.

by Marc Loriol

Pourquoi les Français travaillent-ils ? Pour quelles raisons s’investissent-ils dans leur activité professionnelle ou, au contraire, cherchent-ils à s’en détacher ? Quelle place le travail occupe-t-il dans leur existence et comment cette place a-t-elle évolué au fil du temps ? Ces questions mettent en évidence la complexité et l’ambivalence du rapport au travail. Une même personne peut, au cours d’un entretien, exprimer à la fois un fort attachement à son métier, le souhait d’en changer ou le refus de voir ses enfants exercer la même profession.

L’analyse de ces phénomènes est souvent brouillée par des représentations simplificatrices concernant notamment les jeunes générations, les « Trente Glorieuses » ou encore une prétendue « perte de la valeur travail ». Pourtant, ces discours ne sont pas nouveaux ; ils réapparaissent régulièrement depuis les années 1960. L’ouvrage s’appuie ainsi sur un ensemble de données variées et complémentaires : enquêtes statistiques ponctuelles ou longitudinales, témoignages écrits publiés ou inédits, entretiens biographiques, observations de terrain, travaux historiques et sociologiques, archives institutionnelles et syndicales, rapports officiels, articles de presse et œuvres de fiction, notamment autobiographiques. Le croisement de ces différentes sources permet de renforcer la solidité des analyses et la portée des résultats présentés.

La première partie de l’ouvrage cherche à caractériser la complexité du rapport au travail et à montrer l’intérêt de cette notion, ainsi que de celles qui l’ont précédée ou qui lui sont associées : motivations, attitudes, sens donné au travail, satisfaction, engagement ou encore passion professionnelle. Elle s’attache également à mettre en évidence l’historicité du rapport au travail, en replaçant celui-ci dans différents contextes socio-économiques. Elle en souligne aussi la dimension sociologique, en étudiant l’influence de variables telles que le genre, l’âge, la génération et la position socioprofessionnelle. Après une discussion critique des notions d’attitude, de motivation, de satisfaction, d’engagement et de passion au travail, l’ouvrage définit plus précisément le concept de « rapport au travail » et en propose plusieurs illustrations. Une analyse exploratoire d’une quarantaine de témoignages recueillis sur LinkedIn complète cette réflexion. Elle montre notamment comment les transformations professionnelles, les trajectoires de vie et les événements biographiques influencent les manières de vivre et de percevoir le travail. Les résultats montrent que le rapport au travail se construit à l’intersection de plusieurs univers sociaux, notamment la famille, l’école et l’entreprise. Il évolue en fonction des expériences individuelles, des relations professionnelles, des conditions de travail et des formes de reconnaissance. Il varie également selon le cycle de vie, les perspectives de carrière, les projets personnels et les engagements dans la sphère extra-professionnelle. Ainsi, l’absence de reconnaissance professionnelle peut conduire certains individus à adopter une conception plus instrumentale du travail, celui-ci étant alors principalement considéré comme un moyen de subvenir à ses besoins.

La deuxième partie replace ces évolutions dans l’histoire économique et sociale de la France. Les années 1950 constituent un moment charnière. Après les sacrifices liés à la crise de 1929, à la Seconde Guerre mondiale et à la période de reconstruction, le développement de la société de consommation et l’industrialisation font émerger de nouvelles aspirations sociales. Les revendications portent alors principalement sur l’amélioration des conditions matérielles d’existence. Le travail est donc, en partie, envisagé dans une perspective instrumentale : il constitue avant tout un moyen d’améliorer son niveau de vie et celui de sa famille. À partir des années 1960, les critiques du taylorisme et du fordisme, accusés de déshumaniser l’activité professionnelle, contribuent à déplacer les revendications vers des dimensions plus qualitatives et expressives du travail. Les mouvements sociaux de 1968 illustrent cette aspiration à davantage d’autonomie, de liberté et de sens dans l’activité professionnelle. Dans les années 1970, les contestations du travail et de la société de consommation prennent des formes plus radicales. Des expériences alternatives se développent, notamment à travers les « établis » en usine ou les étudiants qui choisissent de « retourner à la terre ». Ces expériences peuvent être considérées comme des précurseurs de certaines formes contemporaines de reconversion et de bifurcation professionnelle. Les décennies suivantes sont marquées par la montée du chômage et de la précarité, mais aussi par la valorisation croissante de l’entrepreneuriat et l’affaiblissement progressif des collectifs syndicaux. L’intensification du travail, la financiarisation des entreprises et les restructurations contribuent à une dégradation des conditions de travail. La précarisation de l’emploi et l’isolement professionnel favorisent également le développement de différentes formes de souffrance au travail, telles que le stress, l’épuisement professionnel ou le harcèlement. La crise sanitaire liée à la Covid-19 a accentué et rendu particulièrement visibles certaines de ces évolutions, notamment avec le développement massif du télétravail et la fragilisation des collectifs de travail.

La troisième partie propose une analyse comparative de quatre groupes professionnels : les ouvriers d’usine, les gardiens de la paix, les infirmières hospitalières et les informaticiens. Fondée sur plus de deux cents entretiens et sur des observations de terrain, cette analyse met en évidence les transformations propres à chacun de ces univers professionnels. Elle montre notamment l’évolution du travail ouvrier vers des fonctions davantage orientées vers l’activité d’opérateur, les transformations du métier policier sous l’effet de la professionnalisation et de la politisation, la technicisation croissante du travail infirmier ainsi que les mutations rapides du secteur informatique. Malgré les processus d’individualisation qui traversent le monde professionnel, les collectifs de travail continuent de jouer un rôle essentiel dans la construction du sens donné à l’activité professionnelle. Les relations entre collègues, les appartenances professionnelles et les formes de solidarité constituent ainsi des éléments importants de l’expérience du travail. L’affaiblissement des collectifs professionnels s’accompagne également d’une crise des récits qui contribuaient autrefois à valoriser le travail. Dans l’après-guerre, les discours syndicaux et politiques participaient à la construction d’une certaine fierté professionnelle et donnaient au travail une dimension collective et sociale forte. Le recul de ces discours a progressivement favorisé l’émergence de représentations davantage centrées sur la compétitivité, la productivité et le « coût du travail ». Cette évolution rend plus difficile la construction de récits collectifs positifs autour de l’activité professionnelle, y compris dans les professions qualifiées. À travers les différentes études de cas, l’ouvrage cherche ainsi à renouveler le regard porté sur les transformations du travail à partir de l’expérience concrète des travailleurs. Il propose notamment une réflexion sur les conséquences de la désindustrialisation, des politiques sécuritaires et de santé publique, ainsi que sur les effets de la numérisation de l’économie.

Au-delà de la diversité des situations étudiées, une idée centrale se dégage : le rapport au travail ne peut être réduit à une opposition entre investissement et désengagement, ni à une simple évolution de la « valeur travail ». Il constitue une relation complexe, évolutive et socialement située, qui se transforme au gré des trajectoires individuelles, des contextes historiques, des conditions de travail et des évolutions de la société.