Aggregator

Organiser: Institute for Cultural Analysis of the Germans of Eastern Europe (IKDE), Freiburg; Institute for Cultural Analysis and European Ethnology, University of Freiburg Location: Freiburg University Library (Conference Room) Postcode: 79098 City: Freiburg im Breisgau Country: Germany Takes place: In attendance Dates: 30.09.2026 - 02.10.2026 Website: https://www.ikdebw.de/veranstaltungen-publikationen/veranstaltung/the-we-in-central-and-eastern-europe-mobilisation-and-community-formation-in-minority-and-diaspora-contexts  

Why “We”?

The word ‘we’ marks a clear distinction, creating an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’. Belonging to a certain group is a marker of assurance and identification, perhaps even a necessity for navigating everyday life. Nevertheless, it is challenging to define precisely the conditions under which a sense of community emerges and those under which it becomes fragile, in particular, when ‘we’ are faced with crisis situations.

The concept of ‘we’ can unite, but it can also divide, creating oppositions and frontiers; it possesses a compelling power that has historically made it attractive to totalitarian regimes, yet it also serves a valuable purpose when it comes to shared cultural heritage and memory culture projects.

With regard to minority and diaspora contexts, multiethnic regions and migration societies, questions therefore arise concerning the mobilisation and formation of groups, the negotiation of belonging, and the emergence of (unexpected) alliances. The focus here is on various aspects of ‘we’ in and from Eastern Europe, subjected to analytical scrutiny through interdisciplinary discussion.

Throughout the conference, we will thus examine these processes, their narratives and representations in terms of their entangled trajectories and dynamics.

Programme

Wednesday, 30.09.2026

from 09:00 Conference Registration & Arrival
09:30 Opening: Tilman Kasten, Introduction: Jana Stöxen

Origin – Homeland – Future

10:00
Gábor Egry (Budapest)
How to become German? Entangled Hungarian-German visions of minority communities in interwar Central and Eastern Europe

James Koranyi (Durham)
Bonding with the homeland: The Transylvanian Carpathian Association, emigration, and inter-national tourism

11:30 Break

12:00
Giustina Selvelli (Ljubljana)
Mining the Land, Mobilising the “We”: Extractive Conflict and Minority Activism in East-Central
Europe

Bianca Bran (Tübingen)
“Children” and vampires. “We”, gender, generation, and the negotiation of field roles in the community surrounding HOG Hamroth

13:30 Lunch Break

15:30
Neighbourhood Walk through Freiburg-Weingarten
Sarah Wirschke, Tomas Wald (both: Freiburg)
Life Beyond Freiburg’s Public Urban Imaginary – Diverse Communities Living Under a Stigma?

19:00 Conference Dinner

Thursday, 01.10.2026

Folklore – Heritage – Identity

09:30
Tomáš Korbel (Prague)
The Image of the Homeland of the Sudeten Germans: The Identity-Forming Role of Heimat-Museums

10:15 Break

10:45 Laura Marie Steinhaus (Freiburg)
Mobilizing Cultural Heritage: Folk Songs and National Identity in Ukraine

Tim Wenzel (Dresden)
Performing the “We”: Festival Practices and Nation-Building in Gagauzia, Moldova

12:30 Lunch Break

14:30
Roundtable: Belonging & Crises of Displacement and War

Keith Harrington (Dublin), Ágnes Erőss (Bozen-Bolzano), Olga Sasunkevich (Gothenburg), Nino Aivazishvili-Gehne (Maastricht)

In times of crisis, it is primarily minorities who are confronted with their own vulnerability and, in some cases, with their status as outsiders. By bringing together various examples relating to Eastern Europe, we aim to explore their experiences, practices of belonging and ways of coping with daily life, whilst addressing, in particular, the question of how a sense of “we” is formed, especially under pressure.

16:30 Break

17:00
Johannes Müske, Tilman Kasten, Jana Stöxen
(all: Freiburg)
Centralising the Songs of ‘Volk’/Folk. Genealogies, hierar chical research practices and colonial style of thought in folklore collections in Freiburg

19:00 Dinner

Friday, 02.10.2026

Media – Literature – Press

09:00
Anja Wilhelmi (Lüneburg)
The Baltic Letters (“Baltischen Briefe”) as a driving force for the reorientation of the German-Baltic community in (the Federal Republic of) Germany

Andreea Zamfira (Bucharest)
Constructing and Deconstructing a Historical Community at the Intersection of Mediatization, Politicization, and Commodification: The German Minority in Romania (1969–2019)

Anastasia Romanova (Chișinău)
Constructing “We” Abroad: Discursive Community Formation in Moldovan Migrant Memoirs

11:15 Break

11:45 Conclusion

12:30 End of conference

Contact

Jana Stöxen
jana.stoexen@ikde.bwl.de

Organiser: Department of Eastern European History, Humboldt University of Berlin Funded by: Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Eastern Germany Postcode: 10117 City: Berlin Country: Germany Takes place: Hybrid event Date: 17.09.2026 Website: https://www.bundesstiftung-aufarbeitung.de/de/veranstaltungen/frauen-im-spaetsozialismus-women-late-socialism  

The Humboldt University of Berlin warmly invites all interested scholars, students, and members of the public to attend the international conference “Women in Late Socialism: Gender Orders, Agency, and Transnational Entanglements” (17–19 September 2026).

Bringing together researchers from across Europe and beyond, the conference explores women's political subjectivities, bodies and sexualities, socialist internationalism, expertise and knowledge production, as well as ethnic minorities and women's agency in late socialist societies.

Programme

Thursday, September 17
Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Germany (Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung), Kronenstraße 5, 10117 Berlin

17:00 - 19:00
Keynote Lecture
Francisca de Haan (Central European University, Vienna/International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam)
Women in Late Socialism: A Global Perspective

Friday, September 18
Humboldt University of Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin, room 2095A

9:00 - 10:30 Panel 1. Female Political Subjectivity in Late Socialism: Biographical Perspectives

Chair: Oksana Nagornaia (Humboldt University of Berlin)

Susanne Schattenberg (University of Bremen)
Natalya Gorbanevskaya (1936-2013) or: Why Women Did Not Receive the Noble Prize
Nesa Vrečer (Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana)
Majda Gaspari and Women's Socio-Political Work in 1960s Slovenia
Gordeeva Irina (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam)
Valeria Novodvorskaya and the Soviet Independent Peace Movement in the Late 1980s

10:30 - 11:00 - Coffee break

11:00 - 12:30 Panel 2. Female Bodies, and Sexualities in Late Socialism

Chair: Anna Ivanova (Humboldt University of Berlin)

Veronika Lacinová Najmanová (University of Pardubice)
Educating the Socialist Woman: Contraception, Health Advice and Gender Norms in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia
Anna McEwan (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam)
From Family Planning to Self-Determination? Reproductive Rights and the Shifting Ideologies of the Democratic Women's League of Germany (1970–1990).
Barbora Skalická Doležalová (Charles University, Prague)
Sex Workers in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia: Liminality, Agency, and the Fetishization of Work

15:00 - 16:30
Panel 3. Socialist Internationalism: Women and Transnational Engagements

Chair: Jessica Bock (Digital German Women's Archive)

Ella Rossman (Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, Leipzig)
The World in Our Hands: Socialist Girlhood, Citizenship, and Internationalism at the World Meeting of Young Women
Tatjana Šarić (Croatian State Archives, Zagreb)
Gender Orders in Socialist Internationalism: Yugoslav Medical Missions in Libya
Anna Sidorevich (Center for History of Sciences Po, Paris)
Cold War Sisterhood? Leningrad Feminists and Transnational Feminist Solidarity in the Late 1970s and Early 1980s

Saturday, September 19
Humboldt University of Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin, room 2095A

9:00 - 10:30 Panel 4. Expertise, and Female Subjectivity: Women as Objects and Subjects of Knowledge in Late Socialism

Chair: Stefanie Eisenhuth (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam)

Karolina Siewak (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)
Rethinking the “Women’s Question” in the Countryside. Barbara Tryfan and Gender Expertise in Late Socialist Poland
Nadezhda Beliakova (Bielefeld University)
Women Mediating Religion in Late Socialism: Expertise and Knowledge across the Cold War
Agnieszka Mrozik (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)
To Show Girls the Way: Educating Young Polish Women for Modern Socialist Femininity in the Long Sixties and Beyond

10:30 - 11:00 - Coffee break

11:00 - 12:30 Panel 5. Ethnic Minorities and Women’s Agency under Late Socialism

Chair: Priska Komaromi (Humboldt University of Berlin)

Sasha Dimitrova (University of Vienna)
Ordering Emancipation: Knowledge Production and Agency of Muslim Women during Bulgaria’s ‘Revival’ Process (1970s-1980s)
Monika Stachová (Collegium Carolinum, Munich)
„We Are Here for People – Not Vice Versa.“ Slovak Romani Women in State-Socialist Local Politics in the 1970s and 1980s
Helene Henze (Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich)
Invisible Transitions: The Economic Lives of Ethnic German Women in Late Soviet Central Asia

12:30 - closing remarks

Contact

Anna Ivanova (HU Berlin), Irina Makhalova (HU Berlin) und Oksana Nagornaia (HU Berlin), femaleagency2026@gmail.com

Organiser: Daniel Rothenburg, Konstanz; Nikolay Kamenov, Zürich Host: University of Konstanz Location: Centre for Cultural Inquiry, Otto-Adam-Str. 5 Funded by: Werner und Erika Messmer-Stiftung Postcode: 78467 City: Konstanz Country: Deutschland Takes place: In attendance Dates: 24.09.2026 - 25.09.2026 Website: https://www.geschichte.uni-konstanz.de/reichardt/  

Throughout its history, the co-operative movement has promised a more humane way of doing business, maybe even a more humane capitalism—or a completely different economic order and society altogether. Today, co-operatives, once more, seem to hold promise of transforming capitalist forms of ownership and further economic democracy. This workshop, therefore, aims to reassess the history of the co-operative movement focusing on its relationship to capitalism.

Co-operatives and Capitalism: Economy, Morality, and Transformation

The co-operative movement is a “quiet giant”. At least 12 percent of people on earth are co-operators of any of the 3 million co-operatives. Co-operatives provide jobs or work opportunities to 10% of the employed population. Historically, they have promised a more humane way of doing business, maybe even a more humane capitalism, or a completely different economic order and society altogether. After the Global Financial Crisis and against the backdrop of the huge challenge before us—to transform the existing economic order towards sustainable and more equitable outcomes—, co-operatives, once more, seem to hold promise of transforming capitalist forms of ownership and further economic democracy. The United Nations declared 2025 the second Year of Cooperatives (after 2012) “as a way of promoting cooperatives and raising awareness of their contribution to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and to overall social and economic development”, especially in developing countries.

Our intuition for this workshop is that this is the perfect time to reassess the history of the co-operative movement focusing on its relationship to capitalism: to re-evaluate both, co-operatives and capitalism. The goal is to move the history of co-operatives from the periphery to the center of debates on the development, critique, and transformation of global capitalism. We propose three interconnected focal points that use the co-operative as a lens to address critical gaps and generate new questions in the New History of Capitalism, Global Intellectual History, and the Global History of the Co-operative Movement.

1. Cooperatives as Agents of Incorporation
While the New History of Capitalism has powerfully traced the rise of finance, industry, and commodification, its gaze has often stopped at the city limits or the plantation gate. Co-operatives were a primary institutional mechanism for integrating the smallholder countryside—in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa—into national and global capitalist circuits in the late 19th and 20th centuries. They were also instrumental to develop modern mass consumption, facilitated by building global commodity chains in Europe and North America. This focus shifts the story from one of passive incorporation to active institutional negotiation, where co-operatives become central to understanding the “how” of capitalism's geographical and social expansion.

Key questions:
- How did credit, marketing, and consumer co-operatives function as vehicles for embedding rural producers in cash economies, standardizing production for distant markets, and creating new debt and dependency relations?
- Did they act as a “soft” alternative to violent enclosure or a complementary tool for state-led modernization?

2. The Intellectual History of Capitalism Through the Co-operative Lens

The co-operative movement generated a vast, global, and contentious intellectual terrain where the very nature of capitalism was dissected and alternatives were theorized and practiced. Co-operators developed a sophisticated critique of capitalism with the aim to transform, “moralize”, or even supersede the economic order in a “Co-operative Commonwealth”. This track positions co-operatives at the heart of ideological struggles over capitalism’s past and future.

Key questions:
- What were co-operative analyses of capitalism and how did they relate to well-known classical positions?
- How did co-operators criticize capitalism: as an economic system and/or a cause of moral degradation of the working classes?
- Which alternatives did they envision based on their critique—gradual reform, state capitalism, or “Gemeinwirtschaft”?

3. Testing Transformation: Did Co-operatives Transform Capitalism?

The ultimate promise of co-operatives was to transform fundamental capitalist categories and introduce moral values into business. By comparing different forms—like Rochdale consumer co-operatives, Mondragón-style producer co-operatives, or state-controlled colonial marketing boards—, this track moves from theory to practice, asking empirically: Did they?

Key Questions:
- Did shared ownership truly disrupt the capital-labor relationship, or did it create new hierarchies (managerialism in large co-ops, exclusion of non-members)?
- Were co-operatives vessels for incremental reform, pockets of resistance, or laboratories for post-capitalist social relations that were often re-absorbed or defeated?

Through this agenda, the workshop will position co-operatives not as a nostalgic sidebar, but as a central, contradictory, and essential force in the global history of capitalism—a force that simultaneously built, critiqued, and transformed the modern economic order. By looking “through the lens of critique” we aim to understand both capitalism and co-operatives differently.

Programme

Thursday, 24 September

2–2:15 pm
Introduction: Co-operatives and Capitalism—New Avenues for Research (Daniel Rothenburg & Nikolay Kamenov)

2:15–4 pm: Panel 1—Transforming Capitalism?
The State and Co-operation. An International Exploration of an Important but Troublesome Relationship (Anthony Webster)

Cooperatives in Wisconsin in the late 19th Century: Capitalism Without Capitalists? (Alexia Blin)

A Double Imperative of Growth: Consumer Co-operatives, Gemeinwirtschaft, and the Transformation of West German Retail (Philipp Urban)

Discussion

4–4:30 pm: Coffee break

4:30–5:45 pm: Panel 2—Capitalism Through the Co-operative Lens
“Co-operatives are Democracies only on the Inside:” Weimar Germany’s Non-profit Home Builders as a Role Model for Economic Democracy (Philipp Reick)

What’s Wrong with Capitalism? Manchester, the Social Question, and Competing Visions of Self-Help in German Lands, 1840s–1870s (Daniel Rothenburg)

Discussion

5:45–6:45 pm
Comment and Final Discussion (Mary Hilson & Stefan Berger)

7:30 pm
Dinner

Friday, 25 September

9–10:15 am: Panel 3— Co-operatives as Agents of Incorporation
Credit, Cooperatives, and Agricultural Finance in India, ca. 1880 to the 1960s (Nikolay Kamenov)

Cooperatives in the Late Tsarist and Soviet Countryside: The Long Arc of Economic Incorporation from Peasant Credit to Planned Procurement, 1861–1991 (Anna Safronova)

Discussion

10:15–11:15 am
Comment and Final Discussion (Stefan Berger & Mary Hilson)

11:45 am
Lunch and goodbye

Contact

Dr. Daniel Rothenburg, daniel.rothenburg@uni-konstanz.de

Throughout its history, the co-operative movement has promised a more humane way of doing business, maybe even a more humane capitalism—or a completely different economic order and society altogether. Today, co-operatives, once more, seem to hold promise of transforming capitalist forms of ownership and further economic democracy. This workshop, therefore, aims to reassess the history of the co-operative movement focusing on its relationship to capitalism.

Organiser: Iryna Klymenko, Forschungszentrum Urkaine/Max Weber Stiftung; Olena Palko, Universität Basel; Olena Petrenko, Ruhr-Universität Bochum; Katja Wezel, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Location: Historisches Kolleg München, Kaulbachstraße 15 Funded by: Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, Forschungszentrum Ukraine/Max Weber Stiftung, Bundesministerium für Forschung, Technologie und Raumfahrt, BASEES Study Group for Minority History Potscode: 80539 City: Munich Country: Germany Takes place: In attendance Dates: 10.09.2026 - 11.09.2026 Deadline: 08.09.2026   Im Historischen Kolleg München findet vom 10.-11. September 2026 die Konferenz "Ethnicity, Economies and (Dis)Advantages in the History of Modern Central and Eastern Europe" statt, die von Olena Palko (U Basel), Olena Petrenko (U Bochum) und Katja Wezel (U Göttingen) organisiert und von Iryna Klymenko (LMU München/Forschungszentrum Ukraine der Max Weber Stiftung) unterstützt wird. Interessierte können sich als Zuhörer:innen auf Anfrage (bei katja.wezel@uni-goettingen.de) noch anmelden.

Contemporary research suggests that economic marginalization of ethnic minorities remains a persistent trait in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. From a historical perspective, economic advantages and disadvantages were often determined along ethnic lines. This changed with the onset of nationalism and the formation of nation-states, where access to power and economic resources started to be reserved for ethnic majorities, crucially changing the status many ethnic economic elites had previously enjoyed. By integrating historical research, this conference aims to shed light on how identification and differentiation based on ethnicity have shaped economic experiences and outcomes in the region. The conference will address topics such as the unequal concentration of wealth across ethnic lines, the economic and social marginalization of certain ethnic groups, and the correlation between social and economic inequalities with ethnicity and majority-minority relations. Key themes discussed at the conference include the relationship between ethnicity and entrepreneurship, the economic advantages of common ethnicity, and the impact of ethnic (as well as racial) discrimination, as well as the overall role of ethnicity in economic development.

Programme

Thursday, 10 September 2026
9.00–9.30: Welcome & Introduction
Iryna Klymenko (Lviv), Olena Palko (Basel), Olena Petrentko (Bochum), Katja Wezel (Göttingen)

10.00–12.00: Panel 1 – Minorities, Economy, Elections and the Empire
Volodymyr Kulikov (London): Ethnic Entrepreneurship and Value Chains in Ukraine under Imperial Rule
Darius Staliūnas (Vilius): The Influence of Social and Economic Factors on Coalition Formation During Elections to the Russian State Dumas in Lithuania
Andrea Gritti (Paris): The Destruction of Ottomanist Reason. Economic Critique and Sectarian Spirit in Late Ottoman Salonica

14.00–16.30 Panel 2: Industrial Development, Economic Empowerment and Imperial Legacies
Ségolène Plyer (Strasbourg): Shaping an innovative competition: The ethnic factor among textile manufacturers in north-eastern Bohemia
Olena Petrenko (Bochum): Ethnicity and Economic (Dis)Advantages in the Sugar Industry of 19th-Century Ukraine
Vladyslava Moskalets (Lviv): Jews and Others in the Galician Countryside
Samuel Foster (Norwich): A “Vast Armed Camp”: Economic Militarism as State Minority Policy in Ango-French Balkan Discourses, 1880-1914

17.00–18.30: Keynote
Klaus Richter (University of Birmingham): Economic Nationalism or Empowerment of the Nation? East Central Europe in the Interwar Period

Friday, 11 September 2026
9.00–11.00: Panel 3 – Inclusion and Exclusion in the Interwar Era
Maria Kavala (Thessaloniki): The Importance of the 1922 Refugees to the New Greek State
Petre Matei (Bukarest): Criminalized Poverty: The Socioeconomic Marginalization of the Roma in Interwar Romania and its Impact on War Deportations
Max Trecker (Göttingen): The Donbas as a Region of Economic Imagination, 1920s-1940s

11.30–13.30: Panel 4 – Entrepreneurs, Nationalism and Minority Agency after WWI
Heidi Rifk (Tallinn): Baltic German Entrepreneurs in Estonia’s Nation-State Economy
Katja Wezel (Göttingen): Between Economic (Dis)Empowerment and Nationalization: German and Jewish Businesses in Interwar Latvia
Olena Palko (Basel): Soviet Land Reform, National Resistance and Minority Agency in Interwar Ukraine

13.30–14.00: Concluding Discussion
End of the Conference: c. 14.00

Contact

Katja Wezel: katja.wezel@uni-goettingen.de

Key information
Conference: Warsaw, 19–20 November 2026
Abstract deadline: 18 September 2026
Language: English
Paper: 20 minutes
Submission: abstract of up to 350 words + short biography of up to 150 words
Contact: childreninhistory@enrs.eu

In the autumn of 1944, 12-year-old Hieronim Kowalski, wounded during a skirmish, was taken to a Soviet field hospital, where he befriended another child soldier, Volodya. They soon set off with their unit towards Berlin. When the war ended, Hieronim was a 13-year-old corporal. He returned to Poland but he did not go back to his family. He knew that after everything he had been through, there was no return to normality. He stayed in the army. In the same year, two ten year olds, Eva and Miriam Mozes from Romanian Transylvania, stepped off a train onto the old ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Their family was killed almost immediately; the twins survived as guinea pigs for Dr Mengele’s criminal medical experiments, only to return after liberation to a Romania that was already changing its political system. At the same time, thousands of orphaned children – the so-called Wolfskinder – were roaming the forests of East Prussia. One of them was eight-year-old Erna Schneider, who escaped from a cattle train with her siblings and made her way to Lithuania, where for years she hid under a Lithuanian name. Although the war soon ended, the changes set in motion by the division of Europe continued to shape the lives of young people. In 1951, in Prague, the mother of 16-year-old Jana Kanska – like many other parents in countries subjected to Stalinisation – was executed following a fabricated political trial. Five years later, in June 1956, 13-year-old Romek Strzalkowski was shot dead on the streets of Poznań, one of the victims of the June uprising; in the October of the same year, 15-year-old Erika Szeles was photographed on the Budapest barricades with a rifle in her hands – a few hours later she was dead. In the decades that followed, successive generations of children and young people across Central and Eastern Europe continued to face traumatic events: the Prague Spring of 1968, martial law in Poland in 1981 and the violent unrest that accompanied the crisis and then, finally, the collapse of communist rule.

Each of these children, in their own way and in their own time, was drawn into a history that had little to do with the experience of an untroubled childhood. Yet despite this, the historiography of Central and Eastern Europe in the second half of the 20th century has largely been written without them. Children appear in it as a backdrop, as victims or as objects of social policy, but rarely as individuals with their own perspectives, strategies and voices.
Following the framework proposed by Deborah Levison, Mary Jo Maynes and Frances Vavrus,1 this conference invites scholars to examine children and young people simultaneously as subjects shaped by social processes and political discourses, as objects of ideological investment and state intervention and as agents who acted within their world negotiating, resisting and navigating official structures even under tightly constrained conditions.

The end of the Second World War left millions of children not only homeless but also suffering from long-lasting trauma. The collapse of safety and security, and the wartime experiences that accompanied this – the loss of family members, displacement, forced migration, family separation, concealment of identity, and witnessing and experiencing brutal violence, profoundly shaped the outlook and post-war development of hundreds of thousands of children. For many of those living in Central and Eastern Europe, the post-war years were not a new beginning but a struggle to find ways to survive in a reality that still offered little stability or security.
The post-war division of the world and the new political orders, especially in this part of Europe, turned the child into an object of ideological investment and political instrumentalisation: a shift also reflected in new legal frameworks. The constitutions of Eastern Bloc countries guaranteed extensive social rights for children: universal access to education, healthcare and welfare institutions that in many cases surpassed Western standards. These provisions, however, went hand in hand with the state’s claim to shape the minds of the young over and above parental authority, with compulsory membership in youth organisations, with discrimination against children from families designated as class enemies and with the political repression that children witnessed in the lives of those around them.

Guiding Questions
This conference takes the children’s own perspectives as its analytical starting point. Rather than asking what the communist state did to children, we ask what the history of the region looks like when seen through children’s eyes and what it means to recover those perspectives from the sources available to us. These are some of the questions we invite participants to engage in:
- How did children experience and make sense of a post-war reality that continued, in many respects, to remain deeply difficult?
- To what extent were they passive subjects of state power, and to what extent did they act, resist, adapt and find ways around official control?
- How far did communist regimes succeed in their ambition to shape successive generations and at what cost, both for those who internalised the project and for those who remained outside it?
- What part did parents play in shaping their children’s political attitudes?
- How did childhood under communist rule differ across the various national and regional contexts of Central and Eastern Europe, and across its distinct phases: from Stalinist terror through the post-1956 consolidation to the crises and collapse of the 1980s?
- How were children’s experiences shaped by the wider social and economic rhythms of the region, by political repression, recurring crises and the everyday constraints of shortage economies?
- What methodological challenges arise when we attempt to recover children’s voices and perspectives from archives that were largely produced by adults, about children, and for adult purposes?
- And finally a question that connects the past to the present: what do children’s experiences of life under communist rule tell us about the adults of today – the majority of the population in Central and Eastern European societies – who grew up in that environment?
- What has been carried forward, consciously or not, and what has been buried?
- Can recovering these histories help us better understand the societies we live in now?

Who Is This Conference For?
We invite scholars to engage with these questions from multiple disciplinary perspectives, bringing together the history of childhood and youth, the social and cultural history of state socialism, memory studies, including research on representations of the past in literature, film and the visual arts, and the emerging field of transgenerational trauma research. We are particularly interested in approaches that foreground children’s own voices and perspectives, drawing on ego-documents (e.g. diaries, letters and memoirs), oral history, visual sources and artefacts alongside institutional and policy histories that shaped the conditions of their lives.

Themes and Topics
We welcome proposals addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

1. Children in the Shadow of War and Its Aftermath
• The Holocaust and mass violence: children in ghettos, camps and hiding; survivors and their post-war trajectories
• Flight, displacement and violence in the war’s immediate aftermath
• War orphans, missing and homeless children and the reconstruction of family life
• Children Born of War (CBOW): identity, stigma and post-war trajectories
• Displaced persons camps and exile communities: growing up between worlds

2. Children, Migration and Forced Displacement
• Deportations, repatriations and forced resettlements in post-war Central and Eastern Europe
• Children from families separated by war, deportation and the Iron Curtain
• Growing up in political exile, migrant communities and diaspora environments
• Eastern European children abroad: identity, belonging and the experience of displacement across continents

3. Children, Communism and Everyday Life
• State care and state control: legislation, institutions and everyday life
• Ideological formation: schools, youth organisations, children’s literature and visual culture
• Children of the ‘class enemy’: repression, discrimination and family survival strategies
• Children and young people in opposition movements, religious communities and youth subcultures
• The body, health and welfare as areas of state intervention

4. Memory and Trauma
• The intergenerational transmission of war trauma: communicative memory and silence
• Children’s retrospective accounts: oral history, diaries, letters and memoirs
• Ethics and methodological challenges in researching childhood, memory and trauma

5. Sources, Methods and Approaches
• Ego-documents and narrative sources as windows into children’s inner lives
• Objects, images and creative expression: drawings, artwork and artefacts as historical sources
• Interdisciplinary approaches to the history of childhood: between history, sociology, memory studies and trauma research
• Methodological challenges in accessing children’s perspectives across archives and disciplines

Submission Guidelines
We invite proposals for individual papers (20-minute presentations). Proposals should be submitted in English and include:
• An abstract of no more than 350 words
• A short biographical note (up to 150 words), including institutional affiliation

Please send submissions to: childreninhistory@enrs.eu by 18 September 2026.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 25 September 2026. The conference language is English. Selected papers will be considered for publication in the ENRS book series. The organisers offer a contribution towards travel and accommodation costs for accepted participants. Details will be provided on acceptance.

About the Project
The 2026 conference inaugurates ‘A Child in the Labyrinth of 20th Century History’ – a long-term, multi-stranded academic and educational project examining the experiences and fates of children during wars, totalitarian regimes, economic crises and forced migrations. Rooted in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the project explores its entanglements with broader European histories. This opening stage reflects the core priorities of the ENRS: the experience of communism and its legacies in Central and Eastern Europe, and the broader effort to foster a shared understanding and collective memory of 20th-century history. As the project develops, its chronological scope will expand in successive layers, incorporating the First World War and the interwar period, the Second World War and the Holocaust, and the political and social transformations that followed in the wake of 1989. Activities dedicated to each period will continue and steadily increase over the project’s duration. The project will culminate in a travelling exhibition and a series of scholarly publications and educational resources, bringing together project findings in an accessible and enduring form.

Organisers: European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS), Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe (BKGE)

8th Conference of the International Association of Strikes and Social Conflicts
co-organised by the Commodity Frontiers Initiative
hosted by Amsab-Institute of Social History and Ghent University

Contested Countrysides: Conflicts, Claims and the Making of the Modern World

Friday 11 - Saturday 12 June 2027 in Ghent (Belgium)

Throughout the last six centuries, worldwide capitalist expansion has been driven not in the least by advancing vast rural and agrarian frontiers of labour, food, energy, and raw materials. Up to now, capitalism has overcome problems of declining resilience of its production system by the progressive incorporation and appropriation of natural resources and labour through the successive opening of new, not yet fully commodified, zones. Our central argument is that capitalism as a historical system has been growing through the socio-ecological crises it encountered. In fact, crises are inherent and systemic to capitalism, as are movements of resistance and the counter-narratives that they generate.

Since the 1980s, a new wave of expansion and crises has accelerated the transformation of the global countryside. Agro-industrial production chains destroy local food markets, endangering the food supplies of households and communities, vulnerable to the vicissitudes of global food and agricultural markets. Dispossession in the global countryside and concentration of the governance of commodity chains in the hands of a limited number of powerful transnational corporations are two sides of the same coin.

In this conference we explore and discuss the dialectical relationship between dispossession and resistance along two interrelated lines.

First, we study countrysides as contested frontier zones in a comparative and long-term perspective. Frontiers are envisioned as historical and dynamic processes of both incorporation and differentiation, through which we can grasp the imbalances of incorporation processes, emphasising the role of the margins and friction zones and integrating nature and ecology as a defining part of the global economy. 

Building on this general thematic line, further suggested themes:

• What are old and new forms of conflict and resistance, ranging from anti-slavery rebellions to modern peasant movements?
• How did workers’ resistance attain a transnational character?
• How do local and indigenous communities organise their struggles against the incursions of transnational capital into agrarian spaces and practices?
• What specific types of dispossessions can be observed, and how did workers perceive and resist them?

In a second line we investigate how the commodification of the rural world as an infinite set of localised but often interconnected processes was embedded in capitalist expansion and its political economy at large, and how this has affected forms of conflict and resistance. The increasing socialisation of production on a global scale – and its private appropriation – has contributed to bringing the countryside closer to the city, industrial work, services, and agricultural wage earners – but also to their interdependence in production chains and the contagious effect, for example, of their struggles (translatability). In these cases, “chokepoints” play a decisive role.

Over the past two decades, researchers have increasingly emphasized global logistical chokepoints. Modern economies rely on "just-in-time" production and highly interconnected supply chains, making them efficient but also vulnerable. A strike at a single container port, the blockage of a canal, or a cyberattack on a logistics network can ripple across multiple countries. Political theorists have also argued that the transition from factory-based capitalism to logistics-based capitalism has shifted where strategic power lies – from large industrial workplaces toward ports, warehouses, shipping networks, and digital infrastructure. 

Suggested themes:

• The impact/role on production on a global scale of transport systems (railroads, shipping), of critical nodes and chokepoints such as ports, and of spaces of manufacturing.
• The impact/role of networks of information and knowledge on production on a global scale.
• How do agricultural workers, transport workers, warehouse workers, and dockworkers coordinate struggles?
• How does seasonal or migrant labour reshape the geography of collective action?
• How do food systems create common political interests, under what conditions do rural and urban struggles converge and what organizational forms sustain these alliances?

However, in view of the entanglement of rural processes and the wider global context of progressing expropriation, we encourage speakers in this second line of broader themes to consider and integrate possible associations with the main theme of the conference. Please note we would also encourage proposed conference papers on any general aspect of strike activity in specific countries across the 20th and 21st centuries.

Beyond the two lines of research mentioned above, at this conference, we attribute a special importance to the recent surge of Artificial Intelligence (AI). How can movements of resistance protect knowledge and integrate new technological revolutions such as AI? AI is not just another tool susceptible to being used for good or ill. Tools alter our symbolic structure, our brain, body, and social relationships. AI was deliberately designed to be an artifact that expropriates human beings from the most complex ideation. The rise of AI causes effects such as the destruction of public funds transferred to large technology and data corporations; the intensification of work; the breakdown of relationships between human beings; and the subordination of platforms and education systems structured by AI in the grammar of war, through drones, surveillance, and control systems. 
Practical

The conference will take place in Ghent, Belgium, 11-12 June 2027. It is an in-person conference, no hybrid sessions available.

The conference is held by the International Association of Strikes and Social Conflicts (IASSC) and the Commodity Frontiers Initiative, and organised by Amsab-Institute of Social History, Ghent University – Conflict Research Group, Ghent University – Global and Regional Histories, and Ghent University – Institutional, Socio-economic and Political Issues in Rural-urban Areas (INSPIRA).

The conference will involve a registration fee of 50 euros. Travel and accommodation are at your expense. For any questions, please contact us at  info@iassc-net.org.

Proposals should contain a short abstract and a short biographical note and must be submitted before 31 October 2026 by e-mail to info@iassc-net.org.

You will receive a note of acceptance before 1 December 2026. Registrations to the conference will open early 2027, upon further notice.

After the conference, the journals Workers of the World and Commodity Frontiers may invite participants to submit a proposal for a journal article.

Het Jaarboek voor de Geschiedenis van Arbeidersbewegingen en Socialisme in Nederland nodigt onderzoekers uit om bij te dragen aan haar themanummer over de Wereldgeschiedenis van de “Nederlandse” Arbeidersklasse.

In 2017 verscheen de eerste Histoire mondiale de France. Het boek plaatste de Franse geschiedenis in internationaal verband en liet zien dat ‘typisch’ Franse fenomenen in werkelijkheid de uitkomst waren van interacties met andere gebieden. In navolging daarvan verschenen twee delen van de Wereldgeschiedenis van Nederland, dat zich ten doel stelde om aan de hand van concrete voorbeelden de ‘onverwachte verstrengeling van Nederland met het buitenland’ uit te lichten.

De aanpak keerde zich tegen een smalle, nationale kijk op de geschiedenis van Nederland, want ‘wat nationalisten als exclusief voor de eigen exceptionele natie claimen, werd maar al te vaak ontleend aan of gedeeld met het buitenland.’ De aanpak werd ook als uitdaging aan vakgenoten gepresenteerd; volgens de redactie was er ‘nog een wereld aan wereldgeschiedenissen te winnen’.

Graag pakken we deze uitdaging aan door een reeks bijdragen te verzamelen over de Wereldgeschiedenis van de “Nederlandse” arbeidersklasse. Want ook de geschiedschrijving van arbeidersbewegingen heeft lang vastgehouden aan ‘typisch’ Nederlandse fenomenen die bij nadere beschouwing zijn ‘ontleend aan of gedeeld met het buitenland’. Voorbeelden zijn de verzuiling, de verzorgingsstaat, het poldermodel en de overlegcultuur. Interacties en wederzijdse beïnvloedingen tussen (voormalig) Nederlandse gebieden enerzijds (van Europees Nederland en Indonesië tot aan het Caribisch gebied en Zuid-Afrika) en de rest van de wereld anderzijds heeft onze speciale aandacht.

We vragen onderzoekers om bijdragen over belangrijke gebeurtenissen of ontwikkelingen uit de geschiedenis van arbeiders- en socialistische bewegingen in hedendaagse en voormalige Nederlandse gebieden waaruit een in onderzoek onderbelichte of ‘onverwachte verstrengeling’ blijkt met ontwikkelingen en actoren daarbuiten. Mogelijke thema’s die hierbij aansluiten zijn:

1. Het belang van internationale contacten en processen bij het ontstaan en de ontwikkeling van arbeidersbewegingen en socialistische organisaties in Nederlandse gebieden (met een nadruk op contacten ofwel tussen Europees Nederlandse en koloniale Nederlandse gebieden, ofwel tussen nominaal Nederlandse gebieden en regio’s daarbuiten);
2. Nationale en lokale verschillen in de reacties van arbeidersbewegingen en socialisten op internationale fenomenen zoals (de)industrialisatie, verzuiling en de opkomst van neoliberalisme;
3. Uitwisseling en ontwikkeling van culturele uitingsvormen en attitudes over werk en sociale verbetering.
4. Vergelijkingen van de acties, campagnes en strategieën van verschillende arbeidersbewegingen en socialisten.

Deze lijst is niet uitputtend. We verwelkomen alle bijdragen met raakvlakken aan het genoemde thema.

Het themanummer zal bestaan uit onderzoeksartikelen van maximaal 6.000-8.000 woorden, inclusief voetnoten. De bijdragen worden gepubliceerd op de website van het Jaarboek en duurzaam ontsloten via het repositorium van de Universiteit Groningen.

Onderzoekers die willen bijdragen vragen we om vóór 15 oktober 2026 een abstract van 300 woorden aan te leveren. De deadline voor de eerste versie is 15 maart 2027. In november 2027 zal het jaarboek verschijnen.

Iets indienen? Dat kan via redactie@arbeidersgeschiedenis.nl. Via dit mailadres zijn we verder altijd beschikbaar voor vragen, ideeën en opmerkingen.

The International Association of Labour History Institutions (IALHI) is pleased to announce further details about the 56th Annual Conference of the IALHI, which will take place at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Berlin from 9 to 11 September under the theme "The Shared Responsibility of Memory: Maintaining Relations between Heritage Institutions and their Communities".

The Provisional Program, the registration form and an overview with hotel options to help you organise your trip to Berlin can be found on our website: https://ialhi.org/content/56th-annual-conference

Please fill out the registration form and send it until 28 August via e-mail at public.history@fes.de

We look forward to seeing you at the conference in Berlin!
 

Contact person

Nélson Pereira Pinto
executive assistant
info@ialhi.org

Organiser: Institute of History, Jagiellonian University Kraków Postcode: 31-007 City: Kraków Country: Poland Takes place: In attendance Dates: 18.02.2027 - 20.02.2027 Deadline: 01.10.2026  

In the mid-20th century, the world remained deeply divided – both politically and economically. The Iron Curtain, colonialism, and economic backwardness marked various boundaries. Yet in this divided world, the same process could be observed in various places: migration from rural areas to cities, and global urbanisation. Although this phenomenon has accompanied humanity ever since cities first emerged, from the 1930s onwards – and particularly after the Second World War – there was an unprecedented acceleration: the second, after nineteenth-century urbanisation, such a rapid and irreversible social change.

During the workshop, we aim to examine this change from a grassroots perspective, focusing primarily on human experience – the ‘lives’ of those at the centre of migration processes, interwoven with political and economic contexts, as well as global change – the ‘system’ with its geopolitical and economic mechanisms.

The workshop, therefore, aims to analyse the processes by which ‘ordinary people’ enter urban, culturally heterogeneous social environments in various parts of the world. The global revolutionary transformation observed between the 1940s and 1970s affected ways of working, communicating, moving about and consuming, resulting in fundamental social changes. We believe that, despite specific contexts, this shared global experience of ‘becoming urban’ and/or ‘remaining rural’ can be identified, compared and summarised. We therefore wish to highlight the agency and actions of ‘ordinary people’ within these global processes and analyse them from a microhistorical perspective – drawing on biographical, local and intergenerational perspectives. We are interested in the origins of urban values and norms that we now take for granted, within politically and economically diverse systems. We encourage you to focus, amongst other things, on the functioning of the family, education, work, the consumption of goods and media, spatial and social mobility, discrimination and racism.

We invite researchers from various academic disciplines (including history, sociology, anthropology, migration studies, and economics) to submit proposals for presentations that fit within the framework outlined above and address one or more of the following topics:

- migration to cities in individual biographies and intergenerational experiences
- mechanisms of migration to cities and transnational/transcontinental biographies (particularly between socialist and capitalist countries)
- the impact of policies and ideologies on migration experiences
- the relationship between horizontal and vertical social mobility: mechanisms of advancement or degradation; emancipation through migration
- mechanisms for creating and maintaining social hierarchies, practices of discrimination
- social mobility and shame in rural-urban migrations
- mechanisms and models of migration: chain migrations, commuting, migration networks
- means of communication and transmission of information
- rural-urban migration and gender order

We particularly encourage you to submit papers on your ongoing research and research projects.

Abstract (up to 250 words) and a short bio of the author should be sent by 1 October 2026 to the address rural.urban.biographies@gmail.com
The notification of acceptance will be sent in the second half of October 2026.
Participants of the workshop will be asked to share working versions or extended abstracts of their papers (3-5 pages) no later than the end of January 2027.
The organisers will provide accommodation and board during the workshop. There will be no participation fee.

We are delighted to announce that the keynote talk at the workshop will be delivered by Professor Ewald Fire (Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen), author of the book Ein Hof und Elf Geschwister. Der stille Abschied vom bäuerlichen Leben in Deutschland, which won the Deutscher Sachbuch Preis for the best non-fiction book of 2023!

The workshop is part of the research project Globalising Upper Silesia. Migration from Rural Areas to Cities in the Global North, South and East (“Oberschlesien transkontinental: Land-Stadt-Migrationen im globalen Norden, Süden und Osten / Górny Śląsk transkontynentalnie. Migracje ze wsi do miast na Globalnej Północy, Południu i Wschodzie”), a joint project between the Institute of History at the Jagiellonian University and the Institute of History at Ruhr University Bochum, supported by the Polish-German Science Foundation from 2025 to 2028.

Organisers:
Marcin Jarząbek (JU Kraków)
Andrzej Michalczyk (RUB Bochum)
Zofia Strzyż (JU Kraków)

Contact

rural.urban.biographies@gmail.com

by Bastian Matteo Scianna

Katharina Focke (1922–2016) war seit ihrer Jugend eine begeisterte Europäerin. In den 1960er-Jahren fand sie ihren Weg in die SPD und war von 1969 bis 1972 als Parlamentarische Staatssekretärin im Bundeskanzleramt und vor allem für die Europapolitik zuständig. 1979 wurde sie Mitglied im Europäischen Parlament und Europa blieb ihr Lebensthema. An Focke zeigt sich exemplarisch der große Einfluss der Europaverbände und informeller Zirkel auf die deutsche Europapolitik. Zudem steht sie für eine integrationsfreundliche Strömung innerhalb der SPD. An der Seite von Willy Brandt fungierte Focke aufgrund ihrer engen persönlichen Bindung zum Kanzler als europapolitische Antreiberin der sozial-liberalen Koalition.

Bastian Matteo Scianna: Madame Europe: Katharina Focke, die SPD und die europäische Einigung (Beiträge aus dem Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, Heft 26), Bonn: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung 2026 (Link zur Publikation)

by Martin Schulz

Wilhelm Liebknecht, dessen Geburtstag sich am 29. März 2026 zum 200. Mal jährte, gehört zu den prägenden Persönlichkeiten der deutschen Sozialdemokratie. Martin Schulz würdigt Liebknechts lebenslangen Einsatz für Demokratie, soziale Gerechtigkeit und politische Teilhabe sowie seine Rolle beim Aufbau einer starken, international orientierten Arbeiterbewegung. Er zeigt die Aktualität seiner Ideen angesichts heutiger Herausforderungen wie sozialer Ungleichheit, demokratischer Gefährdungen und globaler Konflikte.

Martin Schulz: 200 Jahre Wilhelm Liebknecht. Wegbereiter für Freiheit und Solidarität (Beiträge aus dem Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, Heft 27),  Bonn: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung 2026 (Link zur Publikation).

Organiser: Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security
Postcode: 1067
Country: Hungary
Findet statt: Digital event
Date: 30.11.2026
Deadline: 30.11.2026
Website: https://www.abtl.hu/english/

The annual English language issue (2026/4.) of Betekintő looks back on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. This is perhaps the most significant event in the contemporary Hungarian history: every subsequent political system — the Kádár regime and the politicians of the 1989–90 transition — treated it as a point of reference. Indeed, in today’s fast-changing Hungarian public discourse, 1956 is once again taking on symbolic significance.
During the days of the revolution, or in

Revolution in Hungary: Impact and Influence on the Countries of the Soviet Bloc and the Socialist Camp

The annual English language issue (2026/4.) of Betekintő looks back on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. This is perhaps the most significant event in the contemporary Hungarian history: every subsequent political system — the Kádár regime and the politicians of the 1989–90 transition — treated it as a point of reference. Indeed, in today’s fast-changing Hungarian public discourse, 1956 is once again taking on symbolic significance.

During the days of the revolution, or in the period of the subsequent repressions, world-renowned philosophers and writers, such as Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, had to revise their previous ideas and theses on power, society, and the communist system. The 1956 Hungarian Revolution also had an impact on French and Italian domestic politics through the destabilization of the communist parties there. While much research has been done on the regional impact and influence of the revolution, there is still no comprehensive overview of its consequences in the countries of the Soviet bloc and the socialist camp.

1956 did not bring about any immediate, decisive change in these countries. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to ask whether the events influenced social movements, the tone of the press, ideology, and the thinking of political leaders. Did the events prompt the authorities to take action against those who wanted to respond to the events in Hungary? What was the connection between the impact of the Hungarian Revolution and the regional, geopolitical, and ideological changes of the time, such as the Warsaw Pact, the 20th Congress of the CPSU, the de-Stalinization process, and the Suez Crisis?

It is questionable whether the Hungarian Revolution emerged as a real point of reference, or a significant factor in contemporary social or political reception, or if it was merely a pretext in the context of internal processes that were already underway. It is also worth considering over what time scale the effects of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution manifested themselves in each country: whether the memory of the revolution could be measured in weeks, months, or even years or decades. The fourth issue of Betekintő (2026) aims to contribute to academic discourse by incorporating new research findings from ÁBTL research fellows. It also opens the floor to colleagues from institutions of the European Network of Official Authorities in Charge of Secret Police Files.

With this call for papers, Betekintő wishes to contribute to the further development of a wide-ranging exchange of views. To include in this year’s thematic issue, the editorial team are looking for studies and reviews of related publications that also take state security into consideration and add new perspectives to the academic discourse on the topic.

The abstracts of up to 300 words should be sent by the deadline below. The maximum length of papers is 40,000 characters (including spaces). Please note that only manuscripts prepared in accordance with our citation guidelines (Chicago Manuel of Style: Notes and Bibliography Style) will be accepted. For more information, please click here: https://www.betekinto.hu/en/for_our_authors

Abstract submission deadline: July 31, 2026.
Manuscript submission deadline: November 30, 2026.
Please send abstracts and manuscripts to the official email address of the editorial office: betekinto@abtl.hu

Contact person

Adrienn Joó

Organiser: Historians of the German Association for American Studies (GAAS), Akademie für Politische Bildung, Tutzing; Raphael Rössel / Jana Dunz-Keck, GHI Washington
Host: Akademie für Politische Bildung
Postcode: 82327
City: Tutzing
Country: Deutschland
Takes place: In attendance
Dates: 11.06.2027 - 13.06.2027
Deadline: 31.10.2026
Website: https://app.smartsheet.eu/b/form/019eadbd37d6732aa203f31d481df30f

In the 2020s, the United States has witnessed cases of violence against politicians, activists and political institutions with a seemingly ever rising frequency. At the same time, political scientist Robert Pape has described the United States as entering an “era of violent populism”—a period in which political leaders increasingly harness and perform violence as a central mode of asserting power. Yet violence in politics and violence against politicians is hardly new for a country that lost four presidents and dozens of federal officials to assassinations. Violence has shaped the American experience and U.S. social dynamics, for instance, as an integral part of slavery, the displacement of indigenous people, domestic terrorism, lynching and prevalent (mass) shootings—to list only a few examples. Likewise, violence runs through the cultural imagination of the nation—from frontier mythology to Westerns, from heroic war narratives to the glorification of retribution in political discourse.

In light of ongoing debates about political, but also racial, gender-based and other forms of violence in the United States, the 2027 GAAS Historians’ Meeting invites papers that revisit the extensive scholarship on violence in the U.S. and interrogate the historical roots and evolving expressions of violence across American life. This also means that we intend to analyze which types of behavior were classed and perceived as “violent” and as legitimate or illegitimate during which specific historical moments. As historians, we aim to debate trajectories of violence within U.S. society and, while doing so, also revisit the separation of violence during war and during peacetime. Analytically, we aim to debate if and how more recent concepts like Rob Nixon’s slow violence, coined with reference to the effects of environmental degradation and climate change, can invigorate how historians think about violence.

At the same time, we welcome contributions from various disciplines and fields such as political science, sociology, literary and cultural studies, art history, and anthropology to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue around the theme. We are particularly interested in discussing methodological questions that sit at the intersection of various disciplines. In what ways have media technologies shaped the perception, but also the witnessing, documentation, and circulation of violence? What is the relationship between entertainment, spectacle, and the normalization of violence in American culture?

For this year’s annual meeting of the GAAS’s historians, we invite papers that critically engage with social and political histories of violence in U.S. history. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Histories of Violence in Politics (e.g., rhetorical references to violence in political discourse, violence in the political process, violence against politicians)
Histories of Wartime Violence (specifically in its relation to violence during peacetime)
Histories of Environmental Change and Violence
The relation of violence to social hierarchies, e.g., as it pertains to gender, race, dis/ability, and other categories
Histories of Everyday Violence (e.g., domestic violence/intimate partner violence, violent initiations, violence in care facilities)
Please send an abstract for your paper (500 words max.) and a short bio (150 words max.) as one PDF file to the conference organizers by October 31, 2026 using the submission portal. You will be notified by December 1, 2026.

Gießen/Germany

Veranstalter: Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen; Archiv der sozialen Demokratie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung; Universitätsstadt Gießen (Aula, Universitätshauptgebäude, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen)
Ausrichter: Aula, Universitätshauptgebäude, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
PLZ: 35390
Ort: Gießen
Land: Deutschland
Findet statt: In Präsenz
Vom - Bis: 05.11.2026 - 06.11.2026
Deadline: 19.10.2026

Am 29. März 1826 wurde Wilhelm Liebknecht in Gießen geboren. Die Stadt Gießen nutzt diesen 200. Geburtstag für ein Wilhelm-Liebknecht-Jahr, in dem mittels verschiedener Events einem „Gründervater“ der Sozialdemokratie erinnert und zentrale Anliegen Liebknechts unter Gegenwartsperspektiven beleuchtet werden.

Als Teil dieses Wilhelm-Liebknecht-Jahrs richten die Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, das Archiv der sozialen Demokratie und die Universitätsstadt Gießen eine interdisziplinäre wissenschaftliche Konferenz aus, auf der über Wilhelm Liebknecht und vier für Liebknecht zentrale politische Felder diskutiert werden soll: Demokratie, Krieg/Frieden, Bildung und Publizistik. Als Teil des Wilhelm-Liebknecht-Jahrs möchten wir mit der Konferenz Forschungen anregen und dazu einladen, über die Geschichte der Arbeiter:innenbewegung sowie vor deren Hintergrund über die Probleme der Gegenwart zu diskutieren.

Die vier inhaltlichen Perspektiven auf Wilhelm Liebknecht (Demokratie, Krieg/Frieden, Bildung, Publizistik) sind anschlussfähig an die Gegenwart – nicht in dem Sinne, dass Positionen und Analysen Wilhelm Liebknechts schlicht fortgeschrieben werden könnten, sondern insoweit, als es sich um anhaltende gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen und Konflikte handelt.

Im Anschluss an die Veranstaltung gibt es die Möglichkeit, gemeinsam die Ausstellung zu Wilhelm Liebknecht im Museum für Gießen (Altes Schloss) zu besuchen. https://liebknecht200.de/digitale-ausstellung/.

Die Teilnahme ist kostenlos. Wir bitten um Anmeldungen bis zum 19.10.2026 unter demokratie-made-in-giessen@uni-giessen.de.

Programm

Donnerstag, 5.11.2026

12:30 Uhr
Ankommen/Imbiss

13:00 Uhr
Begrüßung und Einführung

13:15 Uhr
Keynote
Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam)

14:15 Uhr
Pause

14:30 Uhr
"Politischer Protest"

Jannik Schindler (Gießen): Wilhelm Liebknecht und der Auszug der Gießener Studierenden nach Staufenberg 1846

Johannes Diesing (Gießen): Staufenberg: Öffentlichkeit demonstrativ herstellen

Claudio Steiger (Heidelberg): „Bürgerliche Geschworne haben uns verurtheilt […].“ Der Leipziger Hochverratsprozess von 1872 als sozialer Konflikt – historische und gegenwärtige Perspektiven

16:15 Uhr
Pause

16:45 Uhr
"Erinnerungspraktiken"

Susanne Kitschun (Berlin): Wechselwirkungen zwischen Gedenkpraktiken zum 18. März und Liebknechts Publizistik zur Märzrevolution

Christopher Wimmer (Berlin): Wilhelm Liebknecht und die Pariser Kommune. Zum Verhältnis der deutschen Sozialdemokratie zum Aufstand in Paris von 1871

Markus Bürgi (Zürich): Wilhelm Liebknechts „Geschichte der französischen Revolution“ – eine unbekannte Schrift

Valentin Johannes Hemberger (Gießen): Remembering Wilhelm Liebknecht. Erinnerungspraxen zwischen Verstehen, Verkulten, An- und Abwenden

18:45 Uhr
Pause

19:00 Uhr
Evening Talk mit Udo Bullmann (Gießen): Wilhelm Liebknecht – eine persönliche Spurensuche in Paris und Wien

20:00 Uhr
Buffett und Empfang

Freitag, 6.11.2026

09:00 Uhr
"Krieg und Frieden"

Sebastian Striethorst (Gießen): Wie sieht eine sozialistische Friedenspolitik im 21. Jahrhundert aus?

Roundtable der Zeitschrift „Junge Perspektiven ds“: Zwischen den Sicherheiten. Linke Perspektiven im Spannungsfeld zwischen Militarisierung und internationaler Solidarität
Carl Julius Reim (Junge Perspektiven) / Laura Clarissa Loew (Junge Perspektiven) / Lisa Heidenreich (Studentin, Frankfurt) / Pawel Matusz (Doktorand, Regensburg) / Olha Lushankina (Ukrainische Linke Initiative)

11:00 Uhr
Pause

11.30 Uhr
"Bildungsaufstieg und -abstieg"

Ingrid Miethe (Gießen): „Von Natur bin ich Schulmeister“. Wilhelm Liebknecht als Pädagoge und Bildungspolitiker

Frerk Blome (Dortmund): Aufstieg durch Bildung? Versprechen, Paradoxien und die Kehrseite sozialer Mobilität

12:45 Uhr
Pause/Buffett

13:45 Uhr
Wie groß ist Deutschland und was ist das?

Georg Fülberth (Marburg): Einheit ohne Demokratie. Der Kampf Wilhelm Liebknechts gegen Otto von Bismarck

Oliver Bahl (Jena): Revolution oder Rechtsruck? Arbeitermilieus in Thüringen 1918-1933

15:00 Uhr
Abschluss

Kontakt

Anmeldung: demokratie-made-in-giessen@uni-giessen.de
Weitere Informationen: Stefan.Mueller@fes.de

Crime, Punishment and Mercy: Granting Pardon from the Early Modern Period to the Present

Venue: Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Legal Unity & Pluralism”, University of Münster, 48143 Münster, Germany, 15 – 16 April 2027.

Organisation: PD Dr. Beate Althammer, Trier University / Humboldt University Berlin.

Deadline for Proposals: 15 September 2026.

Around 1800, criminal justice systems changed profoundly in most of Europe (and beyond). The division of powers and reformed penal statutes endeavoured to make prosecution more rational, uniform and regular. Nevertheless, courts did not always have the final say: The centuries-old royal prerogative of mercy remained a much-used instrument to commute or remit sentences by extrajudicial means in the nineteenth century, and it lives on in the privileges of heads of state until today. The right to grant pardon was not smoothly compatible, however, with the core principles of the modern legal order, whose emergence was one of the basic transformation processes of the nineteenth century. And hence it does not fit well into historical narratives that portray this century either as an era of progress towards liberal constitutionalism or critically as one of ever more systematic strategies to “discipline and punish” (Foucault). In early modern Europe, the royal prerogative to intervene in the course of justice in favour of individual offenders had drawn its legitimacy from religious motives and from the monarch’s sovereignty. But it was hard to reconcile with political conceptions that centred on the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and citizens’ equal status. No wonder, therefore, that it had been much damned as a feature of arbitrary absolutist government already in the Enlightenment period, and that the French Revolution had (temporarily) abolished it. Despite of that, the right to pardon survived and even thrived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as masses of pertinent files in the archives indicate. And even in the present, it sporadically makes headlines, as recently with regard to the USA. Many comments on the dubious pardons granted by President Donald Trump after his inauguration in January 2025 suggested that the power to do so was a remnant of monarchical despotism and an anomaly in a state under the rule of law. All the more, this poses the question why it still persists throughout the world.  

While there exists by now a rich historiography on the royal prerogative of mercy in medieval and early modern Europe, we know much less about the evolution of this facet of criminal justice after the epochal threshold around 1800. An exception to some extent are works on the death penalty. Another exception are studies that, within the framework of transitional justice research, have analysed the controversies about pardons and amnesties for war criminals, collaborators and human rights violators in the aftermaths of dictatorships and armed conflicts since the Second World War. Yet, large blind spots remain, especially regarding the use of pardons as a corrective to, or an encroachment on, the ordinary course of justice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians of this period have often postulated that the penalisation of deviance should be understood as a negotiation process with many participants; but negotiations about mercy after the court verdict have found surprisingly little attention.  

This workshop takes up the issue. It aims to bring together researchers who are working (or have worked) on the history of pardoning in the modern age, be it in European or extra-European settings. The main focus will be on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but in order to transcend conventional disciplinary boundaries, contributions on the late Ancien Régime and on the contemporary period are welcome as well. Questions of particular interest that might be addressed include (but are not limited to):

- Continuities and Changes: Can we, in the long term, observe shifts in the quantitative use, in the functional logic and in the procedural handling of the power to pardon? When and how has the differentiation between pardons and amnesties evolved? 

- Controversies about the prerogative of mercy: On what grounds has it been criticised or legitimatised since the dawn of modernity? Who argued pro and contra? What benefits and dangers have been associated with it?

- Pardons and political culture: How have governing elites used pardons (and amnesties) to stage authority and rulership symbolically? Can we, in a comparative perspective, observe that the more or less conspicuous granting of pardon relates to specific political regimes or legal traditions?

- Selectivity of granting and denying pardon: Have particular offences and/or social groups (differentiated by age, gender, class, ethnicity, etc.) had greater chances to receive a pardon than others have?

- Petitions for pardon as a means of appeal and negotiation: Who submitted pardon petitions with which rhetoric and reasoning? What can these petitions tell us about how ordinary people experienced the criminal justice system, about variable conceptions of justice and about the social networks of convicts? How can petitions, or large-scale series of petitions, be analysed meaningfully? 

- Individual case stories: Course of events, actors, significance and consequences.

The workshop is organised in cooperation with the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Legal Unity & Pluralism” (https://www.uni-muenster.de/EViR/en/index.shtml) and will take place at the Kolleg’s premises in Münster on the 15-16 April 2027 (from Thursday afternoon to Friday afternoon). It will offer a forum to discuss research projects in a small group of about 10 to 15 participants. The language of the Workshop will be English, unless all participants should turn out to be German speakers.

Interested researchers (of all career stages) are invited to submit proposals for a presentation of ca. 20 minutes length. Please send proposals to Beate Althammer, althamme@uni-trier.de, by 15 September 2026. These should include a working title, an abstract of 300-500 words, and a short bio of 150-200 words. Submitters will be notified by the end of September 2026. The Kolleg will fund accommodation and travel costs for speakers (with certain limitations).

We aim to publish either an edited volume or a journal special issue based on the papers presented at the workshop.

For questions, please contact: PD Dr. Beate Althammer, althamme@uni-trier.de.

Halle (Saale)/Germany   Veranstalter: Wiebke Wiede, Universität Trier; Vincent Streichhahn / Jens Elberfeld, Universität Halle; Jan Kellershohn, Institut für Landesgeschichte am LDA Sachsen-Anhalt; Till Kössler, Universität zu Köln; Stefan Müller, Archiv der sozialen Demokratie; Niklas Venema, Universität Leipzig; Johanna Wolf, Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie; German Labour History Association; Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung; Hans-Böckler-Stiftung; Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (Englischer Saal, Franckesche Stiftungen) Ausrichter: Englischer Saal, Franckesche Stiftungen PLZ: 06110 Ort: Halle (Saale) Land: Deutschland Findet statt: In Präsenz Vom - Bis: 11.11.2026 - 13.11.2026 Deadline: 20.10.2026  

Die vierte Tagung der German Labour History Association (GLHA) befasst sich mit der Bildungsgeschichte von und für Arbeiter:innen in sozial- und kulturgeschichtlicher Perspektive vom 19. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert. Die Arbeiter- und Arbeiterinnenbewegung sowie die mit ihr verbundenen sozialen und politischen Bewegungen (wie Sozialdemokratie oder proletarische Frauenbewegung) waren immer auch Bewegungen, die im Kern versuchten, durch Bildung Selbstermächtigung und alternative politische Handlungsformen zu erreichen. Gleichwohl unterlag Bildung von oder/und für Arbeiter:innen in der sozialen und politischen Praxis stets divergierenden, gesellschaftlichen und individuellen Interessen.

Die Tagung soll die Bildung von „Arbeiterinnen“ und „Arbeitern“ (in einem weiten Begriffsverständnis) mit einem Fokus auf die Verflechtungen von Arbeit, Bildung und Ermächtigung beleuchten. Im Zentrum steht die Frage, wie Arbeiter:innen nicht nur als Akteur:innen sozialer Bewegungen, sondern auch als Produzent:innen und Träger:innen von Ideen und Konzepten sichtbar gemacht werden können.

Programm

Mittwoch, 11.11.2026

Vorher: Mitgliederversammlung German Labour History Association

15:30 Uhr: Begrüßung und Einführung: Sibylle Marti, Wiebke Wiede

15:45–16:45
Moderation: Sibylle Marti

Keynote
Sabine Reh, Zwischen Pädagogisierung von Strukturproblemen und Selbstregulation. Bildungsmaßnahmen für Erwerbslose (1914–1933)

16:45–17:00 Uhr: Pause

17:00–18:15 Uhr: Arbeiter:innenbildung in der DDR
Moderation: Till Kössler

Maike Sophia Baader/Sandra Koch, Die Darstellung und Thematisierung der lesenden und sich bildenden Arbeiter:innen in Bildungsmedien der DDR

Christopher Hölzel, Vom humanistischen Bildungsideal zur musealen Praxis: Museumspädagogik und soziale Öffnung in der DDR am Beispiel der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin

Abendessen im Halleschen Brauhaus (Selbstzahlerbasis)

Donnerstag, 12.11.2026

09:00–10:45 Uhr: Angleichung-Abgrenzung: Strategien gesellschaftlicher Durchsetzung
Moderation: Johanna Wolf

Ingrid Miethe, „Wie gewinnen wir die Jugend für den Sozialismus?“ Die Kontroverse um die sozialistische Kinder- und Jugendbildung im Wilhelminischen Deutschland.

Claudio Steiger, „So schritt die Agitation frisch und freudig vorwärts.“ Debatte und Praxis der Arbeiterinnenbildung um 1900 (Berlin/Zürich)

Jan zum Mallen, Rechtliche Bildung und Rechtsberatung im Deutschen Landarbeiterverband (ca. 1890–1933)

10:45–11:00 Uhr: Pause

11:00–12:45 Uhr: Umgang mit Differenz
Moderation: Niklas Venema

Jan Kellershohn/Daniel Pöhl, Differenz ausbilden. Die Umschulungswerkstätten für Siedler und Auswanderer in Bitterfeld (1931–1945)

Selina Breitbach, „Arbeitsplatz Deutschland“: Migrant Training Programs in West-German Companies, 1955–1973

Manuel Lautenbacher, Arbeiter:innenbildung zwischen Multinationalität und Nationalisierung. Die sozialistische Bukowiner „Bildungsgemeinschaft“ 1926–1931

12:45–14:30 Uhr: Mittagspause

14:30–16:15 Uhr: Bürgerliche und konfessionelle Kontexte
Moderation: Vincent Streichhahn

Marcus Gräser, Bürgerliche Sozialreform und Arbeiter:innenbildung. Deutschland und die USA im Vergleich, 1860–1920

Malte Ebner von Eschenbach, Artikulation vor Position. Die Bildungspraxis im Karlsruher Arbeiterdiskussionsklub

Jacopo Ciammariconi, Politische Bildung, Arbeit und Konflikt: Die FIM-CISL und die Entstehung einer neuen Gewerkschaftskultur

16:15–16:45 Uhr: Pause

16:45–17:45 Uhr: Verleihung Thomas-Welskopp-Dissertationspreis

18:00 Uhr: Kleiner Empfang

Freitag, 13.11.2026

09:00–10:45 Uhr: Subjektivierung und Selbstbildung
Moderation: Jens Elberfeld

Susanne Boehm/Adrian Weiß, „… aufwärts aus der seelischen und geistigen Not […] und aufwärts aus der wirtschaftlichen Not!“ – Gewerkschaftliche Adressierung und Eigensinn junger Arbeiter⁎innen in der frühen Bundesrepublik (1948–1955)

Daniel Rothenburg, Learning by doing: Selbstbildung und Wissensvermittlung in der englischen Genossenschaftsbewegung, ca. 1850er–1870er

Hilke Hammer, „Lernt selbst die sozialistischen Ideen kennen, damit ihr sie lehren könnt.“ Die politische Bildung zu Anti-/Militarismus in der Zeitschrift Die Gleichheit. Zeitschrift für die Interessen der Arbeiterinnen (1892–1923)

10:45–11:00 Uhr: Pause

11:00–12:45 Uhr: Transformationsphasen
Moderation: Stefan Müller

Henning Podulski, Literaturvermittelte politische Bildung aus der Werkstatt. Der Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt zwischen kollektiver Literaturproduktion und politischer Bildungsarbeit

Yves Müller, „Arbeit und Leben“ in der Transformation. Gewerkschaftliche Erwachsenenbildung und Zivilgesellschaft am Beispiel der HVHS „Akademie Haus Sonneck“ in Sachsen-Anhalt, 1990–2003

Leandra Ulrike Oles, Arbeiterinnenbildung jenseits institutioneller Räume: Informelle Lernprozesse, Selbstermächtigung und politisches Handeln in der Fraueninitiative Rheinhausen (1987/88)

12:45-13:00: Pause

13:00–13:30: Abschluss

Kontakt

Wiebke Wiede, wiede@uni-trier.de

Organiser: International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH) (AK-Bildungshaus Jägermayrhof) Host: AK-Bildungshaus Jägermayrhof Location: Römerstraße 98 Funded by: Chamber of Labour, Upper Austria; Chamber of Labour, Vienna; Institute for Historical Social Research; Friedrich Ebert Foundation; Austrian Society for Political Education; City of Linz Postcode: 4020 City: Linz Country: Austria Takes place: In attendance Dates: 17.09.2026 - 19.09.2026 Website: https://www.ith.or.at/en/cfp-61st-ith-conference-working-nature-exploring-intersections-of-labour-history-and-political-ecology/   This year's 61st International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH) brings together labour history and political ecology to explore the connections between work, environmental change, capitalism, and ecological crises.  

The bundle of human-made ecological crises has reached a point where most earth scientist see an actual breaching of ecological thresholds, not only in relation to climate change but also six of nine processes for which “planetary boundaries” have been defined. In this context, the interdisciplinary field of political ecology (which dates to at least the 1970s) has experienced a spectacular boom. In a certain sense, it has become the interdisciplinary critical social science of our days, a field in which both academic and political concerns converge. In the English-speaking world, political ecology has proved to be strongly inflected by historical reasoning, with several authors highlighting the entanglements between material extraction, energy carriers (particularly fossil ones), ecological over-use, capitalist economic development, and exploitation.

While the history of work and labour relations have a place in these studies, many commentators have noticed an ongoing non-communication between labour history and political ecology. Despite such (self-)critical assessments, the last decades already have seen numerous instances scholarship at the intersection of “labour” and “environmental history” as well as “political ecology”. It thus seems both timely and necessary to bring global labour history and historical political ecology into a more structured and fruitful dialogue, to assess existing research at the intersection of both and to explore further avenues of research. While open to a broad spectrum of topics and approaches – from the carbon nexus to agrarian ecologies, from toxic through contested to multispecies labour –, this conference will insist on “labour” as one major category of differentiation in past and current ecological predicaments.

Programme

Thursday, 17 September 2026

Registration at the venue begins at 15:00

13.30–15.30 Meeting of the ITH Board and International Scientific Committee

15.30–16.00 Break

16.00–17.00 General Assembly of the ITH

17.30–18.00 Conference Opening
Therese Garstenauer, ITH President
Martina Jungert, Chamber of Labour of Upper Austria
TBA, City of Linz

18.00–19.30 Keynote lecture
Jason Moore (Binghamton University): The Climate-Class Conjuncture, or, the Worldwide Class Struggle in the Web of Life: Climate and Class on the 'Real Ground of History’

19.30–21.00 Welcome Reception by the Mayor of Linz

Friday, 18 September 2026

09.00–11.00 Panel I: Carbon Nexus
Chair and comment: On Barak

Azar Kafaee (University of Michigan): Oil extraction and agrarian enclosure – tribe and British Petroleum in southern Iran 1900–1950

Joe Rigby (University of Chester): Cumbrian coal and capitalist world-ecology: social and ecological frictions through changing commodity regimes

Jary Koch (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam): The Everyday Life of Material Transformation: Labour and Ecology in the West German Chemical Industry, 1960s to 1980s

Limin Teh (Leiden University): Between Labor Process and Socionature: Workplace, Mechanization, and Coal Mining in Japanese Manchuria

11.00–11.15 Coffee Break

11.15–13.45 Panel II: Agrarian Ecologies
Chair and comment: Marcel van der Linden

Kartika Natalia Manurung (University of Bonn): Spatialised Labour Regimes in Indonesian Palm Oil Plantations

John Emrys Morgan & Nye Merrill-Glover (both University of Bristol): Bodily ecologies in early modern wetlands

Harm Zwarts (University of Groningen): Who Controls the Seed? Farmers, Diversity Loss, and Unequal Power Relations in Dutch Agriculture c. 1930–1990

Matan Kaminer and Ayan Meer (both Queen Mary University London): Climate migration: Deconstructing a trope and reconstructing a politics

Tomasz Kargol (Jagiellonian University, Krakow): Political ecology and history of labour in Habsburg Galicia and southern Poland in the 19th and 20th century (up to 1939) on the example of hydrotechnical construction and melioration

13.45–15.00 Lunch

15.00–17.00 Panel III: Toxic Labour
Chair and comment: David Mayer

Clément Fontanarava (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne): Working Oil: An Environmental History of Labor at La Mède Refinery,France, 1934–1940

Bastien Cabot (Sciences Po): A variety of ‘labour environmentalism’? Facing industrial hazards in interwar Parisian suburbs

Alex Nagel (Independent Researcher, Amsterdam): Rebelling against the Environment and Equality: Political Ecology and Industrial Labor Resistance in the 1970s United States

Anusha Sundar (Columbia University): Making the Body Speak: Labour and Crisis in Madras, 1861–1874

17.00–17.15 Coffee Break

17.15–18.45 Panel IV: Contested Transitions
Chair and comment: Therese Garstenauer

Felix Wagenitz (University of Vienna): Politicising Production: Trade Union Opposition, Conversion Conflicts, and Workplace Power in the German Automobile Industry, 1970–1990

Girigan Gabriel (Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu, Romania): Dangerous and Precarious Forestry Labour in the Carpathian Mountains

Bridget Kenny and Simon Gush (both at University of the Witwatersrand): Of mine dumps, vegetables and container mountains: City Deep as space of capital, labour and nature in Johannesburg, South Africa

18.45–19.30 Dinner

19.30–20.30 Special Event
TBA

Invited guests:
Aaron Niederman, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation
Lukas Oberndorfer, Chamber of Labour of Vienna
Moderation: David Mayer

Saturday, 19 September 2026

09.00–11.00 Panel V: Multispecies Labour
Chair and comment: Ernst Langthaler

Juri Auderset (University of Bern): Knowing Nature Through Animal Work: Agroecological Workscapes and Contested Epistemologies of Laboring Animals in Switzerland, 1820s–1940s

Jelena Micić (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna): Working Nature in the Non-Aligned World: Animals, Labour, and Visual Surplus at the Leda Footwear and Plastics Industry

Jadon Nisly-Goretzki (University of Kassel): Working Cows, Their Peasants, and the River Meadows that Fed Them

Sanjay K. Paul (Harvard University): Yankee Pests: The 1864 "Army Worm" Infestation and the Ecology of Emancipation in the Mississippi Valley

11.00–11.15 Coffee Break

11.15–13.15 Panel VI: Embodied Ecologies
Chair and comment: Susan Zimmermann

Muhammed Junaid (University of Hyderabad): Ecologies of martiality: Labour, Political Ecology and making of Mappila soldiers in Colonial South Asia, 1896–1907

Adrian A. Smith (York University): Heat and Reigns of Terror: Agricultural Labour Regimes and Human-Planetary Boundaries

Anna Sailer (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen): The rise and fall of forest workers’ cooperatives in post-colonial India, 1950s–1970s

Marten Dondrop (Harvard University): Environmental risk and the comparability of labor: Colonial transport workers as risk-managers, c.1750–1850

13.15–14.30 Lunch

14.30–14.50 Final Remarks
On Barak (Tel Aviv) and Ernst Langthaler (Linz)

14.50–15.30 Concluding Debate
Moderation: Marcel van der Linden, David Mayer, and On Barak

Contact

Laurin Blecha (conference@ith.or.at)

Nuremberg/Germany   Organiser: DFG-Schwerpunkprogramm „Digitalisierung der Arbeitswelten“ Funded by: DFG Postcode: 90429 City: Nuremberg Country: Germany Takes place: In attendance Dates: 12.01.2027 - 14.01.2027 Deadline: 30.09.2026 Website: https://digitalisierung-der-arbeitswelten.de/eventreader/work-transform-repeat-2027  

Nach der ersten Work.Transform? Repeat! -Tagung 2024 in Berlin möchten wir die dort angestoßenen Debatten nun am Ende des SPP fortführen und vertiefen. Mit der Work. Transform? Repeat! 2027 rücken wir den Begriff der „digitalen Transformation“ noch systematischer in den Mittelpunkt. Vom 12.–14. Januar 2027 diskutieren wir theoretische, empirische und methodische Perspektiven auf Transformationsdynamiken und ihre Folgen für Arbeit, Organisationen und Gesellschaft.
Wir laden zur Einreichung von Abstracts (ca. 500 Wörter, Deutsch oder Englisch) ein. Einreichungen sind bis zum 30.09.2026 über folgenden Link möglich: https://lnkd.in/dEbyEFyv

Call for Papers: Work. Transform? Repeat! 2027

Über sechs Jahre haben sich mehr als 30 Einzelprojekte im DFG-Schwerpunktprogramm 2267 „Digitalisierung der Arbeitswelten“ mit den Veränderungen von Arbeit, Organisation und Gesellschaft auseinandergesetzt. Nach der ersten Work.Transform? Repeat! -Tagung 2024 in Berlin möchten wir die dort angestoßenen Debatten nun am Ende des SPP fortführen und vertiefen.

Allein die Dynamik um KI in den letzten Jahren scheint nahezulegen, Digitalisierung und digitale Transformation synonym zu verwenden. Der oft disziplinäre Blick auf einzelne Technikphänomene und Geschwindigkeitsdynamiken alleine aber erklärt wenig. Unser DFG-Schwerpunktprogramm fragt mit einem interdisziplinären Blick in die Arbeitswelt daher nach den gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen für die und die Bearbeitungsformen der Digitalisierung und ob sich deren Dynamik und Wirkmacht als systemische Transformation fassen lässt.

Anknüpfend an unsere Ergebnisse aus der ersten Förderphase (Pfeiffer et al. 2024) ist es Ziel dieser Tagung, die damit zusammenhängenden Fragen in einem noch breiteren Kontext interdisziplinär zu verbinden und dabei soziologische, psychologische, wirtschaftswissenschaftliche, sozial-geographische, (wirtschafts-)informatische und historische Perspektiven auf Neukonfigurationen von Arbeit und Technik, auf vielschichtige Dynamiken der Transformation und auf veränderte Formen und Orte der Wertschöpfung zusammen zu bringen.

Willkommen sind Beiträge, die sich mit den transformativen Dynamiken der Digitalisierung der Arbeitswelt beschäftigen und Fragen wie diesen nachgehen:

- Was kann jeweils als transformativ eingeordnet werden und wie lässt sich dies empirisch und konzeptionell festmachen und methodisch erfassen?
- Wo und anhand welcher Phänomene lässt sich der Unterschied zwischen „normalem“ Wandel und Transformationsdynamik aufzeigen?
- Wie wird die digitale Transformation sozial vorbereitet, technisch ermöglicht, diskursiv ausgehandelt sowie gesellschaftlich bewältigt?
- Welche neuen Qualitäten, Brüche und Kontinuitäten sowie Pluritemporalitäten zeigen sich gegenüber informationstechnischen Vorläufern?
- Welche Wechselspiele lassen sich zwischen sozialen Akteuren, betrieblichen Strukturen und gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhängen nachzeichnen
- Welche neuartigen Beziehungen und Dynamiken sich zwischen der Mikro-, Meso- und Makroebene lassen sich identifizieren?
- Welche theoretischen Konzepte, disziplinären Begriffe und Theoriegrammatiken helfen beim Verständnis des Transformativen?

Mit der Work. Transform? Repeat! 2027 rücken wir den Begriff der „digitalen Transformation“ noch systematischer in den Mittelpunkt. Vom 12.–14. Januar 2027 diskutieren wir theoretische, empirische und methodische Perspektiven auf Transformationsdynamiken und ihre Folgen für Arbeit, Organisationen und Gesellschaft.

Wir laden zur Einreichung von Abstracts (ca. 500 Wörter, Deutsch oder Englisch) ein. Einreichungen sind bis zum 30.09.2026 über folgenden Link möglich: https://lnkd.in/dEbyEFyv

Wir freuen uns auf Beiträge, die an die Diskussionen der ersten Tagung anknüpfen, neue Perspektiven eröffnen und Impulse für die weitere Auseinandersetzung mit digitaler Transformation setzen.

Link zur Homepage des SPP: https://lnkd.in/dvwNKqaQ

Kontakt

manuel.nicklich@fau.de

Subject Fields: Economic History / Studies, Environmental History / Studies, Labor History / Studies, Political History / Studies, Social History / Studies

Call for Papers Entangled Histories Seminar Series 2026–2027 Theme: Borders and Sustainability: Human and Natural Resources across Time and Space

Following the success of the previous edition, the Entangled Histories Seminar Series invites abstracts for its 2026–2027 cycle.

This entire seminar series will be held fully online and will offer a publication opportunity with a leading global academic publisher for a selection of the most significant contributions.

We warmly welcome contributions from Labour History, Social and Economic History, Political Economy, Historical Sociology, Gender Studies, Oral History, and Industrial Archaeology, adopting an interdisciplinary, diachronic perspective that spans a wide chronological trajectory from prehistory and antiquity, through the medieval and early modern eras, up to the modern and contemporary periods. In alignment with H-Labor’s mission to foster international discussion on the history of workers, this series encourages proposals that investigate how working-class populations, guilds, trade unions, and migratory labourers negotiated, represented, and sustained their livelihoods in relation to ecological limits, resource allocation, and the shifting dynamics of territorial, institutional, and socioeconomic boundaries (borders).

Sustaining Labour: Boundaries, Working Lives, and Resource Extraction in History 

This edition explores sustainability not as a modern corporate framework, but as a critical historical issue centred on the long-term reproduction, survival, and resistance of human labour in the face of environmental limits and border enforcements. The series investigates these dynamics across several interconnected dimensions:

• Socio-Institutional Sustainability, Labour Scarcity, and Vulnerable Populations: The history of how communities managed the social and material sustainability of working populations (including rural labourers, early industrial workers, and particularly vulnerable groups such as children, women, and the elderly) during periods of economic transition, environmental crises, or plagues; the history of occupational health, foodways, and institutional welfare.
• Geopolitical Borders, Labour Mobility, and Migratory Frontiers: The impact of territorial boundaries, customs lines, and administrative partitions (with a particular interest in shifts before and after 1725) on the movement of workers; the history of seasonal migration, cross-border agricultural labour, maritime crews, and how physical borders conditioned access to employment and material resources.
• Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), Resource Commons, and Agrarian Labour: The historical analysis of the work involved in land, water, and forest management; how the generational knowledge of rural workers, miners, woodcutters, and smallholders regulated common-pool resources (the commons); the historical clashes between community-based sustainable work practices and the imposition of capitalistic borders or enclosures.
• Ecological Sustainability, Material Reuse, and the Work of Recycling: The environmental history of dangerous or intensive resource extraction (mining philosophies, logging, quarrying) and the physical toll on labourers; the material culture and social history of recycling, junk-picking, and the structural reuse of waste or industrial infrastructures by working-class communities.
• Textual Sustainability, Corporative Philology, and the Rewriting of Guild Regulations: The textual transmission, translation, and systematic reuse or adaptation of labour customary laws, merchant codes, guild statutes, and workshop regulations; how workers' rights and occupational parameters were written and rewritten across shifting linguistic, regional, and national frontiers.
• Global Elemental Theory, Humoral Ecology, and the Working Body: The history of ideas surrounding the working body's exposure to natural forces and environmental elements (earth, water, air, fire); how historical medical-dietetic systems or theories of bodily moisture/stamina were applied to maximise, regulate, or defend the health of manual labourers in toxic or demanding work environments.
• The Epistemological Status of Worker Folklore and Oral Histories: Methodological reflections on oral history, working-class memory, and local micro-histories; how regional working-class folklore, protest songs, vernacular weather adaptations, and trade myths served as alternative archives to document socio-environmental transformations and everyday resistance against border regimes.
• Symbolic, Visual, and Performing Arts of Labour Landscapes: Representations of work, physical effort, and socio-ecological boundaries in proletarian literature, early modern iconography, and company ledgers; the staging of labour conflicts or community thresholds in drama, and the modern media or cinematic representation (such as industrial films or social realism) of labour trauma and heritage.

At the heart of the series lies the concept of borders, understood as dynamic thresholds—whether geographic barriers, political lines, class divisions, or the conceptual boundaries separating free from unfree labor, text from body, and material resources from the human hands that extract them—that have historically mediated access to livelihoods, defined solidarity, and shaped the shared, entangled histories of global working societies.

Topics of Interest 

We welcome contributions from a wide range of academic disciplines, including:

• Labour History and Social History: History of trade unions, working-class movements, guild structures, slavery and unfree labour, strikes, working-class gender history, and the international circulation of labour philosophies.
• Economic History and Political Economy: History of capitalism, trade networks, resource monopolies, agrarian regimes (such as sharecropping or tenant farming), and the macro-economic management of human and natural resources.
• Environmental History and Historical Ecology: The environmental footprint of mining, deforestation, and industrialisation; the history of hydraulic labour, environmental hazards, and occupational safety.
• Folklore, Oral History, and Anthropology: Collecting and analysing workers' oral testimonies, memory studies of deindustrialisation, vernacular industrial culture, and the ethnography of working-class borderlands.
• Prehistory and Antiquity: Early divisions of labour, ancient mining operations, public works construction, resource management prior to state consolidation, and the archaeology of early human landscape adaptation and tool/material reuse.
• Medieval and Pre-Modern Studies: Monastic labour systems, feudal obligations, urban crafts, early maritime labour contracts, manuscript production as labour, and the material or textual reuse and rewriting of older regulatory traditions.
• Archaeology, Anthropology, and Material Culture: Industrial archaeology, field archaeology of worker settlements and housing, the material culture of borders, and the bioarchaeology of occupational stress, diet, and trauma.
• Art History, Architecture, and Heritage Studies: Iconography of labour, architectural history of factories, worker housing, and outposts, and the critical heritage preservation or exploitation of industrial and rural cultural landscapes.
• Media Studies, Cinema, and Theatre: The cinematic representation of working-class lives, strikes, and eco-trauma; the performance of labour and class thresholds in historical and contemporary drama; and the role of media in shaping collective historical memory.

Seminar Format & Schedule

• Format: Online seminar via Zoom (Approx. 30-minute presentation followed by discussion). Scheduling will take international time zones into account as much as possible.
• Schedule: October 2026 – Summer 2027.

Submission Guidelines & Selection Rules 

Proposals must be submitted in English and include the following details:

1. Title of the proposed paper.
2. Abstract (250–300 words).
3. Short biographical note (100–150 words).
4. Institutional affiliation (if any) or independent scholar status.
5. Contact email.
6. Preferred months of availability (between October 2026 and Summer 2027).

⚠️ MANDATORY ABSTRACT CRITERIA: The abstract submitted MUST clearly explain how the proposed paper intends to address and integrate the central core topics of the series: Borders (confini) and Sustainability (sostenibilità) within your specific labor historical, geographic, or socio-economic framework. Proposals that fail to explicitly address this conceptual intersection will not be considered.

⚠️ CRITICAL SUBMISSION REQUIREMENT: All submission materials (title, abstract explaining the approach to borders and sustainability, bio, affiliation, and availability) MUST be compiled and submitted into a SINGLE file (either .doc, .docx, or .pdf). Multiple attachments will not be considered.

Please submit your single-file proposal to: entangledhistories.seminars [@] outlook.com

Important Dates

• Deadline for abstracts: 31 August 2026
• Notification of acceptance: By 30 September 2026

Publication Opportunity A selection of the most significant contributions will be published in a special issue or in a dedicated edited volume with a major, world-leading academic publisher.

Contact Information

Organised by:

• Dr Maria Pia Ester Cristaldi (Üsküdar University)
• Dr Elisa Ramazzina (University of Insubria)

Under the patronage of:

The Faculty of Communication and the Master’s Programme in Media and Cultural Studies at Üsküdar University.

Contact Email: entangledhistories.seminars@outlook.com URL: https://sites.google.com/view/entangledhistories/home Attachments: CFP poster

Paris/France

L’objectif de cette journée d’étude est donc d’explorer, dans une perspective historique centrée sur le XXe siècle, les formes diverses qu’ont pu prendre la confrontation des projets éducatifs en favorisant le double prisme de la confrontation et de la circulation.

Présentation

L’école et le système éducatif ont une place particulière dans le débat politique en France. En même temps que l’école est un moyen de produire (ou de reproduire) une force de travail adaptée aux besoins évolutifs de l’économie, elle joue le rôle d’agent à la fois d’homogénéisation d’un corps social autour d’une culture commune, et de différenciation des groupes sociaux en son sein, selon une hiérarchie qui se légitime par le niveau et le contenu de la formation reçue. Mais elle est surtout intrinsèquement incluse dans des projets politiques plus généraux. Elle constitue l’interface entre les affrontements partisans, leurs fondements idéologiques et la réalisation concrète de leur programme.

L’oeuvre scolaire des républicains à la fin du XIXe siècle traduit par exemple la rupture entre les affaires publiques (l’État) et l’église catholique, appuyée sur une lecture du sens de l’Histoire comme triomphe progressif des Lumières, du savoir scientifique et positif, contre la croyance et l’obscurantisme, tout en démontrant, grâce à la gratuité par exemple, les bienfaits pour les masses d’une action politique du parti républicain au pouvoir. Sans renier ces fondements, le solidarisme des radicaux trouve dans l’école publique l’illustration de sa conception de l’échange contractuel entre intérêt public et intérêt privé. Les socialistes réformistes font de l’école unique le projet phare de leur synthèse entre lecture agonistique des rapports sociaux et visée isonomique des rapports civiques, c’est-à-dire de la relation des individus à l’État. L’aspiration au progrès social par la réduction des inégalités, le développement du « capital humain » comme nouveau vecteur de croissance, la lutte contre l’exclusion puis contre les discriminations, etc., qui occupent à divers moments le premier plan dans les projets politiques, se traduisent par des inflexions ou des réorientations des projets scolaires des partis.

Mais les forces politiques ne sont pas les seuls promoteurs de projets. Les enseignants, agents principaux de l’acte d’éducation, ont aussi, par le biais de leurs organisations syndicales, produit des discours et des projets de transformation de l’école. C’est d’autant plus le cas que ces projets servent de catalyseurs à l’affirmation de leur aspiration collective à une autonomie professionnelle, la dynamique de « professionnalisation ». La multiplication des syndicats, dont le modèle passe de l’unité corporative, emprunté à l’amicalisme, à la pluralité renforcée par l’implantation, à côté des grandes confédérations, d’organisations autonomes (FEN, devenue UNSA-éducation, FSU, Snalc…), induit aussi la multiplication des projets éducatifs au sein même du champ syndical. L’identification d’un syndicat à un projet, construit le plus souvent à partir d’une représentation particulière du rôle social de l’enseignant, des cultures professionnelles des différentes catégories, mais tenant aussi compte de leurs intérêts corporatifs, sert de moyen de légitimation des affrontements dans un secteur d’autant plus concurrentiel que la bataille pour la représentativité relative (des organisations les unes par rapport aux autres) conditionne les moyens de fonctionnement des syndicats.

Entre ces deux types d’acteurs collectifs, partis et syndicats, les relations peuvent être complexes, et ce d’autant plus que les enseignants constituent un groupe social ambivalent, distinct du monde ouvrier, base sociale a priori de la gauche d’origine socialiste, mais aussi des classes moyennes productives ou exerçant dans l’administration des fonctions de direction à divers niveaux, qui constituent la clientèle du radicalisme. Ils constituent un socle électoral solide, jusqu’à une période récente, des partis de gauche. Les syndicalistes enseignants sont d’ailleurs aussi souvent au moins jusqu’aux dernières années du XXe siècle, des militants politiques, plus ou moins investis de responsabilités dans les partis, et dont la parole peut avoir une influence dans la détermination des programmes partisans. La doctrine de l’indépendance syndicale, qui suppose que les organisations syndicales élaborent leurs orientations et leurs projets en-dehors des partis, induit plusieurs types de confrontations entre projets scolaires syndicaux et politiques : controverses et oppositions parfois, mais le plus souvent recherche de convergences ou de relais, voire élaborations non pas conjointes (bien que le cas existe, comme le Plan Langevin‑Wallon le démontre) mais susceptibles de circulation d’une sphère à l’autre.

À cela s’ajoute que le débat éducatif est aussi habité par des approches plus théoriques, qu’elles relèvent de l’analyse critique de l’état des choses ou de la construction individuelle de doctrines et pratiques pédagogiques ayant une visée réformatrice, c’est-à-dire se présentant comme modèle généralisable. La pré-existence d’une théorie de l’éducation, son développement plus ou moins autonome, avec ses propres lignes de fracture structurantes, influe sur les élaborations syndicales et partisanes souvent plus par le biais de la référence, voire de l’instrumentalisation, que de la transposition pratique des constructions théoriques.

L’objectif de cette journée d’études est donc d’explorer, dans une perspective historique centrée sur le XXe siècle, les formes diverses qu’ont pu prendre la confrontation des projets éducatifs en favorisant le double prisme de la confrontation et de la circulation.

Les communications s’intéresseront à la fois aux projets, à leur élaboration, leurs sources scientifiques et politiques, et à la mise en œuvre des réformes qui sont souvent des adaptations des projets théoriques ou des réalisations partielles, ainsi qu’à leur réception et à l’élaboration de contre-projets. Elles pourront aborder par exemple les thématiques de la démocratisation du système scolaire, de sa gestion, des méthodes pédagogiques et contenus d’enseignement, de la formation et la qualification des personnels, etc.

Leur organisation se fera autour de cinq axes chronologiques :

• Avant la Première guerre mondiale : l’émergence du pré-syndicalisme (amicalisme) et du syndicalisme, ainsi que la structuration partisane (création du parti radical, de la SFIO...) qui modifie les formes du débat éducatif, tandis que le principe de l’école du XIXe « à chaque classe sociale son école » connaît ses premières remises en cause, tout comme les modèles pédagogiques qui y sont liés, comme en témoigne la grande réforme du secondaire en 1902.
• L’entre-deux-guerres est marqué par le fil rouge du projet d’école unique qui connaît un début de concrétisation au moment du Front populaire. Le système éducatif est aussi transformé par des réformes démocratisantes comme la gratuité du secondaire, l’ouverture de la préparation du baccalauréat dans les lycées féminins publics, tandis que la pression pour la poursuite d’études dans les EPS ou les cours complémentaires mais aussi le secondaire, préfigure la massification à venir.

Programme

Entrée libre sous réserve d’inscription (par mail : formation.syndicale@snes.edu)

Jeudi 15 octobre 2026

9h00 Accueil

9h15 Présentation de la journée

9h30 Projets éducatifs, identités professionnelles et transformation sociale

• Frédéric Mole (Université Jean Monnet de Saint-Étienne, Laboratoire Éducation, Cultures, Politiques) - Quelle adaptation de l’enseignement aux besoins de la classe ouvrière ? Variations, divergences, controverses (début XXe siècle)
• Siranouch Karibian (doctorante Université Bourgogne Europe, LIRS3) - De "l’école de classe" à l’école républicaine. Les enseignants communistes sous le prisme des transformations de discours politiques et syndicaux dans l’entre-deux-guerres.
• Hervé Le Fiblec (IRHSES) - À la jonction du syndical et du politique Le projet d’’école unique de la CGT dans l’entre- deux-guerres.
• Patricia Legris (Université Rennes 2, Laboratoire TEMPORA) - Défendre la spécificité de la maternelle et de ses professionnelles. Le cas de l’AGIEM France, années 1920-1970)

12h00 Pause repas

13h00 Réforme et démocratisation

• Catherine Dorison (Université de Cergy Pontoise Laboratoire EMA) - Filières et classes spéciales dans les collèges des années 1960 et 1970. Les ambiguïtés d’un apparent consensus
• André D. Robert (‘Université Lyon II. Laboratoire Éducation, Cultures, Politiques) - “Célébration” de la réforme” et effervescence programmatique en éducation Années 1970 – 1980
• Clémence Cardon-Quint (Université de Montpellier Paul Valéry CRISES EA 4424) - Demander des moyens ou défendre un projet ? Le budget de l’Éducation nationale saisi par les syndicats de la FEN de la signature du Programme Commun aux élections de 1986

14h30 L’école vue de droite

• Jean-Étienne Dubois (Nantes Université, Centre Histoire Espaces et Cultures) - La mobilisation des défenseurs de l’école libre dans le département de Loire-Atlantique contre le projet Savary 1983 – 1984
• Guy Lapostolle (Université de Lorraine LISEC EA 2310) - Les projets d’école des droites – Renaissance, Les Républicains, Rassemblement national

Lieu

• 46 Avenue d'Ivry
  Paris, France (75)