Mission
The ELHN Working Group Labour Migration History aims to build an interdisciplinary network of scholars studying labour migration from a historical perspective. Its objective is to advance knowledge exchange and cooperation through meetings, workshops and conference sessions and to serve as an open space to discuss research projects and potential collaborative publications. The WG will promote collaboration between researchers working in different countries and support projects on labour migration produced in different languages and in less privileged (non)institutional settings.
Scope
Although migration currently receives great attention in political and academic debates, it is often discussed as a humanitarian emergency, a social and a security problem, but very rarely as a labour (history) issue. Similarly, research sympathetic to the struggles of migrants tends to denounce the violation of human and civil rights experienced by migrants but very rarely refers to the breach of labour rights endured by migrants.
This working group seeks to generate scholarly debate about the interconnectedness of labour and migration history. It will reflect upon the importance of labour to analyse change in migration patterns and policies across time and space. It is interested in both empirical and theoretical analysis, and in various types of labour migration, perspectives, chronological and regional foci.
The working group provides opportunities for young researchers working in and outside academia to share information and seek collaboration and partners for their projects. Calls for papers, and news about forthcoming events and publications will be circulated through the group’s e-mail list.
Activities
A special issue of Labor History, 64(2023)4, on The Cold War of Labor Migrants: Opportunities, struggles and adaptations across the Iron Curtain and beyond seeks to bring forward the conversation between the history of the Cold War and migration studies. It is the result of a workshop convened by the ELHN Working Group Labour Migration History. It maps out the academic debate on international labor migration and it critically engages with its western-centric approach. It introduces seven contributions which, from different geographic and thematic perspectives, reassess the importance of non-Western experiences in shaping the entanglement between international labor migration and the Cold War.
Panels organised by the WG Labour Migration History at the ELHN Conference 2024 in Uppsala
- Tuesday 11 June 2024 14.00 - 15.30 A144-3 MIG1 A more-than-national perspective of guest worker programs
- Wednesday 12 June 2024 09.00 - 10.30 A144-5 MIG2 Guest-workers’ organisation, resistance and protest
- Wednesday 12 June 2024 11.00 - 12.30 A144-6 MIG3 Between past and future: memory and workers’ perspective
- Wednesday 12 June 2024 14.00 - 15.30 A144-7 MIG4 Politicised labour migration: Between policies and practices
- Wednesday 12 June 2024 16.00 - 17.30 A144-8 MIG5 Labour migration, national development and international narratives
Other publications
Bernard, S. (2022), Bringing labour back to migration history: a report on the activities of the working group labour migration history. Migration Letters, 19(4), pp. 537-546.
Contact
If you are interested in joining the Working Group on Labour Migration History, please write to the working group coordinators, providing the following information: name, institution (if any), email address, thematic focus/interest.
Group Coordinators
- Rory Archer (rory.archer@univie.ac.at) is a social historian of the Balkans who is interested in labour history, gender, ethnicity and migration during socialism. Rory works as a researcher at the University of Vienna (the Research Centre for the History of Transformations) on projects connected to non-aligned era Yugoslav labour migration in the Global South, and Yugoslav labour migration to Western Europe.
- Sara Bernard (sara.bernard@glasgow.ac.uk) is lecturer in societal transformations in Central and South East Europe at the University of Glasgow. Sara’s broad research interest is in twentieth century migration history with a current focus on the Cold War and the former Yugoslav region.
- Nadia Latif (nl2021@caa.columbia.edu) is a social anthropologist who studies the labour migration of refugees in and from the Middle East by collecting oral histories and conducting archival research. She also carries out long-term fieldwork in Burj al-Barajneh camp located in Beirut, Lebanon.
- Yannis G.S. Papadopoulos (ypapado@ims.forth.gr) is fellow at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies (FORTH) and lectures at the Hellenic Open University. He studies postwar migration within Europe and to overseas destinations, with a focus on Brazil and West Germany as receiving countries.
[last updated 24 September 2024]