Social and Labour History News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Historiographical discussions, concerning in particular:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Argumentaire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concevoir les lieux de travail et de hors-travail

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

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

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

Habiter et s’approprier les lieux de travail

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

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

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

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

Calendrier et modalités de soumission

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

au plus tard le 28 février 2025.

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

La journée aura lieu le 23 mai à Paris. 

Comité d'organisation et de sélection

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

Paris, 30 June 2025

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

Argument

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Focusing on the physical margins of administrative and police archives  

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

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

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

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

Submission guidelines

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

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

The organizing committee will set up discussion panels. 

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

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

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

Presentations can be held in French or English. 

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

Organizing Committee 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portugal, 10-12 December 2025

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

International Conference: African independences: processes, imaginaries, connections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SPECIAL ISSUE Journal of Agrarian Change

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

Transformations of Foodways: Coloniality, Resistance and Resurgence

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

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

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

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

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

Submission Guidelines and Timeline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact (announcement)

ninam@sdu.dk

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

London, 7-9 January 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submission Details

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

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

Contact (announcement)

matteo.davanzo00@gmail.com

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

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

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

Browse all articles >
Read a free issue >

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

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Table of contents

RESEARCH ARTICLES

ÉDOUARD DOLLÉANS: FIRST MODERN HISTORIAN OF CHARTISM?

KEVIN MORGAN 

 

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

GIUSEPPE TELESCA 

 

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

BEN WILLIAMS 

 

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

LABOUR HISTORY REVIEW ESSAY PRIZE
LABOUR HISTORY REVIEW ESSAY PRIZE

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

Capitalist transformation and shifts in labour and inequality

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

Legitimation processes of the democratic political model

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

International cooperation and competition

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

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

The digital revolution and the diversification of everyday culture

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

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

***

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

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

Conference in Lund/Sweden, 20-22 August 2025

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

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

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

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

Contact (announcement)

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

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

While much of this historiography has focused on liberal democracies, less attention has been given to how concepts of risk operated in state socialist contexts. Building on recent studies in the history of medicine and health, we invite scholars to join a working group examining risk, health, and medicine under state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe. To what extent did state socialist regimes recognize certain health and medical issues as ‘governable’ through risk? What kinds of practices and ideas emerged in response? And were there differences or similarities between state socialist and liberal democratic models of risk in healthcare and medicine? Our aim is to take an exploratory approach to discuss whether, and in what contexts, the concept of risk can be applied to state socialism, and to examine the risk-related practices, ideas, and technologies observed in healthcare and medicine in state socialism.

Existing scholarship, following the works of Ulrich Beck, Nikolas Rose, or François Ewald, has linked concepts of risk and ‘risk society’ primarily to Western Europe and the United States. Emerging from a shared sense of crisis during the 1970s—intensified by economic recession and growing anxieties about the complexity of modern society—risk became a technique of governance that offered a framework for addressing new social challenges by making them more predictable and calculable. Particularly in the fields of medicine and healthcare, from disease prevention and public health to drug control and biomedical research, the language of risk and risk factors has become increasingly prominent.

While much of this historiography has focused on liberal democracies, less attention has been given to how concepts of risk operated in state socialist contexts. Building on recent studies in the history of medicine and health, we invite scholars to join a working group examining risk, health, and medicine under state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe. To what extent did state socialist regimes recognize certain health and medical issues as ‘governable’ through risk? What kinds of practices and ideas emerged in response? And were there differences or similarities between state socialist and liberal democratic models of risk in healthcare and medicine? Our aim is to take an exploratory approach to discuss whether, and in what contexts, the concept of risk can be applied to state socialism, and to examine the risk-related practices, ideas, and technologies observed in healthcare and medicine in state socialism. The outcome of our collaboration is intended to be a publication, such as a special issue.

The initial one-day, in-person meeting of the working group will be held in May 2025 at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine, Charité Berlin. This meeting will focus on outlining the framework for our collaboration, presenting preliminary research ideas (10–15 minute presentations), and discussing potential outcomes of our work. We anticipate at least one or two additional follow-up meetings in autumn 2025 and spring 2026, either online or in person, based on participants’ preferences, to discuss our draft research papers. The aim is to prepare the final manuscripts for submission by the end of 2026, though this timeline may allow for adjustments as needed.

Potential research topics include prevention and self-prevention practices under state socialism; socialist medical innovation and emerging fields such as medical cybernetics; public health and environmental hazards; quantification, forecasting and computational technology in healthcare planning; risk, crime and control; health insurance and workplace safety. Other perspectives and research questions are warmly encouraged.

Submission Guidelines

If you are interested in participating, please send a brief CV and a short abstract (no more than 300 words) describing your research on risk, health, and medicine in state socialism to jakub.strelec@charite.de

by January 31, 2025. 

You are also welcome to include a note on specific themes or questions you would like to explore within the group.

Practical informations

Travel and accommodation costs for the meetings in Berlin can be covered. The exact meeting date in May will be coordinated with participants. The primary language of the working group will be English. Due to the discussion-based format of the group, the number of participants will be limited to six.

The working group is organized by Dr. Jakub Střelec (Charité-Berlin, ERC Leviathan) and supported by the European Research Council (GA No. 854503). Please feel free to reach out with any questions or suggestions you may have.

Scientific coordinator

• Jakub Střelec, Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin

Liverpool University Press is pleased to inform you of the latest content in Labour History: a Journal of Labour and Social History, published on behalf of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, the journal is a highly regarded publication that is essential reading for those working in and researching social and labour history in Australasia.

Volume 127 is devoted to union history. With contributions exploring the causes of union decline; the United Automobile Workers (UAW) in the 1950s; the activism of the Plumbers and Gasfitters Employees Union to raise their wages; the foundation of the Council for Aboriginal Rights in 1951; using union methods in consumer boycotts against hotels in the first two decades of the twentieth century; the historical context of the conditions, poor pay, and vulnerability of migrant labour in the hotel industry; and the policing of drunkenness as labour management in the early colonial period of Australian history.

You will also find an Historical Note on the campaign to have workers’ assembly halls recognised, protected, and celebrated for their part in the international labour movement history, and a tribute to one of Australia’s most outstanding historians, Lyndall Ryan (1943–2024). The issue closes with a generous selection of book reviews.

Browse all articles >  
Read a free issue >

If you would like to read content from this journal, please use our online form to recommend a subscription to your librarian.

 

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Table of contents

 

EDITORIAL

EDITORIAL

DIANE KIRKBY

 

RESEARCH ARTICLES

EXPLAINING UNION DECLINE: REMAKING POWER RELATIONS IN THE PILBARA IRON ORE INDUSTRY

BRADON ELLEM

 

SPEED-UPS AND RELATED PROBLEMS: THE UAW AND GRASSROOTS GRIEVANCES IN THE IMMEDIATE POST-WORLD WAR II PERIOD

TIMOTHY J. MINCHIN

 

MORE LESSONS OF THE ACCORD: THE 1986–87 PLUMBERS’ UNION DISPUTE

LUCIE NEWSOME, DANIELLE MILLER, AND TONY RAMSAY

 

“GUIDING THE WOBBLY HAND OF JUSTICE”: THE EARLY YEARS OF THE COUNCIL FOR ABORIGINAL RIGHTS, C. 1951–55

JENNIFER CLARK

 

PARCHING FOR PRINCIPLE: HOTEL BOYCOTTS IN REGIONAL AUSTRALIA, 1901–20

IAIN MCINTYRE

 

SO HOW DID WE GET HERE? A HISTORICAL CASE STUDY OF MIGRANT EMPLOYMENT IN THE NEW ZEALAND HOTEL SECTOR

DAVID WILLIAMSON AND CANDICE HARRIS

 

ALCOHOL, WORK AND PLAY IN CONVICT AUSTRALIA

SHANNON O’KEEFE, MATTHEW ALLEN, HAMISH MAXWELL-STEWART, AND MICHAEL QUINLAN

 

RESEARCH NOTE

INTERNATIONAL STANDING FOR THE RŪNANGA MINERS’ HALL

RUSSELL DEYELL AND AISLA HART

 

CONFERENCE REPORT

(RE)SOURCES: HISTORICAL INQUIRY AND LABOUR HISTORY ARCHIVES: THE 18TH BIENNIAL CONFERENCE OF THE AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF LABOUR HISTORY, CANBERRA, 23–25 NOVEMBER 2023

MICHAEL P. R. PEARSON

 

OBITUARY

LYNDALL RYAN (1943–2024)

JAMES BENNETT

 

BOOK REVIEWS

IAN ANGUS, THE WAR AGAINST THE COMMONS: DISPOSSESSION AND RESISTANCE IN THE MAKING OF CAPITALISM

MATTHEW D. J. RYAN

 

RALPH DARLINGTON, LABOUR REVOLT IN BRITAIN 1910–14

ALEXIS VASSILEY

 

JARED DAVIDSON, BLOOD & DIRT: PRISON LABOUR AND THE MAKING OF NEW ZEALAND

HAMISH MAXWELL-STEWART

 

MARY DAVIS, UNITE HISTORY VOLUME 5 (1974–1992): THE TRANSPORT AND GENERAL WORKERS’ UNION (TGWU): FROM ZENITH TO NADIR?

BOBBIE OLIVER

 

MICHAEL EASSON, WHITLAM’S FOREIGN POLICY

RICHARD BROINOWSKI

 

LINDSAY FITZCLARENCE, THE DIRTY LIFE OF MINING IN AUSTRALIA: A TRAVELOGUE

ROWAN CAHILL

 

MATTHEW GERTH, ANTI-COMMUNISM IN BRITAIN DURING THE EARLY COLD WAR: A VERY BRITISH WITCH HUNT

JOHN CALLAGHAN

 

DONNY GLUCKSTEIN AND JANEY STONE, THE RADICAL JEWISH TRADITION: REVOLUTIONARIES, RESISTANCE FIGHTERS & FIREBRANDS

JORDANA SILVERSTEIN

 

RICHARD S. HILL AND STEVEN LOVERIDGE, SECRET HISTORY: STATE SURVEILLANCE IN NEW ZEALAND, 1900–1956

CYBÈLE LOCKE

 

NEVILLE KIRK, A NATION IN CRISIS: DIVISION, CONFLICT, CAPITALISM IN THE UNITED KINGDOM; NEVILLE KIRK, BRITISH SOCIETY AND ITS THREE CRISES: FROM THE 1970S GLOBALISATION TO THE FINANCIAL CRASH OF 2007–8 AND THE ONSET OF BREXIT IN 2016

ROB MANWARING

 

JAMES LESH, VALUES IN CITIES: URBAN HERITAGE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AUSTRALIA

CHRIS MCCONVILLE

 

JAN LOKAN AND PHILIP PAYTON, EDS, MORE THAN MINERS: CORNISH ESSAYS FROM SOUTH AUSTRALIA

ROWAN CAHILL

 

NICK MANSFIELD AND MARTIN WRIGHT, MADE BY LABOUR: A MATERIAL AND VISUAL HISTORY OF BRITISH LABOUR C. 1780–1924

DAVID STEPHENS

 

LEE-ANN MONK AND DAVID HENDERSON WITH CHRISTINE BIGBY, RICHARD BROOME, AND KATIE HOLMES, FAILED AMBITIONS: KEW COTTAGES AND CHANGING IDEAS OF INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES

PHILIPPA MARTYR

 

MARIAN QUARTLY, THE MIDDLING SORT: A SOUTH AUSTRALIAN FAMILY HISTORY

MELANIE OPPENHEIMER

 

KEN REIMAN, RON CAREY AND THE TEAMSTERS: HOW A UPS DRIVER BECAME THE GREATEST UNION REFORMER OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

LINDSAY TANNER

 

SAMANTHA J. SIMON, BEFORE THE BADGE: HOW ACADEMY TRAINING SHAPES POLICE VIOLENCE

MARK BRISKEY

 

EVAN SMITH, JAYNE PERSIAN, AND VASHTI JANE FOX, EDS, HISTORIES OF FASCISM AND ANTI-FASCISM IN AUSTRALIA

DAVID GILCHRIST

 

SHELTON STROMQUIST, CLAIMING THE CITY: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF WORKERS’ FIGHT FOR MUNICIPAL SOCIALISM

JANET MCCALMAN

 

ADRIAN WEIR, UNITE HISTORY VOLUME 6 (1992–2010): THE TRANSPORT AND GENERAL WORKERS’ UNION (TGWU): UNITY FOR A NEW ERA

BOBBIE OLIVER

 

SALLY YOUNG, PAPER EMPERORS: THE RISE OF AUSTRALIA’S NEWSPAPER EMPIRES; SALLY YOUNG, MEDIA MONSTERS: THE TRANSFORMATION OF AUSTRALIA’S NEWSPAPER EMPIRES

PETER FRAY

 

RESEARCH NOTICE BOARD

RESEARCH NOTICE BOARD

 

ASSLH DIRECTORY

AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF LABOUR HISTORY

Madeline Linford (1895-1975) was the first woman on the Editorial Board of the Manchester Guardian, working for the newspaper from 1913 to 1953. She wrote theatre, film and book reviews as well as numerous articles on topics ranging from the Manchester sales to the clothing of the Victorian baby. In 1919 and 1921 she visited France, Austria and Poland, reporting on the efforts of the Friends’ Relief Mission to combat suffering and disease. In the autumn of 1939 she wrote articles on how the war was affecting women in Manchester.

Madeline edited the first column for women in the Manchester Guardian from 1922 to 1939, was a picture editor on the paper in the 1940s and, finally, was the editor of the backpage opinion column. Somehow she also found time to write short stories and five novels as well as a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft. When she died at the age of 80 the Guardian in its obituary described her as “…one of the most remarkable newspaperwomen of her time, the creator in the Manchester Guardian of the first women’s page for the ‘intellectual’ woman, and probably, the first woman to become pictures editor of a national newspaper.”

This is the first anthology of her work to appear in print.

https://www.lulu.com/shop/madeline-linford-and-michael-herbert/mal-the-…

International Review of Social History, Volumne 69 Issue 2:

To the Articles: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-review-of-social-…

Practices, Potentials, and Evidence Production in Dealing with Images and Multimodal Cultural Heritage

The Leibniz Research Alliance ‘Value of the Past’ would like to invite you to this conference.

Marburg, 12-13 December 2024

Hybrid format: in-person and online Conference languages: German and English

Dates and Conference Venue: Thursday, December 12th, 12:30 – 19:30, Friday December 13th, 9.00 – 15:45. Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe – Institute of the Leibniz Association, Gisonenweg 5-7, 35037 Marburg

Artificial Intelligence in Archives and Collections. Practices, Potentials, and Evidence Production in Dealing with Images and Multimodal Cultural Heritage

The Research Lab 1.3. “Digital Heuristics and Digital History” of the Leibniz Research Alliance “Value of the Past” is organising a conference in Marburg on artificial intelligence in heritage institutions, such as archives and collections, and how these new technologies are transforming archival institutional practices. Topics will primarily focus on – but will not be limited to – visual sources, such as photography and graphic collections or those with mixed image-text sources and multimodal information processing. The conference will provide a forum for researchers and practitioners from the humanities, archives and collections to connect with researchers and engineers in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer science and the digital humanities, to discuss new findings, and to exchange experiences. The event seeks to promote an interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral dialogue between research, development and practice.

We cordially invite stakeholders from all areas in the field. Attendance without contribution to the programme is welcome.

Speakers from Austria, China, France, Germany, USA, UK and Sweden will talk about topics including: Exploring and Analysing Collections from Textual and Multimodal Contexts, Computer Vision: Semantic Segmentation, Classification, Analysing and Understanding Images, The Effects of Computational Methods on Image Analytical Research and Visual Studies in Cultural Heritage, Opportunities and Challenges for the Automated Indexing and Cataloguing of Visual Sources in Archives and Collections.

Key Topic: Dealing with Images and Multimodal Cultural Heritage

In the years to come, curatorial and archival processes in memory and heritage institutions (including key aspects of cataloguing such as description, classification and categorization) will be increasingly supported by automated systems and artificial intelligence. These practices attribute value to sources and link archival materials and collection objects to societal narratives. Collections and archives thus form an essential basis for memory-related discourses and shape our view of the past.

New technologies have now reached the stage where they are potentially suitable for the requirements of cultural heritage institutions. There is potential promise in the partially automated indexing and cataloguing of historical sources, and particularly of digital images, the semantics and meaning of which have until recently only been accessible to the human eye and not the machine. Images can now be automatically described in semantic terms and therefore made findable. AI methods – and most recently multimodal AI processing – are opening up new possibilities for automatic text and layout recognition, automated image annotation, and the analysis of visual sources and their contextualisation (e.g. text-image combinations or audiovisual sources).

At the same time, however, there is a lack of knowledge about how evidence – and facts – are generated and how AI processes affect the attribution of authenticity to archival documents and photos. At this moment, the humanities lack semantically high-quality and subject-appropriate training data sets. Similarly, there is hardly any agreement about what constitutes an acceptable outcome of computational classification processes, or what benchmarks should be used to evaluate the results. We therefore need to develop best practices (that may tap into explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods), benchmarks and goals. To increase the value that the information and knowledge held in our archives and collections have for future research, we need to deepen our understanding of processes and algorithms.

The conference will bring together curatorial and archiving knowledge and new AI-based methods, and will also provide a forum for ethical reflections on the use of AI in academic and archival practices. We will consider how automated processing and AI methods require detailed epistemic reflection and methodological-technical control to ensure that no false or tainted evidence is generated. Thus, the conference will discuss the effects of these new technologies on the production of evidence, thereby contributing to the crucial question of how the digital transformation is changing knowledge creation in the humanities and what this means for scholarship in historical disciplines.

Conference participation: Registration For registration and further information please consult the conference website: https://eveeno.com/441936742

Most Papers will be presented in English. Discussions can be in English and German.

Participation in the conference is free of charge. Kindly refer to the conference website for information on possible costs for meals and the social programme.

Deadline for Applications: please register as early as possible, since it will help us in organizing the event. Hotels are scarce in Marburg. Please reserve a room in good time of you want to take part in person.

Stipendia

Support for travel costs We can assist selected participants with a stipendium towards travel costs and accommodation in Marburg. Please send a letter of explaining your situation of up to 500 words and a CV with your application. The letter should tell us a little about your experience in the topic, what you expect to gain from the event, and what you would like to contribute to the discussion.

Contact for Programme and Stipendium archivesai@herder-institut.de

Organizers:

- Leibniz-Forschungsverbund „Wert der Vergangenheit“, Lab 1.3. Digitale Heuristik und Historik
- Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA), Mainz
- Herder-Institut für historische Ostmitteleuropaforschung – Institut der Leibniz-Gemeinschaft, Marburg
- NFDI4Memory, Task Area Data Quality
Committee: Elke Bauer, Simon Donig, Annette Frey, Dominik Kimmel

Programm

Thursday, 12th December 2024

12.00 pm Warm up

12.30 pm Welcome

12.40 pm Introduction

Keynote 1

12.45 pm Tayler Arnold, University of Richmond (online): Explainable and Auditable Search and Discovery of Visual Cultural Heritage Collections

Panel 1 Exploring and Analysing Collections from Textual and Multimodal Contexts

1.30 pm Günther Mühlberger, Universität Innsbruck: AI as an employee. How the digital transformation is (not only) changing archives

2.00 pm Frank Puppe, Universität Würzburg: Pipeline for Digital Indexing of Archaeological Record Cards

2.30 pm Coffee Break

2.45 pm Mahsa Vafaie, FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure: Separation of machine-printed and handwritten text in archival documents

3.15 pm Markus Huff, Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Tübingen: ArchiveGPT: Psychological and technological perspectives on the AI-supported archiving of image material

3.45 pm Elisabeth Mödden, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Frankfurt a. M.: Automatic Indexing with Large Scale Vocabulary – Automatic Subject Indexing as Extreme Multi Label Learning Problem (Presentation in German)

4.15 pm Coffee break

Panel 2 Computer Vision: Semantic Segmentation, Analysing and Understanding Images

4.45 pm Ralph Ewert, TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology / Leibniz University Hannover: Unlocking Cultural Heritage: Computer Vision for Art and History Archives

5.15 pm Karsten Tolle, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main: Potpourri of Computer Vision in Cultural Heritage

5.45 pm N.N. State of the Art Methods in Computer Vision

6.15 pm Evening Reception

Friday, 13th December

9.00 am Warm up

Continuation of Panel 2: Computer Vision: Semantic Segmentation, Analysing and Understanding Images

9.30 am Angelica I. Aviles-Rivero, Tsinghua University, Beijing (online): Dusting Off the Unlabelled Data: Graph Semi Supervised Learning for Large-Scale Datasets

10.00 am Erik Radisch, Leibniz Institut für Länderkunde, Leipzig: A new Approach to Semi-Automated Annotations with Segment-Anything (Meta AI)

10.30 am Yury Korolev, University of Bath: Image filtering based on total variation spectral decompositions: an overview of the method and an application in medieval paper analysis

11.00 am Coffee Break

Panel 3: The Effects of Computational Methods on Image Analytical Research and Visual Studies in Cultural Heritage

11.15 am Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, University of Cambridge (online): Unveiling the invisible – mathematical imaging for cultural heritage

11.45 am Christopher Kermorvant, TEKLIA, Paris: How to use controlled vocabularies to describe early Japanese photographs using deep learning models

12.15 pm Peter Bell, Philipps Universität Marburg: Ways of Seeing in AI and art history

12.45 pm Lunch Break

Keynote 2

1.30 pm James Evans, The University of Chicago (online): The Geometry of Culture: Analyzing meaning through embeddings of text and images

Panel 4: Opportunities and Challenges for the Automated Indexing and Cataloguing of Visual Sources in Archives and Collections

2.15 pm Nicole Graf, ETH Zürich (online): Between ritual and relief – when the computer squints: analysis of Al-based indexing in the Image Archive of the ETH Library

2.45 pm Larissa von Bychelberg, Uppsala University: Research at the Intersection of Archives, AI, and Authenticity. Can Artificial Intelligence contribute to an inclusive and sustainable assessment of archival records’ authenticity?

3.15 pm Plenary Discussion

3.45 pm End of the conference

Kontakt

archivesai@herder-institut.de

https://eveeno.com/441936742

This call for papers invites contributors for a special issue of the scientific journal History of Communism in Europe, focusing on the relationship between women and science in socialist contexts. We aim to explore how women engaged with science both within national contexts (in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, or the Global South), and in transnational contexts (whether within the framework of socialist movements and organizations or through academic networks and scientific collaborations that included women from socialist countries and/or took place in these regions).

(Re)Gendering Science: Policies, Practices and Discourses in Socialist Contexts and Beyond

This special issue is based on two premises.

First, both socialism as an ideology and communist regimes encouraged women’s participation in science. To this day, countries of Eastern and Central Europe, Central Asia, and Latin America have a higher proportion of female scientists (around 40% or more) compared to regions like Western Europe and North America (just over 30%), East Asia (a little over 20%), or South and West Asia (under 20%). However, it is precisely these regions, with greater women’s participation in science, that are less represented in the history and historiography of science, and whose scientific contributions tend to be underrated or ignored altogether. Ironically, even in dictionaries and encyclopedias specifically dedicated to women in science, these regions are consistently underrepresented, with most entries coming from Western Europe and North America, a few from South and East Asia, and only a handful from Eastern Europe or the Global South. This special issue aims to shift the focus from “Western science” – too often equated with “real” or “modern” science – toward a more inclusive perspective, analyzing the politics, practices, and discourses of science and women’s involvement within it in state-socialist countries and, more broadly, in socialist environments.

Second, while communist regimes encouraged women’s involvement in science, they also produced specific forms of gender inequality. Although women gained increased opportunities for education and scientific careers, their roles remained largely peripheral within the scientific community. Men continued to occupy the most prominent and powerful positions, maintained visibility in the public communication of scientific developments, and often claimed credit for scientific achievements. The few exceptions to this trend often had political or propagandistic motivations aligned with the logic of the Cold War, and typically occurred in scientific fields considered “feminine”, such as child and elderly care. Additionally, women’s identities were downplayed by authoritarian regimes, subsumed under the broader, politically significant identity of “working people”. In this context, the special issue aims to gather both individual and collective case studies that recover the lost voices of women in science. It also seeks to examine the complex interplay of factors that either encouraged or hindered women’s access to scientific fields and how women negotiated their scientific status, developing strategies for professional achievement. We are also interested in how gender identities were constructed in socialist and state-socialist contexts, and how these identities influenced men and women’s interaction with and within science, as well as the processes of knowledge creation.

An important focus of our special issue is the academic mobility of women scientists and their scientific networking – both crucial strategies for navigating hostile scientific environments and creating professional opportunities that would otherwise be inaccessible.

We use the term “science” to refer to STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine) as well as the social sciences. We are interested in the making, education, institutionalization, and communication of science, as well as scientific perspectives related to production, but also to domestic life, and family care.

We welcome contributions from various fields of research, including history of socialism/communism, history of science, women’s history, Cold War studies, gender and feminist studies, or any other related areas of interest, approached from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Topics may address (but are not limited to) the following aspects:

- Policies that encouraged/excluded women from scientific endeavors
- Women and scientific practices in socialist contexts
- Sites of science (professional vs. amateur science; laboratory vs. home)
- Women international organizations and science
- Transnational/global networks of women’s scientific collaborations (professional associations, international conferences, mobility, field work, scientific friendships)
- Women’s recruitment and promotion in scientific fields
- Women and the public communication of science
- Representations of women and gender in science
- (In)visibility of women in science

Contributors are kindly asked to write abstracts in English that do not exceed 500 words.

Deadline: 2nd of December 2024.
You may submit your proposals at: hce-online@iiccmer.ro, irina.matei@fspub.unibuc.ro, mia.jinga@gmail.com.

Selected authors will be notified by the 15th of December 2024.
The deadline for the final draft of the paper is the 15th of May 2025.

The academic journal History of Communism in Europe is edited by The Institute for the Investigation of the Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile, published by Zeta Books and indexed in EBSCO, CEEOL, PDC, Google Books. It is a journal open to all inquiries that have the objectivity, complexity and sophistication required by any research on the issue of communism, as well as on the different aspects of totalitarianisms of 20th Century Europe. These scholarly investigations must remain an interdisciplinary enterprise, in which raw data and refined concepts help us understand the subtle dynamics of any given phenomenon.

Kontakt

hce-online@iiccmer.ro, irina.matei@fspub.unibuc.ro, mia.jinga@gmail.com

https://www.iiccmer.ro/publicatii/2024/open-call-for-papers-history-of-communism-in-europe-no-16-2025/?fbclid=IwY2xjawGXJYhleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHSggsBDRdynJLs5HU2wxlytehc759MGn995msv8hbN6tCaAvXmf9WpfRJg_aem_q4CAOVVqyd17Bq6ILXAQIQ

Organised by the Labour & Empire Working Group of the European Labour History Network - labourempire.elhn@gmail.com

Online, All the events at 4-5:30pm GMT

Register here to receive the Zoom link: https://tinyurl.com/ds547d7k

 

11 December Seminar

Zaen Alkazi

"Workers think they are masters in the mill": Workers’ Shopfloor Committees in the Bombay Cotton Textile Industry, c. 1927-1930

 

15 January Keynote talk

Frederick Cooper

Colonization, Decolonization, and Labor

 

25 February Anarchism & Empire round table

Lucien van der Walt: Bernard Sigamoney and Indian revolutionary syndicalists in Durban, South Africa, 1915-1921: Race, class, and global networks

Isabelle Felici: Italian colonialism: The Augusto Masetti campaign in the Italian Anarchist newspapers published in France (1913-1914)

Ole Birk Laursen: The International Working Men’s Association and Indian Anticolonialism in Weimar Era Berlin

 

5 March Seminar

André Ribeiro Fernandes

Changing to Remain: the Late Portuguese Empire and the Issue of Anticolonial Labour Unionism (1961-1973)

 

TBC, May Panel – new research directions in labour & empire history

Benjamin Constanty, Josephin Nevill, & Eleanor Strangways

Please find attached the call for papers for the international conference ‘ Residue and oblivion: the manufacture of toxic legacies. Cross-reflections based on the exemplary case of asbestos. 20th - 21st centuries’, to be held on 23 and 24 June 2025 in Grenoble.

This conference will bring the AmiEtat research programme to a close. The aim of the conference is to encourage exchanges between researchers in the social sciences and the medical sciences (epidemiology, occupational medicine, etc.).

Proposals for papers should be sent by 15 January 2025 to : 350tonnesetdespoussieres@groupes.renater.fr

The Moving Past website creates the opportunity to see what was being seen in the 1920s, with a focus on work and industry. The fifteen films available on the website are from 4 to 15 minutes long and present varying types of workplaces and industry. They were made by two government sponsored institutions, the Ontario Motion Picture Bureau, which operated from 1917 to 1934 and the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau, was which was created in 1918 and operated until the late 1930s. Several are documentaries about industries such logging, mining and fishing. Others are more didactic, providing guidance on appropriate workplace behaviour, workplace safety, looking for employment and the marvels of emerging technologies in the 1920s.

These films will be of interest to labour historians and students. The website includes a bibliography and description for each of the films.