Mission
The aim of the ELHN Military Labour History Working Group is to create opportunities for interaction and discussion between scholars who deal with military history from a labour history perspective.
Scope
We would like to discuss and stimulate research related to a broad range of themes and concepts in military labour history including but not limited to the following:
- What is military labour?
- How to identify military workers?
- The pluri-activity character of military labour
- The intersections of class, gender, race, sexuality, etc. in military labour
- Worker recruitment methods (such as, labour market, coercion, volunteers)
- Payment of workers (paid or unpaid labour, waged or piece work, and so on)
- The inclusion (or not) in a military structure: are workers contextualized in a military structure or civil workers who were employed for the army?
- The duration of the employment in the military field
- The consequences on civil life of the employment of the worker in the military field
- Free and unfree military labour: degrees, moments and areas of coercion
- Resistance and protest against military labour
- Military labour in relation to military occupations and interventions
- Theoretical frameworks, concepts and methodologies in military labour history
Given the novelty of this particular research area where scholars have only recently and occasionally dealt with it, we consider the last point of particular importance for the working group to engage with in the upcoming years.
Activities
The working group was created in 2015, during the first European Labour History Network (ELHN) conference, held in Turin between December 14 and 15. Since its creation the main focus has, in accordance with the aim of the working group, been to creating opportunities for interaction and discussion between scholars of military labour history. This has been carried out both within the ELHN (ELHN conferences and cooperation with other ELHN working groups) and outside (e.g. a session on gender & military labour at the Twelfth European Social Science History Conference, held in Belfast in 2018), as well as through social media (a Facebook group) and an e-mail list.
The working group is also organizing internal workshops on a regular basis since 2021. See the attached documents below for more information. The most recent workshop was on 13 and 14 March 2024.
Contact
To join, please send a mail to one of the coordinators.
The coordinators of the Working Group are:
- Christine de Matos (The University of Notre Dame Australia)
- Olli Siitonen (University of Helsinki)
- Jeongmin Kim (University of Manitoba)
- Alexandros Touloumtzidis (University of Patras)
To contact the Working Group, send an e-mail to militarylabourhistory@gmail.com.
External links
[last updated 18 September 2024]