Call for papers: Child labour and globalization
European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC)
Lisbon, 27 February - 1 March 2008
Network: Labour
Organizers: Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, International Institute of Social History, The Netherlands and Lars Olsson, Växjö University, Sweden
Child labour is a problem of the past as well as the present. Globalization and changes in the international division of labour may have led to significant changes in the occurrence and persistence of the work of children. In the past, child labour started to be considered a problem in industrializing countries in the "core" of world economy, while today the focus is mainly on working children in the `periphery´.
In this session, we hope to join expertise from different disciplines: historians, anthropologists and sociologists, in order to investigate how globalization affected and still affects the work of children, both in a quantitative and a more qualitative way. We may even find that the economic "core" and "periphery" regions are shifting today exactly because of the globalization of labour, among other things resulting in a search for cheap labour such as that of children.
This is why we especially welcome contributions from scholars doing comparative research on child labour in the western and non-western world.
Please send a paper proposal (max. 500 words) to Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, [mailto]enm@iisg.nl[/mailto] before 28 March 2007.