I am working to put together two panels for the labor network of SSHA. The annual meeting will be in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, November 1-4, 2012. The deadline for submissions in March 1, 2012.
If you are interested, please contact me at ad5247 [at] wayne.edu OR evfaue [at] gmail.com
1) Panel: "From Worker Control to Pollution Control: Labor, Capital and the State in the Making of Environmental Regimes"
In a recent column in the "New York Times", journalist Thomas Friedman called Richard Nixon “the father of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
Friedman used the phrase to bolster his argument that Republicans ought to embrace conservationism. In doing so, he reflected a view many Americans mistakenly hold. They view far-seeing elites, from Teddy Roosevelt onward, as pioneers of environmental protection, perhaps with some help from the affluent postwar middle classes and popular science writers. Environmental historians have begun to challenge these myths in recent years, showing how grassroots social movements played a critical historical role in challenging capital and the state to curtail industrial pollution and habitat destruction. Much work remains to be done in democratizing narratives of environmental history, however, especially concerning workers. To this end, we invite interdisciplinary contributions that illuminate ordinary workers’ role in the history of environmentalism. We encourage participants to explore two questions. First, how have power relations between labor, capital and the state succeeded or failed in shaping “environmental regimes” (to use Fred Spier’s term)? Second, how have working people viewed their work environments—politically, socially and culturally—in relation to the natural environment?
2) Panel: "Material Changes: Bodies, Health and Struggles over the WorkEnvironment"
The struggle over control of work is a classic subject of labor history.
Only in recent years, however, environmental history and the history of medicine, science and technology have changed the way we think about the work environment—and thus what it means to control it. The ways that science, the state, capital and labor rank, categorize and otherwise map different kinds of working bodies constitutes a fundamental terrain of struggle over power in the workplace. So, too, does the dizzying array of substances, conditions and social relations that impact workers’ health. As a unifying theme for this panel, then, we invite contributors to consider how workers have experienced, and contested, the organization of work environments as physically *embodied *subjects. How have the biological, ecological, technological, and even psychological dimensions of people’s “working conditions” changed over time and space? How have the physical, structural and ideological aspects of race, class and gender intersected for different bodies in specific wo! rk environments? Finally, does viewing workers as *embodied *conflict with broader identities that transcend individual difference, or does it reveal what makes collective agency possible?
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Elizabeth Faue
Professor of History
Director of Graduate Studies
Department of History
3094 Faculty Administration Bldg
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI 48202
Graduate Studies: (313) 577-6570
email: ad5247 [at] wayne.edu
fax: (313) 577-6987
[Cross-posted, with thanks, from H-Labor