Call for Papers
The Labour Movement has a long history of working alongside or against a wide variety of other social and political movements: from the anti-Fascist popular front to the Latin American solidarity campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, from the women's movement to LGBTQ movement today, from anti-nukes to environmental movements, from human rights campaigns in the 1940s and 1950s to Idle No More today. The Alberta Labour History Institute (ALHI) conference of 18-21 June, 2014, wants to investigate this past, present and future of labour's interaction with other social movements in Canada and beyond.
ALHI seeks to share academic and people's own histories with the broader community. It draws its members from organised labour, activist communities and the academy, and its conferences seek to build links between academic and non-academic history. Panels featuring "traditional" academic papers will be interspersed with group oral histories featuring people on-stage and in the audience telling their own stories. All of the presentations are filmed in high definition video and transcribed for archival purposes, with low-res versions uploaded onto our YouTube channel (search "Alberta Labour History" on YouTube).
Our last conference included a concert by Maria Dunn and friends, a film festival, museum displays and keynote addresses from both historians and labour leaders. About one third of the conference participants were academics, and two thirds current and retired trade unionists and other activists. The 2014 conference will be similarly structured and seek a similar audience.
We are looking for people or groups interested in taking part in one of four categories on the theme labour's interaction with other social movements, past, present and future. We encourage papers and presentations from any perspective, including those that may be critical of labour in the past or present. We also encourage potential presenters to take a broad view of social movements, defining them as you like.
1) Academic presentations of 15-20 minutes of length by students,
established academics or others.
2) Oral history participants who want to tell their own story on the
theme in 10 minutes.
3) Films up to 20 minutes in length.
4) Museum-style displays that can be shipped to Edmonton and put up for
public display during the length of the conference.
Interested presenters should send a statement of interest or abstract and brief bio or c.v. to ALHI@labourhistory.ca by 15 Ocotober, 2013 (to be considered for any possible travel funding) or by 15 November,
2013 for inclusion in the programme. All proposals will be peer-reviewed by a panel of academics and labour activists, and selected presenters will be informed by either the end of September or the end of November.
In the past we received grants and donations sufficient to subsidise many of our presenters. We will be fundraising again, but cannot promise support at this time.