Fellows 2013/2014
Dr. Toby Boraman
University of Otago, New Zealand
The Involvement of Maori and Pasifika (Pacific Islanders) in the New Zealand Strike Wave of the 1970s
Toby Boraman received his PhD in 2007 in political studies from the University of Otago, New Zealand. He worked as a historian for the Waitangi Tribunal from 2008 to 2013 in two different spells. His research has focussed on New Zealand extra-parliamentary social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, libertarian socialism, labour history and the socio-economic experiences of Maori.
His research project at re:work examines the strike waves and other forms of workplace dissent in New Zealand from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Topics include the involvement (or lack of involvement) in workplace dissent of rank-and-file, blue-collar, white-collar, female, Maori and Pasifika (Pacific Islander) workers. It will place the strike waves in a transnational context yet still be firmly rooted in the South Pacific, and examine the links between unpaid and paid work, and between social movements and the labour movement. It will also evaluate the nature of the strike waves, examining the validity of theories such as the ‘refusal of work’ or the tendency towards workers’ self-management.
Overall, the project will aim to give primacy to workers’ everyday experience of work, and the interconnection between the workplace and community.
Publications
‘The Independent Left Press and the Rise and Fall of Mass Dissent in Aotearoa since the 1970s’. Counterfutures, no. 1 (2016): 31–70.
‘A Middle-Class Diversion from Working-Class Struggle? The New Zealand New Left from the Mid-1950s to the Mid-1970s’. Labour History, no. 103 (2012): 203–26.
‘Carnival and Class. Anarchism and Councilism in Australasia during the 1970s’. In Libertarian Socialism. Politics in Red and Black, edited by Alex Prichard, Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta, and Dave Berry, 251–74. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Rabble Rousers and Merry Pranksters. A History of Anarchism in Aotearoa/New Zealand from the Mid-1950s to the Early 1980s. Wellington: Irrecuperable Press, 2007.
‘The New Left in New Zealand’. In On the Left. Essays on Socialism in New Zealand, edited by Pat Moloney and Kerry Taylor, 117–32. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2002.
Last updated: April 11, 2016
Professor Jennifer Burrell
University at Albany SUNY, USA
“Workers, Respected, Responsible”: Migration, Work and Generational Conflict among the Maya
Jennifer Burrell is an associate professor of anthropology at University at Albany, State University of New York. She received her doctorate from the New School for Social Research in 2005 and a Certificate in International Criminal Law, International Humanitarian Law, and Human Rights Law from University of Salzburg, Austria (2002). Her research interests include questions of power, structural and political violence, political economy and the construction of inequalities. Burrell conducts research in Guatemala, Mexico and the United States on migration, security, human rights and the state. Her current project examines generation and rights at the nexus of migration and security-making, among migrants in the US and the communities from which they hail in Central America and Mexico. Burrell was a Fulbright Fellow to Guatemala in 1999-2000. Her research has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation and Programa de Investigación de Migración y Salud (PIMSA). Her books include Maya After War: Conflict, Power and Politics in Guatemala (University of Texas Press, 2013) and Central America in the New Millennium (Berghahn, 2013).
While at re:work, Burrell will explore concepts of work and changes around ideas of work in a transnational Mayan community in the past decades. For the Maya, work has been an integral part of identity and culture, and a source of dignity and agency in marginal conditions. Respect for hard work has been consistently enshrined in oral narratives, particularly at “hinge” historical moments where rapid change occurred. Being a “good worker” and doing “good work” have served as orienting tropes and as part of the shared performance of community. Burrell asks how shifting notions of what constitutes being a “good worker” and doing “good work” interpolate into new vectors of intergenerational and gendered caring or conflict, demonstrating how these are foundational to the politically complex negotiations that transnational migrants make in the hyper-securitized world of late capitalism.
Publications
with Ellen Moodie. ‘The Post-Cold War Anthropology of Central America’. Annual Review of Anthropology 44 (2015): 381–400.
Maya After War. Conflict, Power, and Politics in Guatemala. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013.
with Ellen Moodie, eds. Central America in the New Millennium. Living Transition and Reimagining Democracy. New York, NY: Berghahn, 2013.
‘Ephemeral Rights and Securitized Lives. Migration, Mareros and Power in Millennial Guatemala’. In Central America in the New Millennium. Living Transition and Reimagining Democracy, edited by Jennifer Burrell and Ellen Moodie, 146–60. New York, NY: Berghahn, 2013.
‘(After) Lynching’. In War by Other Means. Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala, edited by Carlota McAllister and Diane M. Nelson, 241–60. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
with Elena P. Bilbao González, and James Collins. ‘La migración Mexicana y su acceso a los servicios de salud. Una perspectiva binacional desde puebla y la región de la capital del estado de Nueva York’. Iberóforum. Revista de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad Iberoamericana VII, no. 13 (2012): 61–97.
‘In and Out of Rights. Security, Migration, and Human Rights Talk in Postwar Guatemala’. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 15, no. 1 (2010): 90–115.
‘Migration and the Transnationalization of Fiesta Customs in Todos Santos Cuchumatán, Guatemala’. Latin American Perspectives 32, no. 5 (2005): 12–32.
Last updated: April 11, 2016
Dr. Lorenzo D'Angelo
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy
Working with the Imaginaries: Labour, Environment and Imaginaries in Sierra Leone's Diamond Mines
Lorenzo D’Angelo received a PhD in human sciences – contemporary anthropology in 2011 at the University of Milano-Bicocca. He teaches cultural anthropology of organisations at the Catholic University of Milan, Italy.
He carried out his first fieldwork in Italy by addressing the social suffering of asylum seekers and ‘illegal’ migrants. In 2008, he started a collaborative research project with an Italian association of psychoanalysts, the Società di Psicoanalisi Critica, to elaborate a critical perspective for the social sciences influenced by the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
Since then, he has been conducting historical and ethnographic research on the economic, cultural, ecological and religious aspects of diamond mining in Sierra Leone. In exploring these issues his study raises key questions concerning the anthropology of work. In 2012, he became a member of the newly formed Italian Society of Labour History (SISLav).
His research at re:work stems from his fieldwork experience in Sierra Leone’s mines (2007—2011). It examines how artisanal miners elaborate and imagine their historical and professional experiences in relation to their society and to distant others. The diamonds of Sierra Leone have been the focus of many debates on the reasons that fuelled the civil war from 1991 to 2002. However, next to nothing is known about the views and living conditions of Sierra Leone’s extractor—producers. His research will try to connect two issues that he considers crucial for developing a concept of work capable of bringing sites of production back to the centre of theoretical analyses: the material production of diamonds and the miners’ imaginaries.
By drawing upon the perspectives of those who stand on the fringes of global commodity chains, this research considers work as a complex combination of material production, imaginaries, and the life experiences of social actors. Indeed, miners are not passive subjects, but rather agents who resist, collude or reproduce the dynamics of capitalism in different creative ways.
Publications
‘The Art of Governing Contingency. Rethinking the Colonial History of Diamond Mining in Sierra Leone’. Historical Research 89, no. 243 (2016): 136–57.
‘‘Diamond Mining Is a Chain’. Luck, Blessing, and Gambling in Sierra Leone’s Artisanal Mines’. Critical African Studies 7, no. 3 (2015): 243–61.
‘Who Owns the Diamonds? The Occult Eco-Nomy of Diamond Mining in Sierra Leone’. Africa 84, no. 2 (2014): 269–93.
‘Changing Environments, Occult Protests and Social Memories in Sierra Leone’. Social Evolution & History 13, no. 2 (2014): 22–56.
‘Diamanti e sviluppo. Un’analisi critica degli stereotipi sui minatori della Sierra Leone’. ANUAC 2, no. 1 (2013): 87–104.
with Amalia Rossi, eds. Antropologia, risorse naturali e conflitti ambientali. Milano: Mimesis, 2012.
‘Il duro lavoro ed i soldi veloci. L’economia occulta dell’estrazione mineraria in Sierra Leone’. In L’ideologia del denaro. Tra psicoanalisi, letteratura, antropologia, edited by Adriano Voltolin, 97–129. Milan: Mondadori, 2011.
Last updated: April 11, 2016
Dr. Paula de la Cruz Fernandez
Florida International University, Miami, USA
Atlantic Threads: Singer in Spain and Mexico 1860-1940
Paula A. De La Cruz-Fernández received her PhD in 2013 in history at Florida International University. Her dissertation ‘Atlantic Threads: Singer in Spain and Mexico, 1860—1940’ examines the changes and modernization of sewing practices in Spain and Mexico as the American-owned multinational enterprise Singer developed in both regions and globally. Her research focuses on understanding how this multinational corporation became part of and learned from the social, economic and cultural contexts of the host countries in which it was operating.
At re:work, she will be working on turning her dissertation into a book. Her major research interests are gender history, business history and world history.
Publications
‘Multinationals and Gender. Singer Sewing Machine and Marketing in Mexico, 1890–1930’. Business History Review 89, no. 3 (2015): 531–49.
‘Isaac Merritt Singer’. Edited by William J. Hausman. Immigrant Entrepreneurship. German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present. German Historical Institute, last modified July 30, 2015.
‘Marketing the Hearth. Ornamental Embroidery and the Building of the Multinational Singer Sewing Machine Company’. Enterprise & Society 15, no. 3 (2014): 442–71.
‘Embroidering the Nation. The Culture of Sewing and Spanish Ideologies of Domesticity’. In Memory and Cultural History of the Spanish Civil War. Realms of Oblivion, edited by Aurora G. Morcillo, 249–84. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
‘Atlantic Threads. Singer in Spain and Mexico, 1860-1940’. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in History, Florida International University, 2013.
Last updated: April 12, 2016
Dr. Jan Grill
University of Manchester, UK
‘Roma Labour Action’ [Romani buťi] and ‘Gypsy Work’ [cigánska robota]: Ideologies of Work, Practices of Labour among Slovak Roma
Jan Grill is a research fellow at the department of social anthropology at the University of Manchester. Jan joined the University of Manchester in 2012 after completing his PhD in social anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Since 2005 he has carried out ethnographic research with Slovak, Czech and Hungarian Roma/Gypsy groups, exploring issues related to different forms of migration from Central Eastern Europe to Britain and Canada (and back). His research has focused on the social trajectories of transnational Roma networks, and has examined concrete pathways through which they come to experience their movement. Methodologically, he has done ethnographic, qualitative and archival research. The general research interests informing his work are migration, ethnicity, nationalism, racism, marginality, labour and work, and the ethnography of state and borders.
His research project at re:workwill examine different categorisations of work and labour among Roma/Gypsy groups in Central Eastern Europe.Drawing on data obtained through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Jan Grill will explore transforming Roma conceptualisations of work, their practical performance of labour as a practice in relation to the wider historical forces placing them in various marginal positions in different labour regimes and dominant ideologies of the work ethic.His research will explore how trajectories and self-understandings of Roma work in east Slovakia were re-configured and shaped by efforts to assimilate them into the socialist working class, by their long-term unemployment and by their labour migration during the post-socialist period.
Publications
‘Re-Learning to Labour? “Activation Works” and New Politics of Social Assistance in the Case of Slovak Roma’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24, no. S1 (2018): 105–19.
‘Struggles for the Folk. Politics of Culture in Czechoslovak Ethnography, 1940s–1950s’. History and Anthropology 26, no. 5 (2015): 619–38.
‘“Endured Labour” and “Fixing Up” Money. The Economic Strategies of Roma Migrants in Slovakia and the UK’. In Gypsy Economy. Romani Livelihoods and Notions of Worth in the 21st Century, edited by Micol Brazzabeni, Manuela Ivone Cunha, and Martin Fotta, 88–106. New York, NY: Berghahn, 2015.
‘Historické premeny štruktúry medzikultúrnych vzťahov. Formy spolužitia v prípade Tarkoviec na východnom Slovensku’. In Čierno-biele svety. Rómovia v majoritnej spoločnosti na Slovensku, edited by Tatiana Podolinská and Tomáš Hrustič, 146–71. Bratislava: VEGA, 2014.
‘Roma Asylum Migrations from Czech Republic to Canada and Back. A Case Study of Roma Migratory Network from Bombary’. In Roma Migration to and from Canada. The Czech, Hungarian and Slovak Case, edited by Zsuzsanna Vidra, 89–128. Budapest: Central European University, 2013.
‘“Going up to England”. Exploring Mobilities among Roma from Eastern Slovakia’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 38, no. 8 (2012): 1269–87.
‘“It’s Building up to Something and It Won’t Be Nice When It Erupts”. The Making of Roma/Gypsy Migrants in Post-Industrial Scotland’. Focaal, no. 62 (2012): 42–54.
‘From Street Busking in Switzerland to Meat Factories in the UK. A Comparative Study of Two Roma Migration Networks from Slovakia’. In Global Connections and Emerging Inequalities in Europe. Perspectives on Poverty and Transnational Migration, edited by Deema Kaneff and Frances Pine, 79–102. London: Anthem Press, 2011.
Last updated: October 9, 2019
Dr. Nurşen Gürboğa
Marmara Üniversitesi, Istanbul, Türkei
Life, Labor and the City: Şirket-i Hayriye Steamboat Workers of İstanbul (1890-1944)
Nurşen Gürboğa received her PhD in 2005 from Boğaziçi University, Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History. Her dissertation ‘Mine Workers, the State and War, Zonguldak Coal Basin as the Site of Contest: 1920–1947’ is on the contentious relations between Kemalist single-party rule, coal workers and companies. It placed special emphasis on the contestation by the compulsory mine workers of the oppressive labour policies implemented by the ruling elite; and the grassroots activism in Zonguldak coalfield during the Second World War.
Gürboğa’s dissertation was published by the Osmanlı Bank Research Center in 2009, and her article ‘Compulsory Mine Work: The Single-party Regime and Zonguldak Coalfield as the Site of Contention, 1940–1947’ was published in the International Review of Social History in 2009. Her research interests include the economic and social history of the late Ottoman period and the single-party era of Turkey, labour history, urban history and social movements.
Since 2003, Gürboğa has taught Ottoman and Turkish history, Turkish political life, as well as gender relations in Turkish society at Marmara University’s department of political science and international relations.
At re:work, Gürboğa will be working to extend her research on the labour relations and everyday lives of the workers of a ferry company, Şirket-i Hayriye, which provided public transport on the waterfront of the Bosporus in Istanbul between 1852 and 1944. The history of the Şirket-i Hayriye workers offers us a fruitful case to study the relations of the workers with urban space, their migratory patterns and survival strategies in a gigantic city, as well as their household structure and lifecycle, and their social networks based on residential, regional, ethnic, religious and professional allegiances. A study on a period extending from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century also provides an opportunity to examine the lifecycles of the workers, as well as the changing composition of the workforce under the impact of the transition from an old empire to a nation-state.
Publications
‘Şirket-I Hayriye Pension Fund, Right to Retirement and Labor Control (1893-1932)’. In History from Below. A Tribute in Memory of Donald Quataert, edited by Selim Karahasanoğlu and Deniz Cenk Demir. Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press, forthcoming.
‘1923 Nüfus Mübadelesi ve Mübadil Romanlara Yönelik İskân ve Denetim Politikaları’. Toplumsal Tarih, no. 263 (2015): 36–43.
‘Compulsory Mine Work. The Single-Party Regime and the Zonguldak Coalfield as a Site of Contention, 1940–1947’. International Review of Social History 54, no. Supplement S17 (2009): 115–42.
The Zonguldak Coal Basin as the Site of Contest, 1920-1947. Mine Workers, the Single Party Rule, and War. İstanbul: Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Centre, 2009.
Last updated: April 13, 2016
Professor Vincent Houben
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Indentured and Free Labour. Colonial Work Systems in Southeast Asia
vincent.houben(at)rz.hu-berlin.de
Vincent Houben has been professor of Southeast Asian history and society at the Humboldt University’s Institute of Asian and African Studies since April 2001. From 2004 to 2011 he was the institute’s director.
His academic career started at Leiden University, where he studied history and Indonesian languages and obtained his PhD in 1987 with a study of indirect colonial rule in Central Java. After having been a lecturer of Indonesian history at Leiden, in 1997 he became professor of Southeast Asian studies at the University of Passau. In 1993, he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, and in 2007 and 2009 a visiting fellow at the Institute of Asian and Pacific Studies at Australian National University, Canberra. He is an editorial board member of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies and of TRANS: Trans-Regional and – National Studies of Southeast Asia. His main research interests are modern and contemporary Southeast Asian history and society, in other words, colonial and economic history, the creation of a public memory and a comparative (transnational) history of Southeast Asia as well as the theory of history and area studies. His spatial focus lies on Indonesia, mainly Java, as well as on Malaysia and Vietnam.
During his fellowship at re:work he intends to revive and pursue his previous research from the late 1980s and 1990s on the indentured labour of Javanese people in the colonial era, now with a particular focus on labour law and transnational connectivity. In the course of his archival work he has collected material on the transnational dimensions of Javanese labour migration, a topic that has been largely neglected in existing historiography. The project will take this issue up again and use new insights on global as well as entangled history to engage in a comparative study of colonial labour relations in the broader Southeast Asian and Pacific area. The concrete empirical basis for this study are Dutch archival records of labour inspectors visiting authorities as well as enterprises in nearby British (British Malaya) and French (Indochina, New Caledonia) colonies, where Javanese people were doing plantation work. Further primary source material shall be gathered from the British colonial archives in London, the French archives in Aix-en-Provence as well as the Dutch national archives in The Hague.
Publications
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‘Colonial Capitalism and Javanese Transcolonial Labor Migration in Insular Asia’. In Work out of Place, edited by Mahua Sarkar, 55–76. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018.
‘Koloniale Moderne in Nederlandsch Indië. Grenzen und Gegenströme’. In Andere Modernen. Beiträge zu einer Historisierung des Moderne-Begriffs, edited by Wolfgang Kruse, 209–18. Bielefeld: transcript, 2015.
‘Sociocultures of Insular Southeast Asia. Between History, Area and Social Studies’. Transcience 5, no. 1 (2014): 28–35.
with Julia Seibert. ‘(Un)freedom. Colonial Labour Relations in Belgian Congo and the Dutch East Indies Compared’. In Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development. The Belgian Congo and the Netherlands Indies Compared, edited by Ewout Frankema and Frans Buelens, 178–92. London: Routledge, 2013.
‘Economic Crises in the ASEAN Area. Types and Responses’. European Review of History / Revue Européenne D’histoire 19, no. 6 (2012): 965–77.
with Mona Schrempf, eds. Figurations of Modernity. Global and Local Representations in Comparative Perspective. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2008.
‘Historical Evidence and Dutch Colonial Labor Relations’. In Evidence and Inference in History and Law. Interdisciplinary Dialogues, edited by William L. Twining and Iain Hampsher-Monk, 311–28. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003.
with Howard Dick, J. Thomas Lindblad, and Thee Kian Wie. The Emergence of a National Economy. An Economic History of Indonesia, 1800-2000. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002.
with J. Thomas Lindblad, eds. Coolie Labour in Colonial Indonesia. A Study of Labour Relations in the Outer Islands, C. 1900-1940. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999.
‘Labour Conditions on Western Firnis in Colonial Indonesia. Outline of an Approach’. Jahrbuch Für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook 36, no. 1 (1995): 93–106.
Kraton and Kumpeni. Surakarta and Yogyakarta, 1830-1870. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1994.
‘Javanese Labour Migration into Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Australia’. In Proceedings of the University of Queensland History Research Group, edited by Paul Crook, 5:16–30, 1994.
‘Economic Policy in Central Java in the Nineteenth Century’. In Economic Growth in Indonesia, 1820-1940, edited by Angus Maddison, 185–202. Dordrecht: Foris, 1989.
Dr. Ju Li
Binghamton University, Vestal, NY, USA
Living in “Erosive Deindustrialization”: The Changing Life Courses of Three Generations of TFC Workers in China
Ju Li received her PhD in 2012 from the sociology department at Binghamton University in the US. Her areas of interest include social history, labour, modern China, historical sociology, globalisation, as well as critical development studies, and life course. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled ‘All That Is Solid Melts into Air: An Exploration of the Transformation of Nanfang Steel, a Third-Front Enterprise in China’. It investigates the massive on-going social changes in contemporary China and their relationship to the current dominant discourses of modernity and economic reform. This was done through a study of the transformation process that occurred from the 1960s to the 2000s in one specific third-front enterprise – Nanfang Steel in Sichuan province. The enterprise was built as part of the Third Front Construction (TFC).
Her research project at re:work is entitled ‘Living in “Erosive Deindustrialization”: The Changing Life Courses of Three Generations of TFC Workers in China’. It explores the entangled connection between the historical vicissitude of Third-Front Construction, one of China’s largest socialist industrialisation projects, and the specific changes in the global political-economic climate. At the same time, it looks specifically at three generations of TFC workers to see what impact these larger processes have had on their life-courses, their trajectories and expectations.
Publications
‘From “Out-of-Plan Worker” to the “Floating Mass.” Informal Work in the History of the PRC’. In Work out of Place, edited by Mahua Sarkar, 173–96. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018.
‘From “Master” to “Loser”. Changing Working-Class Identity in Contemporary China’. International Labor and Working-Class History 88 (2015): 190–208.
‘Fight Silently. Everyday Resistance in Surviving State Owned Enterprises in Contemporary China’. Global Labour Journal 3, no. 2 (2012): 194–216.
Professor Alexander Lichtenstein
Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
Making Apartheid Work: Industrial Relations and the South African State, 1948-1994
Alexander Lichtenstein is associate professor of history at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he teaches US and South African history. His research focuses on the intersection of labour history and the struggle for racial justice in societies shaped by white supremacy, particularly the US South (1865—1954) and 20th-century South Africa. His first book, Twice the Work of Free Labor examines the role of convict leasing and chain gangs in the remaking of the American South in the half century after the US Civil War. Subsequently, he has written extensively about race relations in the labour movement, interracial agrarian radicalism, early civil rights struggles, the impact of anticommunism on the labour and civil rights movements, and comparative US/South African history.
His project at re:work will form the basis of a book on South African labour organising and the state under the apartheid regime, tentatively entitled Making Apartheid Work: Industrial Relations and the South African State, 1948—1994. In particular, he plans to explore the way African factory workers under apartheid were able to use the small concessions granted to them by employers and the state to build shop-floor networks that eventually formed the basis for factory-based anti-apartheid struggles. He is also curating an exhibition of photographs taken by Margaret Bourke-White in South Africa in 1950 that will open in Johannesburg and Cape Town in 2014.
Publications
with Christian G. De Vito. ‘Writing a Global History of Convict Labour’. In Global Histories of Work, edited by Andreas Eckert, 49–89. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016.
with Rick Halpern. Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016.
‘Harold Wolpe and the Labour Question’. Social Dynamics. A Journal of African Studies 41, no. 3 (2015): 597–601.
‘“A Measure of Democracy”. Works Committees, Black Workers, and Industrial Citizenship in South Africa, 1973 - 1980’. South African Historical Journal 67, no. 2 (2015): 113–38.
‘The Other Civil Rights Movement and the Problem of Southern Exceptionalism’. Journal of The Historical Society 11, no. 3 (2011): 351–76.
‘Making Apartheid Work. African Trade Unions and the 1953 Native Labour (Settlement of Disputes) Act in South Africa’. The Journal of African History 46, no. 2 (2005): 293–314.
‘“The Hope for White and Black”? Race, Labour and the State in South Africa and the United States, 1924–1956’. Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 1 (2004): 133–53.
Twice the Work of Free Labor. The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South. London: Verso, 1996.
Last updated: October 01, 2016
Professor Elena Marushiakova
Българска Академия на науките (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences), Sofia, Bulgaria
Roma from Southeastern Europe: Living and Working in Migration
Elena Marushiakova works at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with the Ethnographic Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She has published a number of publications about Roma in Bulgaria, the Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe. Her major publications (in co-authorship with Vesselin Popov) include the first monographic research on the history, social structure and culture of the Gypsies in Bulgaria (1997), a book on Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire (2000) and a book on Gypsies living in the Black Sea region (2008). These books were published as part of a series covering the field of Romani studies entitled Studii Romani.
Elena Marushiakova is the president of the Gypsy Lore Society, an international scholarly organisation in the field of Romani studies, which is more than 100-years-old. She is also a member of a number of other professional organisations including the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA); the International Council of Museums/International Committee for Museums Ethnography; and the International Council for Traditional Music. She is also a member of the Scientific Committee of the European Academic Network on Romani Studies, which was established by the European Commission and the Council of Europe, and a member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal Romani Studies.
The research project at re:work is a comparative analysis of the transformation in the work and human lifecycle of Roma from South-eastern Europe both before and after experiences of migration. The project studies migrants not only as passive recipients of policy measures and social benefits but also as active architects of their own lives. The research seeks to answer the question as to what influences Roma migrants’ life course, and analyse their attitudes towards work and leisure in the context of migration. In order to do so, attention will be paid to the issues of the internal structure of Roma communities, their historical experience of service nomadism, and their inclusion in socialist industry during the communist regime. Furthermore, the research also considers the networks between specific Roma communities and migrant populations from their respective home country, as well as with Roma and non-Roma organisations in the host country. The research looks specifically at the extent migration leads to consolidation with other ethnic populations from the same place of origin. It also looks at migrants’ adaptation and integration into their new place of living and how this affects the life course of group members and their relation to work and leisure. The research employs a dual approach involving a comparative perspective across different groups of people originating from different waves of migration, and a longitudinal perspective on the migrants’ complete life trajectory.
Publications
with Vesselin Popov, eds. Roma Culture. Myths and Realities. München: LINCOM, 2016.
‘Roma from Southeastern Europe. Living and Working in Migration’. In Romani Studies. Contemporary Trends, edited by Christo Kjučukov, Ladislav Fizik, and Lukasz Kwadrans, 216–43. München: LINCOM, 2015.
with Vesselin Popov. ‘Significance of the Taking of an Oath in Roma Communities’. In Linguistic, Cultural and Educational Issues of Roma, edited by Khristo Ki︠u︡chukov, Martin Kaleja, and Milan Samko, n/s. München: LINCOM, 2014.
with Vesselin Popov. ‘“Gypsy” Groups in Eastern Europe. Ethnonyms vs. Professionyms’. Romani Studies 23, no. 1 (2013): 61–81.
with Vesselin Popov. ‘Roma Identities in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe’. In Roma Identity and Antigypsyism in Europe, edited by Hristo Kjučukov, n/s. München: LINCOM, 2013.
with Vesselin Popov. ‘Between Exoticization and Marginalization. Current Problems of Gypsy Studies’. Behemoth 4, no. 1 (2011): 86–105.
with Vesselin Popov. ‘Gypsy/Roma European Migrations from 15th Century Till Nowadays’. In Proceedings of the International Conference ‘Romani Mobilities in Europe. Multidisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Nando Sigona, 126–31, 2010.
Dynamics of National Identity and Transnational Identities in the Process of European Integration, ed. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
with Vesselin Popov. ‘Les migrations des Roms balkaniques en Europe occidentale. Mobilités passées et présentes’. Translated by Nadège Ragaru. Balkanologie. Revue d’études pluridisciplinaires XI, no. 1–2 (2008).
Last updated: April 18, 2016
Dr. Frank Reichherzer
Humboldt-University of Berlin, Germany
The Colonization of Free Time. A Topology of Work and Leisure in Modern European History
frank.reichherzer(at)hu-berlin.de
Frank Reichherzer undertakes research in the history of Western Europe and transatlantic relations at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Between 1998 and 2005 he studied contemporary history, political science and rhetoric at the University of Tübingen and the University of Florence. In 2007, he took up work at the Humboldt University, but before this he worked as part of the ‘Collaborative Research Centre 437 – War experiences. War and Society in the Modern Age’ at the University of Tübingen. In Tübingen, he studied the 20th century nexus of war, science and society. In 2011, he gained his PhD with his thesis “Alles ist Front!” Wehrwissenschaften und die Bellifizierung der Gesellschaft vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis in den Kalten Krieg (“Everything is the front line!” Military sciences and the mobilisation of civil society for war – from the First World War to the Cold War).
At re:work he aims to delve into his new project on the colonisation of free time to explore the ways in which free time is constructed, transformed and used. At first glance, modern free time in the European North Atlantic region seems to be framed in opposition to work. Free time is viewed in terms of the end of the working day, as rest or recreation, as space for creativity, for consumption, but also for boredom or simply as spare time. Free time is deeply inscribed into collective and individual life. However, understanding free time as an opposition is both insufficient and misleading: the boundaries of free time are flexible and permeable. Frank Reichherzer is particularly interested in the changing contours of ‘free time’, the discourses that shape these contours, and the various possible meanings with which actors fill their free time and those that they use to make sense of it. Places such as workshops, factories, pubs, stadia, hobby rooms and many others provide the focus of which to approach the study. This aim is to provide a topology of free time and contribute towards the history of the perception of time and the modern European North Atlantic time regime.
Publications
with Emmanuel Droit, and Hélène Miard-Delacroix, eds. Penser et pratiquer l’histoire du temps présent. Essais franco-allemands. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2016.
with Jan Hansen, and Christian Helm, eds. Making Sense of the Americas. How Protest Related to America in the 1980s and Beyond. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015.
‘Zwischen Atomkrieg und Stadtguerilla. Kontinuitäten, Brüche und Anpassungen des Kriegsdenkens westdeutscher Wehrexperten von den 1950er Jahren bis zum NATO-Doppelbeschluss’. In Den Kalten Krieg denken. Beiträge zur sozialen Ideengeschichte, edited by Patrick Bernhard and Holger Nehring, 131–60. Essen: Klartext, 2014.
with Emmanuel Droit. ‘La fin de l’histoire du temps présent telle que nous l’avons connue. Plaidoyer franco-allemand pour l’abandon d’une singularité historiographique’. Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, no. 118 (2013): 121–45.
‘Alles ist Front!’ Wehrwissenschaften in Deutschland und die Bellifizierung der Gesellschaft vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis in den Kalten Krieg. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012.
‘Totaler Krieg – Totale Mobilmachung – Totale Wissenschaft. Die Bellifizierung der zivilen Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der Weltkriege am Beispiel der Wehrwissenschaften’. In Spiesser, Patrioten, Revolutionäre. Militärische Mobilisierung und gesellschaftliche Ordnung in der Neuzeit, edited by Rüdiger Bergien and Ralf Pröve, 662–81. Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2010.
‘Wehrwissenschaften. Zum Wechselverhältnis von Krieg und Wissenschaften im Zeitalter der Weltkriege’. In Mit Feder und Schwert. Militär und Wissenschaft - Wissenschaftler und Krieg, edited by Matthias Berg, 177–96. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2009.
Last updated: April 18, 2016
Professor Won Chul Shin
부산대학교 (Pusan National University), Busan, South Korea
A Comparative Study on the Evolution of Collective Redundancy Regimes
Won Chul Shin is associate professor at the department of sociology at Pusan National University in South Korea. He received his PhD from the department of sociology at Seoul National University in 2001 and has been studying the evolution of industrial and labour relations, especially focusing on the shipbuilding industry in South Korea and Japan. His research interests include internal labour market practices, subcontracting arrangements, forms of union organisation and collective bargaining structures. He is now taking part in the research project ‘In the Same Boat? Shipbuilding and ship repair workers: a global labour history (1950—2010)’ under the initiative of the International Institute of Social History.
His project at the center explores the origins and evolutions of collective redundancy arrangements in Japan, South Korea and Germany, and compares the actual processes of workforce reduction between these countries with a focus on the shipbuilding industry since the 1950s. It will examine the rules and practices associated with collective redundancies in each country and their implications for workers’ movements and solidarity.
Publications
‚Betriebsinterne Unterverträge in der Schiffbauindustrie Ostasiens’. JahrBuch für Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, no. 2 (2013): 46–68.
Articles in Korean
‘Wartime Mobilization and its Legacies in South Korea’. In 1950-yŏndae Han’guk nodongja ŭi saenghwal segye (Life World of Korean Workers in 1950s), edited by Chong-gu Yi. Seoul: Hanul, 2010.
‘The Evolution of Japanese Industrial Relations. A Case Study of the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard (1955-1965)’. Society and History 76 (2007): 335–63.
‘Internal Subcontracting and Employment Relations in the South Korean Shipbuilding Industry’. Korean Journal of Labor Studies 12, no. 2 (2006): 349–77.
‘The Evolution of Enterprise Union System in Korea (1945-1987). With a Focus on the Shipbuilding Industry’. Economy and Society 64 (2004): 118–47.
Last updated: April 19, 2016
Dr. Nitin Sinha
University of York, UK
The Mini-England: History of a Railway Town in Colonial India, 1860s-1960s
Nitin Sinha is a historian of modern South Asia, specifically focusing on the themes of the history of transport and communication, labour, and agro-ecology under British colonial rule from the late eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. His research interests include topics related to urban and labour history, the history of travel and mapping, and social and cultural history related with Hindi printed texts and visuals.
In 2012, Nitin Sinha joined the department of history, University of York as a lecturer in modern history. Before that, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, where he continues to be a research associate.
In Berlin in 2010, together with a few junior colleagues, Nitin Sinha founded a forum titled Young South Asia Scholars Meet (Y-SASM, http://y-sasm.blogspot.com/) in order to promote better academic exchanges amongst scholars at the doctoral and post-doctoral levels working on South Asia. The forum has successfully organised three annual conferences so far.
At re:work, he will focus on the history of Jamalpur, a railway town in colonial India from the 1860s to the 1960s. This project aims to study the growth and development of this small industrial town. It attempts to demonstrate that small town histories, which unfortunately have not been widely researched, are not exclusive to the narratives of big(ger) towns. A call for greater small town studies is based not upon challenging the existing studies on bigger cities but upon generating a fuller understanding of the links between the policies and discourses of colonial rule that applied broadly to towns and cities of various descriptions. The diverse population of Europeans, Anglo-Indians, Bengalis and Biharis forged different forms of sociability; the workshop and other civic amenities both shaped and were contested through these forms. The discursive sites of such contestations – race, work, region, identity, sanitation, defence and protest – were as multiple as the physical ones: roads, drainage, workshops, houses, fields, baths and akharas (wrestling grounds). As a result, Jamalpur seen from the perspective of Europeans and Anglo-Indians was one type of locality that was highly insular and self-fulfilling; from the viewpoint of labour it was an extended place based on the rhythmic circulation of labour.
Being an industrial town, labour, work and skill become important categories of investigation. The early decades of the twentieth century witnessed frequent strikes; some managed by the workers while others were managed by trade unions and nationalist organisations. The period was marked by the growth of the Indian national movement, in which the participation of workers and peasants was becoming conspicuous. Within the backdrop of urban study, the project will employ the insights from labour studies to see how workers put their claims to spaces within the town, how they negotiated the colonial/managerial authority, and whether they became part of the mainstream national movement. In doing this, the aim is to bring urban, labour and transport histories closer, an approach which scholars have only recently begun to adopt.
Publications
with Nitin Varma, eds. Servants’ Pasts. Late-Eighteenth to Twentieth-Century, South Asia. Vol. 02. 02 vols. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2019.
with Nitin Varma and Pankaj Jha, eds. Servants’ Pasts. Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century, South Asia. Vol. 01. 02 vols. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2019.
‘“Opinion” and “Violence”. Whiteness, Empire and State-Formation in Colonial India’. South Asia Chronicle 4/2014 (2015): 322–51.
‘Fluvial Landscape and the State. Property and the Gangetic Diaras in Colonial India, 1790s-1890s’. Environment and History 20, no. 2 (2014): 209–37.
‘Contract, Work, and Resistance. Boatmen in Early Colonial Eastern India, 1760s–1850s’. International Review of Social History 59, no. S22 (2014): 11–43.
Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India. Bihar, 1760s-1880s. London: Anthem Press, 2012.
‘Continuity and Change. The Eighteenth Century and Indian Historiography’. South Asia Chronicle 2 (2012): 416–40.
‘Entering the Black Hole. Between “Mini-England” and “Smell-Like Rotten Potato”, the Railway Workshop Town of Jamalpur, 1860s–1940s’. South Asian History and Culture 3, no. 3 (2012): 317–47.
‘Protest and Mobilization. Aspects of Workers’ Resistance and Control’. In Labour Matters. Towards Global Histories. Studies in Honour of Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, edited by Marcel van der Linden and Prabhu P. Mohapatra. Tulika Books, 2009.
‘Mobility, Control and Criminality in Early Colonial India, 1760s-1850s’. Indian Economic & Social History Review 45, no. 1 (2008): 1–33.
‘The World of Workers’ Politics. Some Issues of Railway Workers in Colonial India, 1918–1922’. Modern Asian Studies 42, no. 5 (2008): 999–1033.
Last updated: October 10, 2019
Dr. Sigrid Wadauer
Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria
Work, Livelihood and Mobility, Austria, 1880-1938
sigrid.wadauer(at)univie.ac.at
Sigrid Wadauer is a historian and has conducted research into manual crafts, autobiography, migration, alienation, the National Socialist regime and work in the 19th and 20th century. Her last position was at the University of Vienna, where she ran the ERC Starting Grant Project ‘The Production of Work. Welfare, Labour-Market and the Disputed Boundaries of Labour (1880–1938)’. This project examined how certain activities are turned into and normalised as work and how this changes and redefines other activities. Instead of using a particular form of work as the starting point, this project instead sought to focus on the debates that arose out of the conflicts and consensuses that lead to the production of work. The research included various state agencies and perspectives, but also went beyond what is officially recognised as work. It focused on various practices and contexts, and in particular on practices that often seem powerless or ineffective but that are implemented by people who work or organise their livelihood in other ways.
Her project at re:work is based on the research undertaken at the ERC Starting Grant Project, and focuses on mobility and livelihoods. It entails reconstructing and comparing the variable and contrasting range of activities that are more or less associated with work. This includes the search for waged employment or a livelihood, but also various regular freelance and dependent positions (such as peddling, and work as sales representatives) as well as criminalised activities such as unauthorised or informal labour, begging and vagrancy. At first glance, some of these practices may seem to be marginal, traditional, or even as having nothing to do with work or the theme of work. These assumptions have often led the historiography of the European history of work during the 20th century to ignore these themes. However, these activities are clearly bound up with the debate about the limits, the definition and the order of work in the context of the development of a welfare state. Sigrid Wadauer’s investigation will be based on a systematic comparison of cases from sources that should enable social facts to be understood and described as related practices (such as material from commercial administrations or court records). In this context, her research will also analyse the question of age-specific practices, representations of life courses (such as through the use of ego-documents) and employment histories.
Publications
Der Arbeit nachgehen? Auseinandersetzungen um Lebensunterhalt und Mobilität (Österreich 1880-1938). Wien: Böhlau, in preparation.
‘Immer nur Arbeit? Überlegungen zur Historisierung von Arbeit und Lebensunterhalten’. In Semantiken von Arbeit. Diachrone und vergleichende Perspektiven, edited by Jörn Leonhard and Willibald Steinmetz, 225–46. Köln: Böhlau, 2016.
with Thomas Buchner, and Alexander Mejstrik, eds. The History of Labour Intermediation. Institutions and Finding Employment in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. New York, NY: Berghahn, 2015.
‘The Usual Suspects. Begging and Law Enforcement in Interwar Austria’. In The Welfare State and the ‘Deviant Poor’ in Europe, 1870-1933, edited by Beate Althammer, Andreas Gestrich, and Jens Gründler, 126–49. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
with Alexander Mejstrik, and Thomas Buchner, eds. Die Erzeugung des Berufs [= Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften, 24 (1)], 2013.
with Thomas Buchner, and Alexander Mejstrik. ‘The Making of Public Labour Intermediation. Job Search, Job Placement, and the State in Europe, 1880–1940’. International Review of Social History 57, no. S20 (2012): 161–89.
‘Establishing Distinctions. Unemployment versus Vagrancy in Austria from the Late Nineteenth Century to 1938’. International Review of Social History 56, no. 1 (2011): 31–70.
‘Mobility and Irregularities. Itinerant Sales in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s’. In Shadow Economies and Irregular Work in Urban Europe. 16th to Early 20th Centuries, edited by Thomas Buchner and Philip R. Hoffmann-Rehnitz, 197–216. Wien: LIT Verlag, 2011.
Die Tour der Gesellen. Mobilität und Biographie im Handwerk vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005.
Last updated: May 10, 2016
Professor Theresa Wobbe
Universität Potsdam, Germany
Making up People - Reworking Labour Statistics, Legal Norms, and Gender Categorisation in a European and Global Context
theresa.wobbe(at)uni-potsdam.de
Theresa Wobbe is currently professor of sociology and gender sociology at the faculty of economics and social sciences of Potsdam University, member of the training research group WIPCAD ‘Wicked Problems – Contested Public Administrations’ of the faculty of economics, and social sciences, and fellow at the Potsdam Centre for Policy and Management.
Her main research focus is related to the institutional transformation of gender difference, knowledge and societal differentiation at the interface of policy, law, and science. In particular, she is interested in exploring the interplay of national, supranational and global institutional levels within a world-polity context. While examining institutional models of classifying work, occupation, and equality she has done and still is doing research on the gender policy of the European Union. Together with Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffmann, Michel Lallement and Olivier Giraud she is involved in the German—French project ‘The Metamorphosis of Equality’ that is dedicated to the classificatory and regulatory models of gender and work within the comparative context (comparaison en contexte) of German and French gender relations.
While at re:work, she will be focusing on the mutual relationship between the procedures that categorise people and create the idea of work productivity. To this end, current debates about the erosion of the standard employment model (Normalarbeitsverhältnis), about shifting gender relations, and the economisation of society are being specified. While relating the research to the period around 1900 the dimension of transformation and discontinuity will be placed into a historical comparative context. Following the institutionalist approach, she will explore the cultural meanings of statistical observation, legal norms, and gender categorisation. The core material will consist of occupational statistics from the nation-states, the EU, and the International Labour Organization as well as legal labour norms and administrative procedures. Against this background, she will discuss the extent to which today’s occupational statistics reflect a global standardisation of productivity while at the same time reconfiguring gender relations.
Publications
‘Globalisierung – weltkulturelle, weltgesellschaftliche, transnationale Perspektiven’. In Handbuch Religionssoziologie, edited by Volkhard Krech, Detlef Pollack, Markus Hero, and Olaf Müller. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, forthcoming.
‘Das Globalwerden der Menschenrechte in der ILO. Die Umdeutung von Arbeitsrechten im Kontext weltgesellschaftlicher Strukturprobleme von den 1930er bis 1950er Jahren’. In Menschenrechte in der Weltgesellschaft. Deutungswandel und Wirkungsweise eines globalen Leitwerts, edited by Bettina Heintz and Britta Leisering, 283–316. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015.
‘Making up People. Berufsstatistische Klassifikation, geschlechtliche Kategorisierung und wirtschaftliche Inklusion um 1900 in Deutschland’. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 41, no. 1 (2012): 41–57.
‘Statistical Ways of Knowing Gender. Open Questions from a Sociological Perspective’. In Gendered Ways of Knowing in Science? Scope and Limitations, edited by Stefanie Knauss, Theresa Wobbe, and Giovanna Covi, 75–91. Trento: Fondazione Bruno Kessler, 2012.
with Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffmann, and Michel Lallement, eds. Die gesellschaftliche Verortung des Geschlechts. Diskurse der Differenz in der deutschen und französischen Soziologie um 1900. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2011.
‘The Metamorphosis of Gender in the European Community. Shifting Forms of Social Inclusion from the Nation-Building to the Market-Building Frame’. In Dignity in Change. Exploring the Constitutional Potential of EU Gender and Anti-Discrimination Law, edited by Silvia Niccolai and Ilenia Ruggiu, 69–87. Firenze: European Press Academic Publishing, 2010.
Weltgesellschaft. Bielefeld: transcript, 2000.
Last updated: April 22, 2016