Guest of the Director
2018/2019
Professor Pauli Kettunen
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finnland
Corporate Citizens and Social Partners: Neo-Voluntarism and Soft Governance in the Regulation of Labour
Pauli Kettunen has been Professor of Political History in the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, since 2000. From 2007 to 2014, he was the director of the Nordic Centre of Excellence NordWel (The Nordic Welfare State - Historical Foundations and Future Challenges) and, since 2009, Honorary Professor of Welfare State Research at the University of Southern Denmark. Kettunen has been active in several research projects on Nordic labour relations and welfare states, social movements, nationalism and globalization, and the conceptual history of politics. He has published widely on these topics.
During his time at re:work, Pauli Kettunen will investigate the ideological emphases on harmony and symmetry that are, paradoxically, tied to recent and on-going transformations in the regulation of labor. In an era marked by capitalism’s dissolution of socio-spatial ties, debates about “corporate social responsibility” have come to focus on a popular, humble community-oriented concept: “corporate citizenship”. As the asymmetries between labor and capital continue to increase under globalized capitalism, a warm-sounding talk of “social partners” and “social dialogue” has been widely adopted, especially by the European Union. By way of an historical analysis of “corporate citizenship” and “social partnership”, Kettunen will highlight the changing relationships between the public and the private in the reshaping of the nation-state into a competitive state and the role of neo-voluntarism and soft governance in the regulation of labor. One point of departure is his research on the so-called Nordic model, which he has studied from a transnational historical and comparative perspective with an emphasis on the political implications of language and concepts in particular. Kettunen will examine the modes of thought and action expressed by “corporate citizenship” and “social partnership” in relation to those ideological ingredients that were effective in the making of the so-called Nordic model, especially the idea of parity between “labor market parties”. He will also relate them to tripartism, which the ILO has established as a universal norm, and discuss the role of the ILO, the UN, the OECD, and the EU in developing and advocating new ideas and practices of neo-voluntarism and soft governance.
Publications
with Klaus Petersen, Stein Kuhnle, Yoko Otsuka, and Akio Kamiko, eds. Hokuo fukushi kokka wa jizoku kano ka. Tagensei to seisaku kyocho no yukue. Kyoto: Mineruvashobo, 2017.
with Sonya Michel, and Klaus Petersen, eds. Race, Ethnicity and Welfare States. An American Dilemma? Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015.
with Stein Kuhnle, and Yuan Ren, eds. Reshaping Welfare Institutions in China and the Nordic Countries. Helsinki: Nordic Centre of Excellence NordWel, 2014.
with Klaus Petersen, eds. Beyond Welfare State Models. Transnational Historical Perspectives on Social Policy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011.
Last updated: September 27, 2018
Dr. Asli Vatansever
Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy
The Making of the Neoliberal Worker: Human Resources Management and the Alignment of the Worker with the Flexible Time-Regime
Aslı Vatansever (b. 1980, Istanbul) is an associate professor of sociology of work who focuses on precarious academic labour. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Hamburg in January 2010 with a study entitled ‘Ursprünge des Islamismus im Osmanischen Reich. Eine weltsystemanalytische Perspektive’ (Hamburg: Dr. Kovač Verlag, 2010) From September 2010 to April 2016 she was a faculty member of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Doğuş University (Istanbul), until she was removed from her office for signing the Peace Petition of the Academics for Peace and continuing to raise her voice in the national and international press against the authoritarian policies of the AKP-government. She was a guest researcher at the Zentrum moderner Orient (October 2016-May 2017) where she worked on the complicity between universities and the state in Turkey. During her guest fellowship at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin between June and July 2017 she conducted empirical research on the relationship between precariousness and subjectivity based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with the Academics for Peace in German exile. She summarized the results of this research in two articles and in an ongoing book project during her period as a Scholar Rescue Fund Fellow in the Department of Political Science, Law, and International Studies at the University of Padova (September 2017-August 2018). The manuscript entitled ‘At the Margins of Academia. Exile, Precariousness, and Subjectivity’ will be completed by November 2018 and submitted to Brill.
Dr. Vatansever’s research focuses on the dynamics of the current transition of capitalist societies in general and on the changing nature of capital-labour relations in particular. Especially in the wake of the global wave of uprisings and the subsequent Gezi movement, in which she actively took part, Dr. Vatansever’s research began to increasingly focus on the precariat as the main actor in most of the Occupy movements across the globe. She wrote a pair of well-received articles on the precarisation of the skilled labour force, and in 2015, she co-authored a book entitled Ne Ders Olsa Veririz. Akademisyenin Vasıfsız İşçiye Dönüşümü (Ready to Teach Anything. The Transformation of the Academic into Unskilled Worker) on the de-skilling and commodification of the academic labour force, which sparked a lively debate on the commodification and devaluation of the academic labour force at private universities in Turkey. Besides her ongoing book project on precariousness and subjectivity, Aslı Vatansever is currently co-organizing an international conference on ‘Problems of Scientific Freedom in Modern and Contemporary History’, which will take place at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, on 2-3 November 2018.
At re:work she will work on a project entitled ‘The Making of the Neoliberal Worker: Human Resources Management and the Alignment of the Worker with the Flexible Time Regime’. The project focuses on the flexibilisation of immaterial labour and questions the ways through which capital has aligned immaterial labour with an increasingly liquid conception of labour-time through human resources strategies to sustain capital accumulation. These alignment strategies will be examined through the lens of absolute and relative surplus value. For this purpose, Vatansever will utilize the data she gathered between July 2015 and January 2016 from in-depth interviews with over 20 employees working in the human resources departments of various local and international corporate companies in Istanbul.
Publications
At the Margins of Academia. Exile, Precariousness, and Subjectivity. Brill, forthcoming.
‘Partners in Crime. The Anti-Intellectual Complicity between the State and the Universities in Turkey’. The Journal of Interrupted Studies, 2018, 1–23.
‘Sürgün Hükmünde Kararname. Göçebelik, Güvencesizlik ve Özneleşme [= Exile Decree. Nomadism, Precariousness, and Subjectivation]’. In OHAL’de Hayat. KHK’lılar konuşuyor, edited by Kemal İnal, Efe Beşler, and Batur Talu. Ankara: Belge, 2018.
‘Proletarya ile Orta Sınıf Arasında: Siyasi Aktör Olarak Prekarya [= Between the Proletariat and the Middle Class. The Precariat as a Political Actor]’. In Türkiye’de Toplumsal Tabakalaşma ve Eşitsizlik, edited by Lütfi Sunar, 163–94. Istanbul: Matbu, 2016.
with Meral Gezici-Yalçın. Ne Ders Olsa Veririz. Akademisyenin Vasıfsız İşçiye Dönüşümü [= Ready to Teach Anything: The Transformation of the Academic into Unskilled Worker ]. Istanbul: İletişim, 2015.
‘A Tale of Two and A Half Revolutions’. Humanities and Social Sciences Review 2, no. 2 (2013): 1–6.
‘Die Muslimbrüder und die AKP. Die Blinden und der Einäugige’. Zeitschrift Für Weltgeschichte 14, no. 2 (2013): 159–82.
Ursprünge des Islamismus im Osmanischen Reich. Eine weltsystemanalytische Perspektive. Socialia 110. Hamburg: Kovač, 2010.
Last updated: February 12, 2020
2017/2018
Professor Judy Fudge
University of Kent, United Kingdom
Labour Exploitation, Unfree Labour and the Productive Power of Legal Characterization
Judy Fudge first studied philosophy and then turned to law. Currently she teaches labour law at Kent Law School at the University of Kent, which she joined in 2013. She began her academic career in Canada, first at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University and then the University of Victoria. Her initial research was on Canadian labour law history and she has written widely in the broad area of labour law, recently focusing on the labour/migration law nexus, citizenship at work, and feminist approaches to labour law. She was a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in Nantes, France in 2014/2015. Previously, she was a visiting professor at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) at Linköping University and the NORMA research programme at Lund University, as well as a Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence.
At re:work, Judy will be working on a book, provisionally titled ‘Labour Exploitation, Modern Slavery and Unfree Labour: The Social Dynamics of Legal Characterization’. It addresses the following questions: How is labour unfreedom characterized for legal purposes? What are the social processes that animate legal characterization and the social effects of legal characterization? The book explores the competing and overlapping legal characterizations of various forms of unfree labour (such as modern slavery, forced labour, or human trafficking for the purpose of labour exploitation) in the UK and Europe. It will attempt to elucidate how the economic and political context amplifies or retards the influence and reach of specific legal categories and their technologies of governance, which, in turn, shapes how we understand labour exploitation (Is it caused by rapacious employers, the weak governance of supply chains, a structural effect of neo-liberal globalized capitalism or by migrant workers undercutting wages?) and how the state responds to it (strengthen immigration controls, impose criminal penalties against rogue employers, resource labour inspectorates or empower trade unions).
Publications
‘Migrant Domestic Workers in British Columbia, Canada Unfreedom, Trafficking and Domestic Servitude’. In Temporary Labour Migration in the Global Era. The Regulatory Challenges, edited by Joanna Howe, Rosemary J. Owens, and Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, 151–72. Oxford: Hart, 2016.
with Kendra Strauss, eds. Temporary Work, Agencies and Unfree Labour. Insecurity in the New World of Work. New York, NY: Routledge, 2014.
‘Feminist Reflections on the Scope of Labour Law. Domestic Work, Social Reproduction, and Jurisdiction’. Feminist Legal Studies 22, no. 1 (2014): 1–23.
‘Making Claims for Migrant Workers. Human Rights and Citizenship’. Citizenship Studies 18, no. 1 (2014): 29–45.
‘Blurring Legal Boundaries. Regulating Work’. In Challenging the Legal Boundaries of Work Regulation, edited by Judy Fudge, Shae McCrystal, and Kamala Sankaran, 1–26. Oxford: Hart, 2012.
‘Labour as a “Fictive Commodity”. Radically Reconceptualizing Labour Law’. In The Idea of Labour Law, edited by Guy Davidov and Brian Langille, 120–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Last updated: September 01, 2017
Professor Deborah James
The London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom
The New Middle Class in (South) Africa in Comparative Perspective
Deborah James is a specialist in the anthropology of South and Southern Africa, and has recently begun research at some sites in the UK. Her work is broadly political and economic in focus, and her expertise covers South Africa and the UK; the ethnography of advice; aspiration, indebtedness and welfare; civil society; citizenship and the state; economic anthropology; ethnomusicology; land reform and property regimes, as well as migration and ethnicity.
Her research, cast in the crucible of South Africa’s infamous system of apartheid, first documented the lives of the country’s black migrant worker/cultivator population as they weathered the storms of that regime, and, second, the effects on them of attempts to eradicate residual forms of injustice following its demise. Following on from her 2007 book Gaining Ground?, which explored the complexities of the post-apartheid government’s land reform program, her recent work is on indebtedness and aspiration. The prizewinning book Money from Nothing (Stanford, 2015) explores the dynamics surrounding South Africa’s national project of financial inclusion, which aimed to extend credit to black South Africans as a critical aspect of broad-based economic enfranchisement. It reveals how middle- and working-class South Africans’ access to credit is intimately bound up with identity, status, and aspirations of upward mobility, and draws out the paradoxical nature of economic relations of debt. These relations sustain people, but they can also produce new forms of disenfranchisement in place of older ones. The book captures the lived experience of debt for those many millions who attempt to improve their positions (or merely sustain existing livelihoods) in emerging economies.
Moving beyond South Africa, a group project, funded by the ESRC, has investigated “ethnographies of advice” in settings of austerity in the EU and UK. Based on her part of this work, “Innovation and patchwork partnerships: Advice services in austere times”, co-authored with Alice Forbess, gives new insights into the lived realities of austerity. It shows how advisers, and the organizations they work for, do not passively accept the government’s funding cuts: instead they piece together new “patchworks” of funds, devise new forms of face-to-face advice, invest local authority funds to yield returns from centrally-funded sources, and help people to pay their council tax and rent, and to honor their tax commitments while challenging debts incurred from the incorrect award and reclaim of benefits. For advisers – the article demonstrates – austerity is more a matter of seeking new resource flows, inventing novel interventions, and creating new spaces where justice may be sought and found, than of passively accepting funding cuts.
Her earlier research focused on ethnicity, migration, and musical performance: Her book Songs of the women migrants: Performance and identity in South Africa (Edinburgh, 1999) showed how women migrants from the Northern Province defined themselves as ethnic subjects through song and musical performance.
Her re:work project concerns the new middle classes in the Global South. It seeks to understand changing class, work, and welfare regimes, exploring the contradictory intersection between new prosperity aspirations and new forms of austerity. In a context where many hope for things their parents might never have dreamed of, the increasing precarity of work (and its virtual disappearance in numerous settings) means that more people than before are becoming dependent either on the state (via civil-service employment or through welfare regimes), or on informal “benefits” arranged through church or via remittances and contributions from relatives who are better-off and upwardly mobile. Often the two types of dependency intersect. Redistribution and taxation, when counted beyond strictly fiscal regimes, acquire new meanings. Prosperity and aspiration are rightly applauded, but have a darker underside – that of reliance on benefits, or on borrowing at extortionate rates of interest.
Publications
‘New Subjectivities: Aspiration, Prosperity and the New Middle Class’. African Studies 78, no. 1 (2019): 33–50.
with Alice Forbess. ‘Innovation and Patchwork Partnerships. Advice Services in Austere Times’. Oñati Socio-Legal Series 7, no. 7 (2017): 1465–86.
Money from Nothing. Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Gaining Ground? ‘Rights’ and ‘Property’ in South African Land Reform. Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007.
Songs of the Women Migrants. Performance and Identity in South Africa. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Last updated: January 10, 2019
Dr. Marcia Schenck
Universität Potsdam, Germany
International Organizations and African Return Migration: Between Fears of Brain Drain and Visions of Development
Marcia C. Schenck recently completed her PhD in history at Princeton University. Her dissertation examines state-sponsored education and labor migration between the Peoples’ Republics of Angola and Mozambique and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from the mid 1970s to 1990. During the Cold War, political and economic relations between the “Second World” and the “Third World” opened up migration routes for young African men and women to work and study abroad. In the process, migrants were expected to gain technical skills and expertise to develop their nascent postcolonial home states upon their return. Tracing Angola’s and Mozambique’s political transitions from decolonization to socialism and finally to free market democracies through the lived experiences of these migrants, her work is firmly rooted in African history. Schenck’s dissertation illustrates the lasting impact of the migration experience, which indelibly shaped the Angolan and Mozambican workers’ relationship to production, consumption, education, as well as their affective relationships. She also highlights the degree to which Angolan and Mozambican history is intertwined with that of other socialist nations such as East Germany. In addition, by tracing the lives of transnational migrants, she contributes to an understanding of the significance of non-military global socialist ties for African history during the Cold War and beyond. While in residence at re:work, Schenck will turn her dissertation into a book manuscript.
Her research interests include the history of labor, migration, education and development, oral history, African and global history, as well as the history of international organizations. Marcia holds an M.Sc. in African Studies from the University of Oxford.
Publications
‘Between Hammer, Machete, and Kalashnikov. Contract Labor Migration from Angola and Mozambique to East Germany, 1979-1990’. EuropeNow. A Journal of Research & Art, no. 15 (2018).
‘A Chronology of Nostalgia. Memories of Former Angolan and Mozambican Worker Trainees to East Germany’. Labor History, February 2018, 1–23.
‘Negotiating East Germany. Angolan Student Migration during the Cold War 1976-90’. Africa, submitted.
‘A Conversation About Global Lives in Global History. South Korean Overseas Travelers and Angolan and Mozambican Labourers in East Germany During the Cold War’. L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques. Revue électronique du CRH, submitted.
‘From Luanda and Maputo to Berlin. Uncovering Angolan and Mozambican Migrants’ Motives to Move to the German Democratic Republic (1979–1990)’. African Economic History 44, no. 1 (2016): 202–34.
‘Review of Cleveland, Todd: Diamonds in the Rough. Corporate Paternalism and African Professionalism on the Mines of Colonial Angola, 1917–1975. Ohio 2015’. H-Soz-Kult, 2 September 2016.
‘Tanja R. Müller. Legacies of Socialist Solidarity: East Germany in Mozambique. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2014. Xvi + 205 Pp. List of Figures. List of Tables. List of Acronyms. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. $85.00. Cloth. Ulrich van der Heyden, Wolfgang Semmler, and Ralf Straßburg, Eds. Mosambikanische Vertragsarbeiter in der DDR-Wirtschaft: Hintergründe–Verlauf–Folgen. (Mozambican Contract Laborers in the GDR Economy: Background–Course–Consequences.) Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2014. Appendix. Index. €39.90. Paper.’ African Studies Review 58, no. 1 (2015): 247–50.
with Mariana P. Candido. ‘Uncomfortable Pasts. Talking About Slavery in Angola’. In African Heritage and Memories of Slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic World, edited by Ana Lucia Araujo, 213–52. Amherst, MA: Cambria Press, 2015.
2016/2017
Professor Sven Beckert
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Capitalism: A Global History
Professor Beckert researches and teaches the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political and transnational dimensions. Beckert is co-chair of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University, and co-chair of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (WIGH). Beyond Harvard, he co-chairs an international study group on global history, is co-editor of a series of books at Princeton University Press on “America in the World,” and has co-organized a series of conferences on the history of capitalism. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. He also directs the Harvard College Europe Program. Beckert teaches courses on the political economy of modern capitalism, the history of American capitalism, Gilded Age America, labor history, global capitalism and the history of European capitalism. Together with a group of students he has also worked on the historical connections between Harvard and slavery and published Harvard and Slavery: Seeking a Forgotten History. In 2014, he published Empire of Cotton: A Global History, the first global history of the nineteenth century’s most important commodity. The book won the Bancroft Award, The Philip Taft Award, the Cundill Recognition for Excellence and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His other publications have focused on the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, on labor, on democracy, on global history and on the connections between slavery and capitalism.
While at rework, Beckert will begin researching and writing a book tentatively entitled Capitalism: A Global History. The book will tell the history of capitalism over the past five hundred years, and will do so from a perspective that takes the entire world into view. This book will try to infuse contemporary debates on capitalism with a long-term historical perspective, return conversations about capitalism to the center of the historical profession, emphasize the global nature of the unfolding of capitalist social relations in different parts of the world, and seek to understand capitalism as a system deeply embedded within the politics, culture and history of particular places. The book will stress both the revolutionary nature of these transformations, and the wide variety of outcomes that they produced; it will emphasize the importance of global links to capitalism’s most local articulations, and the significance of the local to changes in the global. And, last but not least, it will systematically investigate the connections between capitalism’s expansion and the simultaneous emergence of ever more powerful states.
Publications
with Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds. Global History, Globally. Research and Practice Around the World. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
with Christine Desan. American Capitalism. New Histories. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2018.
‘American Danger. United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950’. The American Historical Review 122, no. 4 (2017): 1137–70.
with Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery’s Capitalism. A New History of American Economic Development. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Empire of Cotton. A Global History. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
with Julia Rosenbaum, eds. The American Bourgeoisie. Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
‘From Tuskegee to Togo. The Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton’. The Journal of American History 92, no. 2 (2005): 498–526.
‘Emancipation and Empire. Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War’. The American Historical Review 109, no. 5 (2004): 1405–38.
‘Democracy and Its Discontents. Contesting Suffrage Rights in Gilded Age New York’. Past & Present 174, no. 1 (2002): 116–57.
The Monied Metropolis. New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850 - 1896. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Professor Daniel Eisenberg
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA
The Unstable Object
Daniel Eisenberg lives and works in Chicago and is a Professor in the departments of Film/Video/New Media/Animation, and Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been making films and videos at the edges of documentary and experimental media for thirty years. His films have been screened throughout Europe, Asia, and Americas with solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York, the Musée du Cinema, Brussels; De Unie, Rotterdam; and Kino Arsenal, Berlin among many others. His films have been shown in the Berlin Film Festival; the Sydney Film Festival; the London Film Festival; the Jerusalem Film Festival; FIDMarseille, and theWhitney Biennial, New York. His work has also been featured in many conferences and symposia, including the first International Walter Benjamin Conference, Portbou-Barcelona, Spain. Eisenberg's films have won numerous awards, fellowships, and honors. Among these are the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship; the D.A.A.D. Berliner Künstlerprogramm Fellowship, an Illinois Arts Council Media Arts Fellowship, a Creative Capital grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Awards include the Prix Georges De Beauregard International at FIDMarseilles, arc+film Festival, Graz, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, New England Film Festival. His films are included in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Arsenal-Experimentale, Berlin, the Nederlands Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, the Haus des Dokumentarfilms, Stuttgart, and many university, art, and film school collections.
The Unstable Object, Eisenberg’s ongoing series of films and installations of factories over the world, has been seen in installation at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial.
During his stay at re:work, Eisenberg is researching sites for the third in the series of films entitled The Unstable Object:
“As technology continues to disrupt so many social and economic formations, our relationship to every object we encounter is transformed. Things now present a new register of unstable meanings. Why we want something, what it means to us, how its value is established; all these questions have become politically and phenomenologically charged. The Unstable Object, a long-term observational film project, is motivated by some of these simple questions and a few others: what are the working spaces like for those that make the things around us? What does the object mean to them? How do these objects connect us? What kinds of exchanges take place through the object itself? The Unstable Object examines "things" and "objects" at a moment when our understanding of material culture is most unstable. It’s been essential to conceive of a project that would bring many foreign workers into the line of sight, making visible what the new economy has, by consequence and distance, made invisible and hidden. Equally important, the project has to present sites where concentrations of resources and technology produce unexpected configurations. Factory sites need to have a dense set of perceptible relationships that reveal the complexity and contradictions in the current system. Contemporary global marketing demands ever more novel branding strategies, and ever-new ways to distinguish one’s goods from fierce competition. So it hasn’t been difficult to find factories where the response to this demand is extreme, contradictory, and at times uncanny. The project grew from these initial thoughts, but research broadened the project, and it has accumulated additional ideas and strategies. In the end the entire project will be comprised of three feature-length films with three factory portraits per film, each factory portrait approximately a half-hour in length. The films are structured upon a general theme with factories that are complementary to each other, with each film resonating associations both within the film, and between films. And because the moving image has itself been an extremely unstable object over the last decade, the work has been conceived for multiple formats, varied audiences, and venues; durable enough to withstand such varied reconfigurations as gallery installations or as individual factory portraits, remaining conceptually legible in multiple curatorial and spatial contexts....”
Publications
The Unstable Object. 67 min, Documentary, 2011. (password: unstable071011)
Something More Than Night. 73 min, Documentary, 2003.
Persistence. 86 min, Documentary, 1997.
Displaced Person. 11 min, Documentary, 1991.
Cooperation of Parts. 40 min, Documentary, 1983.
Last updated: October 01, 2016
Professor Hanchao Lu
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
Striving not to Work: The Lifecycles of the Urban 'Idle Labor Force' in China
Hanchao Lu is Professor of History in the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. A specialist in socioeconomic and cultural history of modern China, Lu published widely in leading academic journals both in English and Chinese. His publications also include three award-winning books: Beyond the Neon Lights, Street Criers, and The Birth of A Republic. His works are broadly focused on everyday life and grassroots society in China’s turbulent modern era. Lu is the editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal, Chinese Historical Review (Taylor & Francis Group) and the editor of a 16-volume series, The Culture and Customs of Asia (ABC-CLIO). Lu served as the president of the Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS) and was a visiting fellow at the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore and William Bentinck-Smith Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Lu holds a number of honorary and advisory positions in major Chinese academic institutions including the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and Fudan University. He has also served on review panels for the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the University Grants Committee of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
At re:work, Lu is working on a project titled “Striving Not to Work: The Lifecycle of the Urban ‘Idle Labor Force’ in China.” The research looks at a group of urban youths who defied the state order to leave the city during the Mao era. In official census data, these people—contemporaries of the baby boomers in the West—were categorized as the “Idle Labor Force.” A sort of social outcasts at the time, this group of urban youth managed to work as day labors during the Cultural Revolution while obstinately pursued the types of knowledge that were disdained by Maoists. Lu will particularly focus on how the idle labor force integrated with women workers in Shanghai’s neighborhood workshops.
Publications
‘The Tastes of Chairman Mao. The Quotidian as Statecraft in the Great Leap Forward and Its Aftermath’. Modern China 41, no. 5 (2015): 539–72.
The Birth of a Republic. Francis Stafford’s Photographs of China’s 1911 Revolution and Beyond. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2010.
中国第一客卿. 鹭宾・赫德传 [= A Man of Two Worlds. The Life of Sir Robert Hart, 1835-1911]. Shanghai: Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2009.
Street Criers. A Cultural History of Chinese Beggars. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Beyond the Neon Lights. Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004.
‘The Significance of the Insignificant. Reconstructing the Daily Lives of the Common People of China’. China. An International Journal 1, no. 1 (2003): 144–58.
Last updated: October 01, 2016
Professor Drew Thompson
Bard College, New York, USA
Photography’s Bureaucracy: Constructing Colony and Nation in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times
Dr. Drew Thompson is visual and political historian with a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa (specifically Lusophone Africa) and topical interests in nationalism and state formation, transnational liberation movements, and histories of technology and bureaucracy. Thompson currently serves as Assistant Professor of Historical and Africana Studies at Bard College, and holds a PhD in African History from the University of Minnesota. His PhD dissertation used archival research, studio apprenticeships, and oral histories to explore a history of liberation and independence in Mozambique through the racial politics of representation that emerged as a result of state and popular appropriations of photography from 1950 to 1993. With colleagues at the University of Western Cape, he co-edited a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Kronos on Mozambican historiography. In addition to organizing numerous seminars, workshops, and conference panels related to his research interests, Dr. Thompson has served as a peer-reviewer for the journals Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, and Anthropology Quarterly.
While at re:work, Dr. Drew Thompson will prepare a book manuscript titled Photography’s Bureaucracy: Constructing Colony and Nation in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times. The book is a history of how the state bureaucracy in colonial and independent Mozambique used photography. State bureaucrats deployed photography to imagine and control the colonial territory and independent nation. Because photography involves a technology and human actors, it is often understood as purely technical and not political. In the context of a state bureaucracy, considered across the span of colonial rule, an armed liberation struggle, and civil war, the politics associated with photography’s use are thrown into relief and open new analytical possibilities for Africa’s visual and political histories.
Photography’s Bureaucracy situates questions of representation and archiving at the center of Mozambique’s history as a colony and independent nation. The study includes three components: 1) a history of photography in Mozambique; 2) the development of the Mozambican state in relation to photography’s practice; and 3) governing authorities use of photography to write Mozambique’s history. First, I aim to explain why the colonial and post-independent state’s use of photography replicated one another in a political context that proclaimed “revolution” and a radical break from the practices of the past. Second, I examine how the printing and archiving of photographs frame Mozambique’s colonial and independence histories. This project challenges ideas that the independent African state was more disorganized than its colonial predecessor, and it also demonstrates how photography’s use drives politics in colonial and post-independent contexts.
Publications
‘Techno-Histories in Mozambique. A Photographic Story’. Technology Stories. Past & Present, 2015.
‘A Iconicidade de Ricardo Rangel e a Escrita de História de Moçambique’. In Ricardo Rangel. Insubmisso e generoso, edited by Nelson Saúte, 51–62. Maputo: Marimbique, 2014.
‘(Re-)Exposing Old “Negatives”. New Discourses and Methodologies in Photographic Studies on Africa’. African Studies Review 57, no. 3 (2014): 175–185.
with Erin Haney, eds. Emerging Platforms for Artistic Production in DRC, Angola and Mozambique [= Special Issue Critical Intervention, 8 (2)], 2014.
with Paolo Israel, and Rui Assubuji, eds. The Liberation Script in Mozambican History [= Special Issue Kronos, 39], 2014.
‘Constructing a History of Independent Mozambique, 1974-1982. A Study in Photography’. Kronos 39, no. 1 (2013): 158–84.
‘Visualising FRELIMO’s Liberated Zones in Mozambique, 1962–1974’. Social Dynamics 39, no. 1 (2013): 24–50.
Last updated: October 01, 2016
Professor em. Shulamit Volkov (שולמית וולקוב)
אוניברסיטת תל אביב (Tel Aviv University), Israel
Working Jews: Myth and Reality in a Global Perspective
Shulamit Volkov, Professor emerita of Modern History at Tel Aviv University and member of the Israeli Academy of Science and the Humanities. She studied at the Hebrew University and earned her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. She was Head of the Minerva Institute for German History, editing its yearbooks, and then head of the Graduate School of History at Tel Aviv University. She has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Historisches Kolleg in Munich, as well as a visiting scholar at Oxford, Paris, New York, Zurich and Vienna. She published books and essays on German social history, German-Jewish history, and antisemitism, on some neglected aspects in the history of the Enlightenment, and on the historiography of National-Socialism. Most recently, she has received a research award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Publications
The Rise of popular Antimodernism in Germany. The Urban Master Artisans, 1873-1896, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton N.J. 1978 (A new edition in “Princeton Legacy Library” 2015)
Antisemitismus als Kultureller Code, Becksche Reihe, Beck Verlag, Muenchen 2000
Das Juedische Projekt der Moderne, Becksche Reihe, Beck Verlag, Muenchen 2001.
Germans, Jews and Antisemites. Trials in Emancipation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2006
Walther Rathenau. Weimar’s Fallen Statesman, Yale University Press, New Haven & London 2012 (A German edition: Walther Rathenau. Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland, Beck Verlag, Muenchen 2012)
2015/2016
Professor Eric Allina
University of Ottawa, Canada
Labour on the Frontlines. An Entangled History of Southern Africa and Central Europe
is associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Ottawa, where he teaches courses in African history, the history of slavery, and historical methods. Much of his past research examined the history of colonial rule in Mozambique, with a particular interest in the relationship between law and violence, the interaction between colonial and indigenous practices of subordination, and forms of state power.
At the IGK, Eric will be working on a project (entitled, "Tracing African History in the Shadow of the Berlin Wall: Mozambican Workers in East Germany") that grew out of earlier research on pan-African identity among African students in Soviet and post-Soviet Moscow. The project explores the connection between Mozambique and East Germany from the 1960s to 1990s by focusing on Mozambican labor migration to the GDR. This history of an African society’s internal dynamics and external connections shows how workers sought to remake themselves and their place in the world, extracting themselves from older imperial relationships and attempting to forge links within new transnational networks. Seizing on a long-established practice, by which young men and women embarked on long-distance labor migration as a strategy for personal growth and collective solidarity, individual Mozambicans and the state aimed to fashion new selves and new citizens in the post-colonial era. In tracing the history of Mozambique’s connection to East Germany, the project will consider how both the state and individuals saw nationalism, socialist internationalism, and developmental modernism as paths toward a new and just public order, and it will examine how individual Mozambican workers interpreted and remade these narratives.
Publications
‘Between Sozialismus and Socialismo. African Workers and Public Authority in the German Democratic Republic’. In Work out of Place, edited by Mahua Sarkar, 77–100. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018.
‘„Neue Menschen“ für Mosambik. Erwartungen an und Realität von Vertragsarbeit in der DDR der 1980er-Jahre’. Translated by Helmut Ettinger. Arbeit - Bewegung - Geschichte 15, no. 2016/III (2016): 65–84.
‘“Captive to Civilisation.” Law, Labor Mobility, and Violence in Colonial Mozambique’. In Mobility Makes States. Migration and Power in Africa, edited by Darshan Vigneswaran and Joel Quirk, 59–78. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
‘Modern Slavery and Latter-Day Pawns Under Colonial Rule in Central Mozambique’. In Slavery, Migration and Contemporary Bondage in Africa, edited by Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran, 37–64. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2013.
Slavery by Any Other Name. African Life Under Company Rule in Colonial Mozambique. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012.
‘“No Real Freedom for the Natives.” The Men in the Middle and Critiques of Colonial Labor in Central Mozambique’. Humanity 3, no. 3 (2012): 337–59.
‘The Zimba, the Portuguese, and Other Cannibals in Late Sixteenth-Century Southeast Africa’. Journal of Southern African Studies 37, no. 2 (2011): 211–27.
‘Resistance and the Social History of Africa’. Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 187–98.
‘“Fallacious Mirrors.” Colonial Anxiety and Images of African Labor in Mozambique, Ca. 1929’. History in Africa 24 (1997): 9–52.
Professor Frederick Cooper
New York University, USA
Reflections on Citizenship and Labour in Global Perspective
New York University, USA
Frederick Cooper is professor of History at New York University. He previously taught at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. His early research focused on slavery and labor in 19th- and 20th- century East Africa. In studying interaction and conflict in specific locations, he became interested in the shifting nature of colonial thinking and practices that went into these processes, leading to a comparative study of the labor question in French and British Africa. Cooper also began a project on the history and anthropology of colonialism with the anthropologist Ann Stoler. His interest in social theory led him to write essays on key concepts widely used in the social sciences and humanities–identity, modernity, and globalization--and he collaborated with Jane Burbank on a project to counter both the national and the modern bias of most historical studies via a study of the most durable form of political organization in world history–empires. More recently, he has done archival research in France and Senegal on citizenship and decolonization in French Africa and continued to reflect on the relationship of citizenship, labor, inequality, and difference. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Wilson Center, the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, the Institut d'Études Avancées de Nantes, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He has also been a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the École Normale Supérieure, Université de Paris VII, and Sciences Po Bordeaux. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Guggenheim Foundation, and the ACLS, and book prizes from the African Studies Association, the World History Association, and the American Historical Association.
Publications
Von Der Sklaverei in Die Prekarität? Afrikanische Arbeitsgeschichte Im Globalen Kontext. 1st edition. Re:Work Lectures. Boston, MA: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019.
Africa in the World. Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Citizenship Between Empire and Nation. Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.
with Jane Burbank. Empires in World History. Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Colonialism in Question. Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.
Decolonization and African Society. The Labor Question in French and British Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
From Slaves to Squatters. Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
Last updated: October 10, 2019
Dr. Milena Kremakova
University of Warwick, UK
Employment and Life Course Trajectories of Mathematicians and Computer Scientists in the UK and Germany
Milena’s research interests include post-socialist transformations in Eastern Europe more widely, and the interplay of local and global mechanisms and conventions on the labour market. She is particularly interested in maritime labour and coastal communities worldwide. Further academic interests include the public role of sociology, research methodologies (especially ethnography, oral history, visual research methods), and (incidentally) the sociology of mathematics. With Warwick PhD student Mark Carrigan, Milena co-edits the Online magazine The Sociological Imagination (www.sociologicalimagination.org), for which she also writes her own column.
At re:work, Milena will be working to extend her research further afield in post-socialist Eastern Europe to a comparative transnational study of Bulgarian and Ukrainian maritime livelihoods. It will examine how individual life-courses, career paths and vocational identities on the waterfront were reshaped after the formerly state-run industries of the two countries became part of the global market of maritime labour. The study will use oral histories gathered through in-person and online interviews. By analysing working lives in a dynamic ex-socialist industry in two different post-socialist scenarios, this research aims to contribute to the understanding of post-socialist labour markets, issues related to the quality of maritime labour, diverging national pathways out of state socialism, as well as global mechanisms and the effects of labour marketisation. The maritime labour market is a global industry that transcends national and continental borders; this calls for concerted supra-national policies to better safeguard working conditions and improve the well-being of workers and local communities.
Publications
Sea Change. How Bulgarian Seafarers Became Global Market Agents. Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming.
‘The “New Spirit of Academic Capitalism.” Can Scientists Create Generative Critique from Within?’ Teorie Vědy / Theory of Science XXXVIII, no. 1 (2016): 27–51.
‘Trust, Access, and Diverging Notions of “Public” and “Private”. A Returning Insider’s Experience of Research in Bulgaria’. Sociological Research Online 19, no. 4 (2014): 12.
‘Too Soft for Economics, Too Rigid for Sociology, or Just Right? The Productive Ambiguities of Sen’s Capability Approach’. European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie 54, no. 3 (2013): 393–419.
‘What Do Market Mechanisms (Really) Mean? A Study of Maritime Livelihoods after 1989’. In Rethinking Work. Global Historical and Sociological Perspectives, edited by Rana P. Behal, Alice Mah, and Babacar Fall, 55–72. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2011.
2014/2015
Professor Leon Fink
University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Post-WWII Industrial Relations Policies in the Non-Communist West
Fink’s professional training as a historian began at the University of Rochester, where he received his doctorate in 1977 under the direction of Herbert Gutman. Though he first taught as a Lecturer in the City College of New York, 1972-1974, Fink’s scholarly career largely developed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1977-2000 and, since 2000, as Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A specialist in labor and immigration history, he has written, co-authored, and/or edited twelve books. His previous academic honors include a Lloyd Lewis Fellowship at the Newberry Library (2012-13), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), Charles Warren Center Fellow at Harvard University (1998-1999), National Humanities Fellowship (1990-1991), and Senior Fulbright Lectureship, University of Munich, 1983-1984. At UIC, Fink founded the PhD concentration in the History of Work, Race, and Gender in the Urban World. Since 2003, he has also served as editor Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, the official journal of the Labor and Working Class History Association.
At re:work, Fink hopes to advance a new project tentatively entitled, The Rise and Fall of Social Liberalism: State-Making and Re-Making in the Postwar World, 1945-1973. With an emphasis on labor and welfare policy in the non-communist world, Fink will be looking for patterns (as well as contrasts) in the social polities of a wide range of countries, likely including West Germany, Japan, India, Israel, and Kenya. One question throughout will be the decisive impact (or not) of the U.S. model of industrial relations.
Although the projected work in some measure grows out of the Long Gilded Age project mentioned below (as well as a paper presented in March 2014 at the Association of Indian Labour Historians meeting in Delhi), re:work will effectively serve as the launching pad for this study.
Publications
Deliverance Revisited. Der Triumph von Trump, die liberalen Eliten und die weiße Zombie-Arbeiterklasse. Berlin ; Boston, MA: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019.
with Juan Manuel Palacio, eds. Labor Justice Across the Americas. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018.
The Long Gilded Age. American Capitalism and the Promise of a New World Order. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Sweatshops at Sea. Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
The Maya of Morganton. Work and Community in the Nuevo New South. Winner of the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award. Chapel Hill, N.C: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
In Search of the Working Class. Essays in American Labor History and Political Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Last updated: October 9, 2019
Professor Alf Lüdtke
Universität Erfurt, Germany
War as Work. Young Adults in the German Wehrmacht during WWII
After completing his studies of history, philosophy, sociology and political science at the University of Tübingen Alf Lüdtke finished his M.A. in 1974. His PhD-dissertation (on state violence and policing in Prussia from 1800 to 1850) he concluded in 1980 at the University of Konstanz. His second dissertation (Habilitation; studies on work and “Eigensinn”) he completed in 1989 at the University of Hanover. From 1975 until his retirement in 2008 Lüdtke had a position as (Senior) Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen. In addition, in 1999 he took on a Professorship at the History Dept. of the University of Erfurt. After this engagement had also expired in 2008 the University of Erfurt granted him a Honorary Professorship. In the early 1990s Lüdtke substituted history chairs at the University of Düsseldorf (1989/90) and Greifswald (1992), respectively. Fellowships or Visiting Professorships he held at Princeton University (1981/82), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1992), University of Chicago (1993/94, 2003), University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1993; 1997; 2007), Université de Toulouse (2011), Hanyang University (Seoul, 2009 to 2013).
His project at re: work is entitled “War as Work. Young adults in the German Wehrmacht and in Allied forces during WWII”. Since the 1970s interest in the everyday of ordinary soldiers has grown rapidly. In turn, fresh research shed new light on war and war violence. Not only for German soldiers in WWII such investigations question the impact of ideology and other types of ‘belief’. Rather, they trace how everyday practices produce cooperation or, at least acceptance of a given task by people on all levels of hierarchy. They also show how rank and file obeyed orders yet still managed to carve out room of their own. Even more, this angle provides insight into the moulding of males (and females) into people who are ready to kill and ready to cope with the risk to be killed. His point is that the work of soldiering fostered pride of good workmanship which, in turn, ‘normalized’ the act of killing. In other words: these studies show ‘doing war’ as work.
A second dimension pertains the dynamics of age and life-course of the military personnel. Combat units tend to be staffed by young adults while rearguard or occupation units are manned by males (and female auxiliaries) in their thirties if not forties (oftentimes married and parents). What is the importance of age in either case? Moreover, to what extent did survivors of WWI receive or claim special attention when joining the military in the 1930s and ´40s? And in the German case: were they met with contempt for ‘their’ defeat in 1918?
Alf Lüdtke has explored various topics and fields:
1) state and state violence, yet also the whole range of violent behavior.
2) practices and experiences of work – his particular focus is on industrial work and the ways people appropriate a given situation and remold or accept it in ways of their own. From here he pursued the notion of people's self-will ("Eigensinn").
3) the visual caught his eye early on, esp. the potential of a "visual history" triggered studies on industrial photography and nourishes a strong interest in the interrelationships or resonances between the textual and the visual.
4) range and impact of the multiple facets of people's everyday: thus, Alltagsgeschichte and in particular the overlaps with ethnography are focal.
5) debates on "Provincializing Europe" (D. Chakrabarty) stimulated his interest in re-situating crucial notions like "domination" or "work" and to trace their trans- or international trajectories. A recent five-year stint at Hanyang University, Seoul/Korea has greatly contributed to this effort.
Publications
Lüdtke, Alf, ed. 1989. Alltagsgeschichte. Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen. Frankfurt: Campus.
Lüdtke, Alf. , ed. 1991. Herrschaft als soziale Praxis. Historische und sozial-anthropologische Studien. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Lüdtke, Alf. 1993. Eigen-Sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus. Hamburg: Ergebnisse Verlag.
Lüdtke, Alf. 2010. “Soldiering and Working. Almost the Same? Reviewing Practices in Industry and the Military in Twentieth-Century Contexts.” In Work in a Modern Society. The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective, edited by Jürgen Kocka, 109–30. New York: Berghahn Books.
Lüdtke, Alf. 2011. “Male Bodies. Well Trained Muscles or Beer Bellies? From the ‘Master Race’ in Nazism to the Ruling Class in East Germany.” In Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship. Global Perspectives, edited by Jie-Hyun Lim and Karen Petrone, 142–68. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Professor Eric Vanhaute
Universiteit Gent, Ghent, Belgium
Into their Labors. A Global History of Peasantries
Eric Vanhaute is Professor of Economic History and World History at Ghent University in Belgium. He has been Visiting Research Fellow at the Weatherhead Initiative of Global History, Harvard University, the Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton and at Utrecht University, Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, The Institute of Economic and Social History at The University of Vienna and The Institute for Social Economy and Culture at Peking University. His scholarly work includes projects and publications on rural history and the history of the peasantries, on world history, global studies and world-systems analysis, on the history of labour markets and labour strategies of families, and on historical statistics and historical information systems. See his website http://www.ccc.ugent.be/vanhaute.
His past and current research has been closely related to the objectives of the re: work fellowship program. The central aim of his stay will be to conceptualize an analytical framework to research and understand how rural workers have lived their lives and organized their communities in very different spaces and times. This ambition asks for a broad comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, both in space and in time. This project will materialize in a textbook Peasants. A World History (Routledge Series Themes in World History).
Publications
Vanhaute, Eric. 2001. “Rich Agriculture and Poor Farmers. Land, Landlords and Farmers in Flanders in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Rural History. Economy. Society. Culture 12 (01): 19–40. doi:10.1017/S0956793300002259.
Eric Vanhaute. 2004. “Structure and Strategy. Two Rural Communities in the Kempen Region of Belgium, 1850–1910.” The History of the Family 9 (2): 193–220. doi:10.1016/j.hisfam.2004.01.004.
Ó Gráda, Cormac, Richard Paping, and Eric Vanhaute, eds. 2007. When the Potato Failed. Causes and Effects of the “Last” European Subsistence Crisis, 1845-1850. Turnhout: Brepols.
Eric Vanhaute. 2009. “Who Is Afraid of Global History? Ambitions, Pitfalls and Limits of Learning Global History.” In Global History [= Special Issue Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 20.2], edited by Peer Vries, 22–39. Innsbruck: Studien-Verlag.
Eric Vanhaute. 2012. “Peasants, Peasantries and (De)Peasantization in the Capitalist World-System.” In Routledge Handbook of World-Systems Analysis. Theory and Research, edited by Salvatore J. Babones and Christopher K. Chase-Dunn, 313–21. Abingdon: Routledge.
Eric Vanhaute. 2013. World History. An Introduction. London: Routledge.
2013/2014
Professor Philip Bonner
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Life, Work and Political Struggles in South Africa’s Small and Medium Towns, 1945-1995
Philip Bonner is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of the Witwatersrand and until recently held the NRF Chair in Local Histories and Present Realities. He was the Chair of the History Workshop up to 2011and was principal organizer of conferences and open days in 1990, 1994 and co-organizer of the 1999 History Workshop on the Truth and Reconciliation Report entitled “Commissioning the Past” the two History Workshop Conferences that were staged in 2001:“Aids in Context” and “The Burden of Race” and the History Workshop Conference on ‘Rethinking Worlds of Labour’, held in July 2006. Each of these has been a landmark intellectual event. Phil Bonner has also organized/participated in various teachers’ workshops in Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and North-West Province. He was on the editorial committee of the South African Democratic Education Trust and helped supervise the production of Vol.1 of The Road to Democracy in South Africa. He was historical consultant and executive producer to a six part documentary television series entitled Soweto: A History, which embodied a large amount of original historical and film archival research. It was screened on Channel 4 in Britain, on SBS in Australia and was shown on SABC TV 1 to considerable critical acclaim. Phil Bonner was the co-curator of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. He entered a partnership between History Workshop and the Robben Island Museum and supervised a pilot project interviewing ex Robben Island prisoners. He is completing a book on African Politics on the Witwatersrand 1912-1950 and a chapter on the period 1910-1940 for the Cambridge History of Africa.
Publications
Alexander, Peter, Philip Bonner, Jonathan Hyslop, and Lucien van der Walt. 2009. “Introduction. Labour Crossings in Eastern and Southern Africa.” African Studies 68 (1): 79–85.
Bonner, Philip. 2002. Kings, Commoners, and Concessionaires. The Evolution and Dissolution of the Nineteenth-Century Swazi State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bonner, Philip. 2004. “Migration, Urbanization and Urban Social Movements in Twentieth Century India and South Africa.” Studies in History 20 (2): 215–36.
Bonner, Philip. 2005. “Eluding Capture. African Grass Roots Struggles in 1940s Benoni.” In South Africa’s 1940s. Worlds of Possibilities, edited by Saul Dubow and Alan Jeeves, 170–91. Cape Town: Double Storey.
Bonner, Philip. 2008. Alexandra. A History. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Bonner, Philip. 2009. “Labour, Migrancy and Urbanization in South Africa and India, 1900-60.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 44 (1): 69–95.
Bonner, Philip, Jonathan Hyslop, and Lucien van der Walt. 2007. “Rethinking Worlds of Labour. Southern African Labour History in International Context.” African Studies 66 (2-3): 137–67.
Professor Paulo Fontes
PPGHis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Workers, Communities and Social Movements: Neighborhoods Associations in Sao Paulo, Brazil and Buenos Aires, Argentina (1945-1978)
Paulo Fontes is an associate professor at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (CPDOC/FGV) in Rio de Janeiro and a researcher at the Brazilian Scientific Research Council (CNPq). He received his PhD in social history from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp). He was a visiting professor at Duke University (2004) and Princeton University (2006/7). A historian of Brazilian labour and working-class culture in São Paulo after World War II, Fontes has studied internal migration from the Northeast to São Paulo, the links between rural and urban workers, the role of place and communities in working-class formation, and the cultural aspects of popular organisation and politics. In 2011, his book Um Nordesteem São Paulo. Trabalhadores Migrantes em São Miguel Paulista, 1945—1966 won the first Thomas Skidmore Prize, sponsored by the National Archive and the Brazilian Studies Association. As a result, the book is due to be published in English by Duke University Press in 2014.
A former trade union educator, Fontes has also been involved in many initiatives related to public history, labour and industrial heritage. Recently, he was chosen as one of the curators of the Museum of Work and the Workers, which is due to be established in the ABC region, an industrial belt near São Paulo. Between 2010 and 2012, Fontes was the national coordinator of the working group ‘Worlds of Labour’, which is part of the Brazilian Historians Association. The group is the Brazilian labour historians’ main organisation.
Currently, Paulo Fontes is particularly interested in the political role of local civil society organisations, especially those in working-class neighbourhoods. Additionally, he is also researching trade union dynamics and politics during the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship (1964—1985). His project at re:work focuses on popular culture and the dynamics of working-class associations between the Second World War and the 1970s in São Paulo, Brazil. He intends to expand the scope of the investigation by tracing comparisons between the São Paulo case and Buenos Aires, Argentina. During this period, industrialisation, an intense process of urbanisation, as well as nationalism, populism, and military dictatorships were all key elements that shaped these nations. The workers and their various organisations were fundamental actors in these processes and the research intends to devote particular attention to the local associations, leisure and sportclubs in the workers’ districts, connecting them with broader political processes, the trade union movement and the building of democracy in Latin America.
Publications
Fontes, Paulo. 1997. Trabalhadores e cidadãos. Nitro Química: a fábrica e as lutas operárias nos anos 50. 1a. ed. São Paulo, SP, Brasil: Annablume : Sindicato Químicos e Plásticos-SP.
Fontes, Paulo. 2008. Um Nordeste em São Paulo. Trabalhadores migrantes em São Miguel Paulista (1945-66). Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil: FGV Editora.
Fontes, Paulo. 2011. “‘With a Cardboard Suitcase in My Hand and a Pannier on My Back’. Workers and Northeastern Migrations in the 1950s in São Paulo, Brazil.” Social History 36 (1): 1–21.
Fontes, Paulo, Alexandre Fortes, and Mônica Kornis. 2006. Trabalho e Trabalhadores no Brasil. Catálogo da exposição fotográfica. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: CPDOC-FGV Press.
Fontes, Paulo, and Thomas Miller Klubock. 2009. “Labor History and Public History. Introduction.” International Labor and Working-Class History 76 (1): 2–5.
Fontes, Paulo, and Francisco Barbosa de Macedo. 2013. “Strikes and Pickets in Brazil. Working-Class Mobilization in the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Unionism, the Strikes of 1957 and 1980.” International Labor and Working Class History 83: 86–111.
Fortes, Alexandre, Paulo Fontes, Antonio Luigi Negro, Hélio da Costa, and Fernando T. Silva, ed. 1999. Na luta por direitos. Estudos recentes em história social do trabalho. Coleção Momento. Campinas, SP, Brasil: Editora da Unicamp.
Professor Katrin Hansing
City University of New York, USA
Contemporary Cuban Youth: Now and in the Future
Katrin Hansing is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at City University New York (CUNY). Prior to her tenure at CUNY she was the Associate Director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University in Miami. As a social anthropologist Katrin has spent the last fifteen years conducting research in the Caribbean (especially Cuba) and Southern Africa. Her main areas of interest and expertise include: ‘race’/ethnicity, social movements, inequality, migration/transnational ties, and civil society. Currently she is completing a Ford Foundation funded research project on contemporary Cuban youth as well as co-editing a book on socialist migrations during the Cold War (Palgrave). Katrin received her Ph.D. from Oxford University. She is the author of numerous scholarly and policy publications including the book Rasta, Race, and Revolution: The Emergence of the Rastafari Movement in Socialist Cuba (Lit Verlag 2006). In 2010 she completed the documentary film: 'Freddy Ilanga: Che's Swahili Translator', which has since been shown at many film festivals and won numerous prizes.
At re: work, Katrin will look at “Youth and Work in Contemporary Cuba”. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork the project is examining changing definitions, attitudes, values, and relations towards ‘work’ and ‘employment’ as well as reactions towards and experiences of unemployment during Cuba’s current major economic reforms. Particular emphasis is being paid to how young Cuban youth are making sense of these changes and strategizing about their futures. In so doing, the study will shed light on the changing relationship between the state and the individual in post-Soviet Cuba.
Publications
Hansing, Katrin. 2006. Rasta, Race and Revolution. The Emergence and Development of the Rastafari Movement in Socialist Cuba. Beiträge Zur Afrikaforschung Bd. 28. Münster: Lit.
Hansing, Katrin. 2008. ‘South South Migration and Transnational Ties between Cuba and Mozambique’. In Transnational Ties. Cities, Migrations, and Identities, edited by Michael P. Smith and John Eade, 77–90. Comparative Urban and Community Research v. 9. New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Publishers.
Hansing, Katrin. 2009. ‘The Making of Transnational Civic Social Capital between Two Cuban Religious Communities’. In Churches and Charity in the Immigrant City. Religion, Immigration, and Civic Engagement in Miami, edited by Alex Stepick, Terry Rey, and Sarah J. Mahler, 119–31. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press.
Hansing, Katrin. 2011. ‘Changes from Below. New Dynamics, Spaces, and Attitudes in Contemporary Cuban Society’. NACLA Report on the Americas 44 (4): 16.
Hansing, Katrin. 2012. ‘World in Cuba, Cuba in the World. Cuba and Africa’. In Cuba. People, Culture, History, edited by Alan West. Scribner World Scholar Series. Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Hansing, Katrin, and Maxim Matusevich, ed. forthcoming. Socialist Migrations during the Cold War. New York, NY: Palgrave.
Hansing, Katrin, and Manuel Orozco. 2011. ‘Remesas. Presente y futuro de la pequeña empresa en Cuba’. Palabra Nueva 20 (209).
Dr. Aishwary Kumar
Stanford University, CA, USA
Shudradharma: Notes towards a Conceptual History of Force
Aishwary Kumar (Ph.D., University of Cambridge) is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. An intellectual historian of modern South Asia and its European and global valences, Kumar works at the intersection of social and legal thought, conceptual history, and moral and political philosophy. His first book, Equality at War: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Demands of Democracy,is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Kumar’s current work is developing in two related directions. The first, using B. R. Ambedkar’s reading of Marx, Bergson, and Arthashastra as a beginning,explores the problematic of dharma in nineteenth and twentieth restatements of the theologico-political. The second examines the place of secrecy in Indian politics, ethics, and epistemology. Here, the Hindi poet and chronicler Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s prehistory of sanskriti and sovereignty, both in its revolutionary and conservative iterations, provides a set of guiding mediations. Kumar’s writings have appeared in mainstream publications and newspapers and scholarly journals such as Modern Intellectual History, Public Culture, Seminar, Outlook, and The Hindu. At re: work, he will develop his project titled Shudradharma: Notes toward a Conceptual History of Force.
Publications
Kumar, Aishwary. 2010. “Ambedkar’s Inheritances.” Modern Intellectual History 7 (02): 391–415.
Kumar, Aishwary. 2011. “The Ellipsis of Touch. Gandhi’s Unequals.” Public Culture 23 (2): 449–69.
Kumar, Aishwary. 2012. “The Ahimsa to Come. The Lies of Manu.” Outlook India, August 20.
Kumar, Aishwary. 2013a. “Force and Adoration. Ambedkar’s Maitri.” Seminar. The Monthly Symposium, no. 641 (January). http://www.india-seminar.com/2013/641/641_aishwary_kumar.htm#top.
Kumar, Aishwary. 2013b. “Hinduism’s Struggle to Be Modern [Review of Sharma, Jyotirmaya. 2013. Cosmic Love and Human Apathy. Swami Vivekananda’s Restatement of Religion. Noida: HarperCollins Publishers India.].” The Hindu, February 13, sec. Books » Reviews. http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/hinduisms-struggle-to-be-modern/article4404844.ece.
Kumar, Aishwary. 2014. “Satyagraha and the Place of the Animal. Gandhi’s Distinctions.” Social History 39 (3): 359–81.
2012/2013
Dr. Brigitta Bernet
At re:work she is currently working on the increasing importance of psychology for business in the second half of the 20th century. The basis of her work is the observation that the economic boom in most European societies went hand in hand with a “psychological boom” – daily life became imbued with psychological categories, patterns of perception and behavioural guidance. In the working environment the psychological matrix was combined with an economic view of the working subject, which itself was designated part of human resources leading human capital to become integral to rationalization in the workplace. It is here that the research project finds its starting point. The research investigates the development of the culture of psychological experts in human capital at the international level. It takes the simple but internationally relevant example of Switzerland, and examines how human capital was discovered, and how it has been modelled and used as an economic resource. Key questions include: how was the subjectivity of working people economized with psychological knowledge? How was intellectual property in large companies practically managed? How did the workers view the increasing importance of psychology for business? The historical changes in interactions between working relations and relations of self provide a particular focus.
Publications
Bernet, Brigitta. 2008. “Mündigkeit und Mündlichkeit. Sprachliche Vergesellschaftung um 1900.” Figurationen. Gender, Literatur, Kultur, 1: 47–60.
Bernet, Brigitta. 2009. “»Eintragen und Ausfüllen«. Der Fall des psychiatrischen Formulars.” In Zum Fall machen, zum Fall werden. Wissensproduktion und Patientenerfahrung in Medizin und Psychiatrie des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Sibylle Brändli, Barbara Lüthi, and Gregor Spuhler, 62–91. Campus.
Bernet, Brigitta. 2012. “‘Depressed? It might be political!’ Die Pathologien der Leistungsgesellschaft im Fokus der ausserklinischen Literatur.” Nach Feierabend. Zürcher Jahrbuch für Wissensgeschichte 8: 189–98.
Bernet, Brigitta. 2013. Schizophrenie. Entstehung und Entwicklung eines psychiatrischen Krankheitsbildes um 1900. Zürich: Chronos.
Bernet, Brigitta, and Eugen Bleuler. 2008. »Unbewusste Gemeinheiten« und andere kulturtheoretische Schriften von Eugen Bleuler (1857 -1939). Edited by Brigitta Bernett. Bern: Huber.
Bernet, Brigitta, Marietta Meier, Roswitha Dubach, Urs Germann, and Jakob Tanner. 2007. Zwang zur Ordnung. Psychiatrie im Kanton Zürich, 1870 - 1970. Zürich: Chronos.
Bernet, Brigitta, and Jakob Tanner, eds. 2015. Ausser Betrieb. Metamorphosen der Arbeit in der Schweiz. Zürich: Limmat.
Dr. Michel Doortmont, FRGS
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Netherlands
Slave Trade as Family Business: Euro-African Trading Networks in the Era of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade, 1730-1820
Michel Doortmont teaches in international relations and African studies at the universities of Groningen and Leiden (African Studies Centre). Since 2012 he is academic coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus programme EU-SATURN building capacity for research in an international context in South African universities, through exchange of PhD and Master students and staff in numerous disciplines. He is co-editor of History in Africa: A Journal of Method and the book series African Sources for African History and Sources for African History. His research focusses on several themes, including Dutch relations with West Africa (especially Ghana) from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, multicultural elite formation in colonial contexts, African historiography and historical methodology, and the phenomenon of mutual cultural heritage and cultural identification of the other in the history of the West and its former colonies.
At re:work he is working at the completion of a book, Slave Trade as Family Business: Euro-African Trading Networks in the Era of the Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade, 1730-1820, in which the organisation of Dutch slave trading activities are studied through a number of family histories of Gold Coast (Ghanaian) families of mixed Euro-African descent. Dutch archival records, combined with oral traditions and other materials, make it possible to reconstruct the family history of some of the leading commercial families of the eighteenth century, in a period when the Dutch West India Company monopoly on the slave trade lapsed, and private merchants – both African and European – entered into the trade directly. This study follows these families through careers, business exploits, and private adventures and misadventures, across three continents and over three to five generations. The overall picture that comes out of this micro-cosmological and genealogical approach provides for an alternative analytical framework for our understanding of the organisation of the slave trade in coastal West Africa in particular, and the social organisation of cross-cultural commerce in general.
Publications
Anquandah, James, Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, and Michel Doortmont, ed. 2007. The Transatlantic Slave Trade. Landmarks, Legacies, Expectations. Proceedings of the International Conference on Historic Slave Route Held at Accra, Ghana on 30 August-2 September 2004. Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers.
Doortmont, Michel. 2005. The Pen-Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities by Charles Francis Hutchison. A Collective Biography of Elite Society in the Gold Coast Colony. Leiden: Brill.
Doortmont, Michel. 2006. “Producing a Received View of Gold Coast Elite Society? C. F. Hutchison’s ‘Pen Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities.’” History in Africa 33: 473–93.
Doortmont, Michel. 2007a. Sources for the Mutual History of Ghana and the Netherlands. An Annotated Guide to the Dutch Archives Relating to Ghana and West Africa in the Nationaal Archief, 1593-1960s. Leiden: Brill.
Doortmont, Michel. 2007b. “The Dutch Atlantic Slave Trade as Family Business. The Case of the Van Der Noot de Gietere - van Bakergem Family.” In The Transatlantic Slave Trade. Landmarks, Legacies, Expectations. Proceedings of the International Conference on Historic Slave Route Held at Accra, Ghana on 30 August-2 September 2004, edited by James Kwesi Anquandah, Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, and Michel R. Doortmont, 92–137. Sub-Saharan Publishers.
Doortmont, Michel. 2011. “Making History in Africa. David Henige and the Quest for Method in African History.” History in Africa, 38: 7–20.
Doortmont, Michel. 2012. “Kamerling in Ghana. A Euro-African Family History and an Old-Fashioned Love Story.” De Nederlandsche Leeuw 123 (3): 178–92.
Doortmont, Michel, and Benedetta Savoldi. 2006. The Castles of Ghana. Axim, Butre, Anomabu. Historical and Architectural Research Project on the Use and Conservation Status of Three Ghanaian Forts. Saonara: il prato.
Professor Gail Kligman
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
A Multi-Sited Ethnography of East-West European Migratory Strategies and their Impact on Gender, Generation, and Family
gkligman(at)international.ucla.edu
Gail Kligman is a professor of sociology at UCLA and director of the UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies. Her research explores the interrelationships between politics, policy, culture, and gender in socialist and postsocialist Romania, and in postsocialist Central East Europe. The intellectual interests that have informed her work are comparative, historical, and interdisciplinary; methodologically, she has done qualitative, ethnographic, and archival research. Her most recent book, Peasants Under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962 (Princeton University Press 2011) was co-authored with Katherine Verdery (CUNY, Anthropology).
Peasants Under Siege is an historical ethnography of Party-state formation in Romania analyzed through the collectivization of agriculture. In a largely agrarian country such as Romania, collectivization was the first mass action through which the new communist regime initiated its radical program of social, political, cultural, and economic transformation. This complex process assaulted the very foundations of rural life and fundamentally altered social organization and social relations, including gender and generational roles in the household and in the socialist economy. Collectivization was not simply an adjunct to industrial development, but part of a broader set of modernizing technologies. The authors argue that collectivization was crucial in creating the Party-state that emerged, its mechanisms of rule, and the “new persons” who were its subjects. The analysis is based on extensive oral historical and archival data from a nineteen-person, multi-disciplinary research project that they co-directed.
The book has received a number of awards, among them: the 2012 Barbara Jelavich Prize for Distinguished Monograph and the 2012 Davis Center (Harvard University) Book Prize in Political and Social Studies (both from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; and honorable mentions for the 2012 Barrington Moore Best Book Award in Comparative-Historical Sociology and the 2012 Political Sociology Section Best Book Award (both from the American Sociology Association).
At re:work, Gail Kligman will immerse herself in selected readings in migration studies, including empirical ones of postsocialist migration (circular and permanent) from eastern to western Europe, with the aim of preliminarily formulating a project on gendered and generational aspects of migration and the impacts on home and host countries. The scope of this project remains to be determined.
Publications
Kligman, Gail. 1988. The Wedding of the Dead. Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kligman, Gail. 1998. The Politics of Duplicity. Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kligman, Gail. 2001. “On the Social Construction of ‘Otherness’. Identifying ‘the Roma’ in Post-Socialist Communities.” Review of Sociology of the Hungarian Sociological Association 7 (2): 61–78.
Kligman, Gail. 2005. “Trafficking Women after Socialism. To, Through, and From Eastern Europe.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 12 (1): 118–40. doi:10.1093/sp/jxi006.
Gal, Susan, and Gail Kligman. 2000. The Politics of Gender After Socialism. A Comparative-Historical Essay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kligman, Gail, and Katherine Verdery. 2011. Peasants Under Siege. The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949-1962. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
Verdery, Katherine, and Gail Kligman. 2011. “How Communist Cadres Persuaded Romanian Peasants to Give Up Their Land.” East European Politics & Societies 25 (2): 361–87.
2011/2012
Professor Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann
University of California, Berkeley, USA
History of Human Rights.
http://history.berkeley.edu/people/stefan-ludwig-hoffmann
is associate professor for late modern Europe at the Department of History of the University of California, Berkeley and director of the human rights interdisciplinary minor at Berkeley. Together with Samuel Moyn, he edits the series Human Rights in History, which is published by Cambridge University Press. He obtained his MA at the Johns Hopkins University and completed his doctorate at the University of Bielefeld. His research interests are German history, transnational history and the history of human rights since the Enlightenment.
At the research centre, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is working on a new history of human rights, which will be published in 2013 by C.H.Beck Verlag.
Literature
Fulda, Daniel, Dagmar Herzog, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, and Till van Rahden, ed. 2010. Demokratie im Schatten der Gewalt. Geschichten des Privaten im deutschen Nachkrieg. Göttingen: Wallstein.
Hoffman, Stefan-Ludwig. 2011a. “Germany Is No More. Defeat, Occupation, and the Postwar Order.” In Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, edited by Helmut Walser Smith, 597–618. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig. 2011b. “Gazing at Ruins. German Defeat as Visual Experience.” Journal of Modern European History 9: 328–50.
Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig. 2007. The Politics of Sociability. Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840-1918. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig. 2010a. “Koselleck, Arendt, and the Anthropology of Historical Experience.” History and Theory 49 (2): 212–36.
Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig. , ed. 2010b. Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, and Martin Kohlrausch. 2011. “Introduction. Post-Catastrophic Cities.” Journal of Modern European History 9 (3): 308–13.
2010/2011
Professor Baz Lecocq
Universiteit Gent, Ghent, Netherlands
The "Awad el Djouh Affair". Slave Trade to Saudi Arabia, Human Rights, and the ILO (1948-1962).
is an Africanist historian, holding a PhD in the social sciences from Amsterdam University (2002). Between 2003 and 2007 he worked as a research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin on the contemporary history of (labor) migration and the urbanization of the Tuareg people in the Central Sahara (Libya, Mali, Niger). Since 2007 he has been lecturing in African history at Ghent University. His complete curriculum vitae can be found at the website of the CCC (Communities, Comparisons, Connections) Research Group at Ghent University.
Baz Lecocq will be working on the slave trade from French West Africa to the Arabian Peninsula in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1950s, the continued existence of this slave trade drew wide international media attention. This, in turn, influenced debates on slavery, the slave trade and human rights within the Communauté Française, the International Labor Organization, and the Working Commission drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His project uses the mediatized micro-histories of the slave trade as a lens to analyze the discursive construction of the postcolonial world in the North Atlantic, Africa and the Middle East. This discursive history will be framed by the Cold War "questions" that gave it shape: labor issues, decolonization in Africa, and the changing geopolitics between the North Atlantic and the Middle East. Methodologically, the project will address the ways in which microstoria, the study of discursive praxis, and “classical” political history can be combined to intertwine historical actors across polities, policies, legal systems and continents into a single global and translocal history.
Publications
Lecocq, Baz. 2004. “Unemployed Intellectuals in the Sahara. The Teshumara Nationalist Movement and the Revolutions in Tuareg Society.” International Review of Social History 49 (S12): 87–109.
Lecocq, Baz. 2005. “The Bellah Question. Slave Emancipation, Race, and Social Categories in Late Twentieth- Century Northern Mali.” Canadian Journal of African Studies 39 (1): 42–68.
Lecocq, Baz. 2010a. “Tuareg City Blues. Cultural Capital in a Global Cosmopole.” In Tuareg Society within a Globalized World : Saharan Life in Transition, edited by Anja Fischer and Ines Kohl, 91:41–58. Tauris Academic Studies. London: I. B. Tauris.
Lecocq, Baz. 2010b. Disputed Desert. Decolonisation, Competing Nationalisms and Tuareg Rebellions in Northern Mali. Vol. 19. Afrika-Studiecentrum Series. Leiden: Brill.
Lecocq, Baz. 2012. “The Hajj From West Africa From a Global Historical Perspective (19th and 20th Centuries).” African Diaspora 5 (2): 187–212.
Lecocq, Baz, and Gregory Mann. 2007. “Between Empire, Umma, and the Muslim Third World. The French Union and African Pilgrims to Mecca, 1946-1958.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27 (2): 367–83.
Lecocq, Baz, and Paul Schrijver. 2007. “The War on Terror in a Haze of Dust. Potholes and Pitfalls on the Saharan Front.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 25 (1): 141–66.
2009/2010
Professor Hagen Schulz-Forberg
Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
Conceptual History and Global Translations: The Euro-Asian Semantics of the Social and the Economic.
received his doctorate from the European University Institute in Florence. As of 2007 he has been teaching international history at the University of Aarhus. His complete curriculum vitae can be found on the website of the University of Aarhus.
Hagen Schulz-Forberg is participating in a larger project on the global history of work: Conceptual History and Global Translations: The Euro-Asian Semantics of the Social and the Economic. The goal of this research field (jointly developed with Bo Strath, the Renvall Institute and the University of Helsinki) is to investigate the conception and imagining of the “social” and the “economic” in various European and Asiatic languages. Both concepts can be semantically located in the Western world, so their use in a global world without a Western center is extremely problematic. The project’s objective is to create a transnational epistemological basis that equitably comprises both Asian and European ideas and conceptions relating to both notions. At the center of the project is the question as to what degree the dominance of Western-shaped ideas and concepts can be overcome in favor of a kind of global communication that crosses cultural and civilizational divides. The concern here is not to play Asian and European perspectives off against one another but rather to conjoin both perspectives in historical processes.
Publications
A Global Conceptual History of Asia, 1860–1940, ed. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014.
with Niklas Olsen, eds. Re-Inventing Western Civilisation. Transnational Reconstructions of Liberalism in Europe in the Twentieth Century. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.
Zero Hours. Conceptual Insecurities and New Beginnings in the Interwar Period, ed. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2013.
The Global Arctic [= Special Issue New Global Studies, 7 (2)], ed. De Gruyter, 2013.
‘The Spatial and Temporal Layers of Global History. A Reflection on Global Conceptual History through Expanding Reinhart Koselleck’s Zeitschichten into Global Spaces’. Historical Social Research 38, no. 3 (2013): 40–58.
‘Welfare State’. In Encyclopedia of Global Studies, edited by Helmut K. Anheier and Mark Juergensmeyer, vol. 4: 1782–87. Los Angeles, CA / London / New Delhi / Singapore / Washington DC: SAGE, 2012.
‘Before Integration. Human Rights and Post-War Europe’. In European Identity and the Second World War, edited by Michael J. Wintle and Menno Spiering, 37–54. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
with Bo Stråth. The Political History of European Integration. The Hypocrisy of Democracy-Through-Market. London: Routledge, 2010.
Last updated: February 19, 2016