re:work 2019 - 2021
Dr. Görkem Akgöz
Gerda Henkel Stiftung, Germany
(September 2019 - September 2021)
Gender and Labour at the Margins of Modernity: Representations of Female Factory Labour in Turkey, 1947-1960
After completing her post-graduate studies at SUNY Binghamton and her doctorate at the University of Amsterdam, Görkem Akgöz taught sociology and history at the Department of Sociology at Hacettepe University in Ankara until February 2017. She is currently a post-doc fellow at the Central European University in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology.
Her PhD project focused on the micro-level analysis of working-class formations at a state-owned textile factory in İstanbul between 1932 and 1950. Inspired by the methodological questions she raised in her dissertation, she founded the Factory History Working Group as part of the European Labor History Network in October 2013, which she continues to coordinate. The group will publish a special issue on factory history in Labor History in 2018, and an edited volume on comparative factory histories in Europe. The project on factory history has been supported by a British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship.
Her project for her re:work fellowship is entitled “Developing Factory History as a Research Program: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Industrial Capitalism’s Emblematic Workplace”. Once looming large in national historiographies as the emblematic locus of industrialization, the industrial plant nurtured the core and soul of capitalism: the relations of production on the shop floor. Few labor historians, however, have tracked developments in one single factory and concentrated on production itself. Moreover, labor historians rarely discuss the methodological implications of their choice of factory for their monographs. Akgöz, in contrast, follows the experience of workers both inside and outside the factory in order to reveal the complex interplay between the immediate experience of labor and the effects of broader developments on working-class identity. Her aim is to transcend the unrealistic boundary between the shop floor and life outside the factory gate.
At re:work, she will be working on three journal articles. The first article is on the shop-floor-level interactions between the new languages and idioms of social citizenship and working-class identity in Turkey in the 1940s. She will also be working on a journal article that will critically review the existing studies that have focused on single factories, and will define factory history as a research agenda that links labor history to fields such as business history, management studies, and urban and community histories. Her final article will be on the (re)construction of gender identity on the shop floor based on the representations of female factory workers in the trade union press of the early Turkish Republic.
Publications
„Petitioning as Industrial Bargaining in a Turkish State Factory. The Changing Nature of Petitioning in an Early Republican State Factory“. In On the Road to Global Labour History. A Festschrift for Marcel van der Linden, herausgegeben von Karl Heinz Roth. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
„Mutsuz Evlilikten Tehlikeli Flörte. Feminizm, Neoliberalizm ve Toplumsal Hareketler“. Fe Dergi 8, Nr. 2 (2016): 86–100.
„İşçi Sınıfı Tarihyazımında İşyeri ve Çalışma Deneyiminin Yeri. Erken Cumhuriyet Dönemi Fabrikalarının Kapısından Girmek“. In Tanzimat’tan günümüze Türkiye işçi sınıfı tarihi 1839-2014. Yeni yaklaşımlar yeni alanlar yeni sorunlar, herausgegeben von Y. Doğan Çetinkaya und Mehmet Ö. Alkan, 231–53. İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2015.
mit Ecehan Balta. „Kapitalizmin Krizine Toplumsal Cinsiyet Perspektifinden Bakmak. Analitik bir Çerçeve Önerisi“. Hacettepe Üniversitesi Sosyolojik Araştırmalar E-Dergisi, 2015.
„İşçiler Greve Karşı. 1947 Sendikacılığının İlk Yıllarında Grev Tartışmaları“. Mülkiye Dergisi 38, Nr. 4 (2014): 121–58.
„Sınıfın Söylemsel Kuruluşu. 1947 Sendikacılığının İlk Yıllarında Milliyetçi ve Anti-Komünist Söylemler“. Praksis 35–36 (2014): 61–82.
Last updated: March 25, 2020
Dr. Beate Althammer
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
(Juni 2018 – Juni 2021)
The Borders of the Welfare State: Labour Migration, Social Rights and Expulsion
Phone: +49(0)30 2093 702 32
Beate Althammer is a historian with main research interests in the comparative and transnational history of modern Europe. She studied at the University of Zurich and obtained her doctorate with a scholarship of the research training group “Western Europe in Comparative Historical Perspective” at the University of Trier. She then joined the Collaborative Research Centre 600 “Strangers and Poor People: Changing Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion from Classical Antiquity to the Present Day”, which was funded by the DFG at the University of Trier from 2002 to 2012. In 2011 and 2013, she held research fellowships at the German Historical Institute London, in 2014 at the German Historical Institute Paris. Since 2015, she is a visiting lecturer at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, and in 2016 she earned her habilitation at the University of Trier with a book on the history of vagabondage in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. In the academic year 2017/18 she was a fellow at re:work, where since November 2018 also her DFG-Project on the “Borders of the Welfare State” is based.
Publications (selection)
‘Roaming Men, Sedentary Women? The Gendering of Vagrancy Offenses in Nineteenth-Century Europe’. Journal of Social History 51, no. 4 (2018): 736–59.
‘Armut und Auswanderung’. In Karl Marx 1818–1883. Leben. Werk. Zeit. Katalog zur Landesausstellung im Rheinischen Landesmuseum Trier und im Stadtmuseum Simeonstift Trier, 90–97. Darmstadt: Theiss, 2018.
Vagabunden. Eine Geschichte von Armut, Bettel und Mobilität im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung (1815–1933). Essen: Klartext, 2017.
Das Bismarckreich 1871-1890. 2., aktualisierte Auflage. UTB 2995. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2017.
‘Vagabonds in the German Empire. Mobility, Unemployment, and the Transformation of Social Policies (1870-1914)’. In Poverty and Welfare in Modern German History, edited by Lutz Raphael, 78–104. New York, NY: Berghahn, 2017.
with Lutz Raphael, and Tamara Stazic-Wendt, eds. Rescuing the Vulnerable. Poverty, Welfare and Social Ties in Modern Europe. New York, NY: Berghahn, 2016.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Dr. Supurna Banerjee
Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK), India
(March 2020)
From Mazdoor to Naukrani: Making of a Precariat Labour
Supurna Banerjee completed her PhD in Sociology from the University in Edinburgh in 2014. Her PhD, now a monograph entitled ‘Activism and Agency in India: Nurturing Resistance in the Tea Plantations’, explores gendered relations of labour in the tea plantations of Dooars in West Bengal, India. Through ethnography at two tea plantations the study explores the complexities of a space which is both a work-site as well as the place of residence for these migrant workers. Women’s work in the plantations is mapped onto their ‘natural’ physiological or psychological traits thus rendering irrelevant questions of training, practice and skill. This results in concentration of women in low paid jobs. The study also explores the myriad ways in which the women’s everyday lived experiences illustrate an active negotiation with their situations.
Banerjee was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK) on an Indian Council of Social Science Research project called ‘Trade Unions and Collective Bargaining: Case Study of West Bengal’. In 2014 she joined IDSK as a faculty member in political science. She has been a Co-Principal Investigator on an Indian Council of Social Science Research project entitled ‘Reconceptualising Domestic Violence: Shifting Discourse within the Women’s Movement in India’ and on a Morrell Trust Fund, York University, UK funded project on ‘Inequality, Injustice and Exploitation: The Different Blends in Assam Tea’. While gender and labour are her primary interests, her research interests also include marginalities, intersectionality, urban studies and migration.
While at re:work Banerjee will be working on a project entitled ‘From Mazdoor to Naukrani: Making of Precariat Labour’. The shrinking of India’s formal organised workforce has been matched by the growth of the unorganised workforce. Banerjee traces this process of making/unmaking an urban casualised workforce from one of the most organised employment sectors in India—the tea plantations. She traces the modes through which tea plantation workforce was created as ‘docile’ and the workers’ negotiations with it. Her work will focus on the present moment of crisis in the tea plantations of West Bengal since the 2000s and the resultant migration of the workforce, especially women, and their employment in various unorganised sectors in other parts of the country. She traces the social history of creation of this urban precariat workforce and provides insights on the changing ideas of skill, free/unfree labour, gendering of work and inter-generational negotiations with changing patterns of life-course.
Publications
‘From “Plantation Workers” to “Naukrāni”. The Changing Labour Discourses of Migrant Domestic Workers’. Journal of South Asian Development 13, no. 2 (forthcoming).
with Nandini Ghosh. ‘Debating Intersectionalities. Challenges for a Methodological Framework’. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, forthcoming.
Activism and Agency in India. Nurturing Resistance in the Tea Plantations. London: Routledge, 2017.
‘Too Much or Too Little? Paradoxes of Disability and Care Work in India’. Review of Disability Studies 13, no. 4 (2017).
with Zaad Mahmood. ‘Judicial Intervention and Industrial Relations. Exploring Industrial Disputes Cases in West Bengal’. Industrial Law Journal 46, no. 3 (September 2017): 366–96.
‘We Are Still Junglis to Them. Institutionalising Marginalities Among the Adivasis in Dooars’. In From the Margins to the Mainstream. Institutionalising Minorities in South Asia, edited by Hugo Gorringe, Roger Jeffery, and Suryakant Waghmore. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2016.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Professor Jennifer Burrell
University at Albany SUNY, USA
(February - March 2021)
“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
Professor Josef Ehmer
Institut für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, University Vienna, Austria
(July 2020)
Life Course, Work and Labour: Historical, Sociological and Anthropological Perspectives
Josef Ehmer is Professor emeritus for social and economic history at the University of Vienna and Associate Fellow at re:work. Before this he was professor for late-modern history at the University of Salzburg. Guest professorships took him to, among other places, the Free University Berlin, the European University Institute in Florence, and the University of Cambridge. His research encompasses the broad spectrum of European social history from the early modern period to the present day, some of his topics being work and the worker, the family and aging, historical demography and migration.
At the International Research Center, Josef Ehmer will be attempting to conceptually correlate two long historical trends – the increasingly late entry of young people into the field of gainful employment, and the increasingly early retirement of older individuals from the work world. Both trends have been well documented worldwide, but they have neither been sufficiently explained nor examined from a comparative perspective. Josef Ehmer is particularly interested in the interaction between three continuously changing factors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the structure of employment markets, the preferences of actors in terms of work and leisure time, and the alternatives to gainful employment through educational systems for younger people, pension systems for older individuals and family and domestic work for women.
Publications
„Zur Geschichte des Normalarbeitsverhältnisses. Rekonstruktion und Kritik“. In Normalarbeit. Nur Vergangenheit oder auch Zukunft?, herausgegeben von Johanna Muckenhuber, Josef Hödl, und Martin Griesbacher, 21–39. Bielefeld: transcript, 2018.
„Arbeitsdiskurse im deutschen Sprachraum des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts“. In Semantiken von Arbeit. Diachrone und vergleichende Perspektiven, herausgegeben von Jörn Leonhard und Willibald Steinmetz, 93–114. Köln: Böhlau, 2016.
“Work versus Leisure. Historical Roots of the Dissociation of Work and Later Life in Twentieth-Century Europe“. In Challenges of Aging. Pensions, Retirement and Generational Justice, herausgegeben von Cornelius Torp, 135–64. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
“Attitudes to Work, Class Structures, and Social Change. A Review of Recent Historical Studies“. International Review of Social History 59, Nr. 01 (2014): 99–117.
Bevölkerungsgeschichte und Historische Demographie 1800-2010. 2., um einen Nachtrag erweiterte Auflage. München: Oldenbourg, 2013.
„Altersstrukturen im historischen Wandel. Demographische Trends und gesellschaftliche Bewertung“. In Alter(n) anders denken. Kulturelle und biologische Perspektiven, herausgegeben von Brigitte Röder, Willemijn de Jong, und Kurt W. Alt, 403–36. Köln: Böhlau, 2012.
“Quantifying Mobility in Early Modern Europe. The Challenge of Concepts and Data“. Journal of Global History 6, Nr. 02 (2011): 327–38.
Ruhestand [= Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften, 22 (3)], Hrsg. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2011.
mit Jens Ehrhardt, und Martin Kohli, Hrsg. Fertility in the History of the 20th Century. Trends, Theories, Policies, Discourses [= Special Issue Historical Social Research, 36 (2)]. Köln: Zentrum für Historische Sozialforschung, 2011.
“Discourses on Work and Labour in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Germany“. In Work in a Modern Society. The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective, herausgegeben von Jürgen Kocka, 17–36. New York: Berghahn, 2010.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Professor Daniel Eisenberg
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA
(January - March 2021)
re:working labour
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.
Publications
The Unstable Object. 67 min, Dokumentarfilm, 2011. (Passwort: unstable071011)
Something More Than Night. 73 min, Dokumentarfilm, 2003.
Persistence. 86 min, Dokumentarfilm, 1997.
Displaced Person. 11 min, Dokumentarfilm, 1991.
Cooperation of Parts. 40 min, Dokumentarfilm, 1983.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Kodzo Gozo
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany / Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France
(March - June 2021)
The Ambivalence of German-Togolese Relations: Between Memory, Interests and Equal Partnership
gozokodz@hu-berlin.de
Kodzo Gozo, M.A. is a Togolese PhD student (Paris/Berlin). After an education in German studies, he turned to historical studies at the University of Göttingen. Besides Togolese history, he is interested in German and French imperial history, intermediaries studies, but also in identitarian issues.
He is currently completing his dissertation "The Ambivalence of German-Togolese Relations: Between Memory, Interests and Equal Partnership". It critically examines the course of German-Togolese interactions from their beginnings in the mid-19th century to 1990, bringing German and Togolese perspectives on such interactions into dialogue, something often lacking in historiographies of relations between Western and African countries. In the study, he embeds respectively imperial history, global intellectual history and the history of international relations, which takes into account the redefinition of German-African relations since the 1960s underlining the former initial German-Togolese 'special relations'.
Parallel to the dissertation, Mr Gozo is completing an article at re:work entitled "Bundisme et l'Allemagne : (Re)penser une 'collaboration' trans-impériale pour un retour allemand au Togo, 1923-1955 ".
Publications
« Interactions ordinaires en contexte impérial allemand: les ambivalences des relations entre Gidi-Gidi et l’administration allemande au Togo (1887-1914) », Monde(s) (2023 forthcoming).
« Trois acteurs privés de la diplomatie du Land de Bavière au Togo, 1977-1990: L’Association Bavaro-Togolaise et les Fondations Hanns-Seidel et Eyadéma », in Les Cahiers Sirice, n° 25, 2020/2, p. 51-58.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Professor Mischa Honeck
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
(October 2019 - September 2020)
Anti-Aging Work
Mischa Honeck is a historian of the United States who works at the intersection of national and global history. He is interested in the ways in which peoples, ideas, and objects from North America have interacted – often unevenly – with various parts of the globe. Spanning two centuries, his contributions to this burgeoning “America and the World” scholarship engage with the histories of race, ethnicity, gender, childhood, youth, and empire.
Mischa’s research has resulted in two monographs. His first book, We Are the Revolutionists, maps encounters between black and white antislavery activists and exiled European radicals in the Civil-War era United States. His second book, Our Frontier Is the World, details how the scouting movement aided and abetted US global expansion in the twentieth century. He also edited two collections of essays: Germany and the Black Diaspora and War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars.
Mischa earned his Ph.D. and his Habilitation at Heidelberg University in 2008 and 2016, respectively. He spent six years as a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC. Upon returning to Germany in August 2017, he joined the Department of History at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. From October 2018 to September 2019, he was a visiting professor for social and economic history at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Thanks to funding provided by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Mischa will embark on writing a third book while at re:work. He is drawn to the topic of rejuvenation and the ways in which various forms of “anti-aging work” have been deployed to repair and regenerate flesh-and-blood bodies as well as collective bodies such as nations and empires. Specifically, he aims to examine major rejuvenationist discourses and practices throughout US history, from the nation’s inception to Silicon Valley’s transhumanist projects.
Publications
‘Rubble and Rebirth: Postwar Rejuvenation and the Erasure of History’. Journal of Social History, forthcoming.
‘Youth Organizations’. Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 2019.
Our Frontier Is the World. The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy. The United States in the World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018.
with James Alan Marten, eds. War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars. Publications of the German Historical Institute. Cambridge ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
with Gabriel Rosenberg. ‘Transnational Generations: Organizing Youth in the Cold War’. Diplomatic History 38, no. 2 (2014): 233–39.
with Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann, eds. Germany and the Black Diaspora. Points of Contact, 1250-1914. Studies in German History. New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2013.
We Are the Revolutionists. German-Speaking Immigrants & American Abolitionists After 1848. Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011.
Last updated: February 12, 2020
Dr. Nurçin Ileri
Forum Transregionale Studien / EUME (Europe in the Middle East- the Middle East in Europe), Germany
(October 2020 - June 2022)
The Electrification of Istanbul: Technology, Politics, and Everyday Life
Nurcin Ileri is a historian from Turkey with research interests in urban studies, history of science and technology, and history of infrastructures in the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey. She received her PhD from the Department of History at Binghamton University in 2015. Her dissertation, A Nocturnal History of fin de siècle Istanbul, casts light on the social and material geographies of night that went beyond the dichotomies of the ‘city of glittering leisure and consumption,’ or the ‘city of indigence and vice.’ She taught courses on the history of the late Ottoman Empire and contemporary Turkey at Boğaziçi and Işık Universities (2012-2018). She worked as the assistant coordinator of the Boğaziçi University Archives and Documentation Center, where she conducted a project entitled “Histories of Science, Culture and Education in Istanbul Through Personal Archives” and was involved in curating and writing material for on-site and online exhibitions (2015-2018). She spent one year as a post-doctoral scholar in the Department of History at the Université Grenoble Alpes (2018-2019) and six months as a visiting researcher at the Center of Metropolitan Studies of Technische Universität Berlin (2019-2020).
She is currently a EUME Fellow associated with the IGK Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History (re:work) of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her project “The Electrification of Istanbul: Technology, Politics, and Everyday Life” focuses on the efforts to build an urban scale power plant and electric grid in Istanbul and explores how electrical technology and infrastructure transformed public, industrial, and domestic spaces, and rearranged the rhythm of everyday life. It examines how the transfer, generation, distribution, and consumption of this new technology triggered a range of encounters and dialogues among the state authorities, city administration, multinational investors, experts, workers, and consumers. Ileri questions how the electricity network of artifacts, knowledge, labor, and political ideologies reinforced new hierarchies and inequalities in institutions, in the city’s natural and built environment and in daily life. Her research relies on a wide range of sources; state archives, foreign diplomatic archives, company/consortium archives, local periodicals, and memoirs; and reveals how the history of electrification in Istanbul stands at the intersection of transnational political and economic networks and tells another history of global capitalism both in the Middle Eastern and European contexts.
Publications
Tarihçilerden Başka Bir Hikâye (= A Different Story by Historians), eds. Ebru Aykut, Nurçin İleri, Fatih Artvinli, İstanbul: Can Yayınları, 2019.
“Kayıp bir Müzenin İzinde: Robert Kolej’in Bilimsel Koleksiyonları,” (= In search of a Lost Museum: Scientific Collections of Robert College) Nurçin İleri and Semih Çelik (eds.) in “Tasniften Teşhire: Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Doğa Tarihi Müzeleri” (From Classification to Display: Natural History Museums from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic) Toplumsal Tarih 311, Kasım 2019, 50-57.
“Hangi Usül Tenvir: Havagazı mı Elektrik mi?” (= Which Type of Illumination: Coal Gas or Electricity), in İstanbul Araştırmaları Yıllığı, İstanbul Research Institute, 2018, 205-216.
"Nightlife and Temporal Order in fin de siècle Istanbul" in special issue titled "Inquiring Temporal Otherness: Timekeeping and Attitudes towards Time in the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire" Etudes balkaniques, 2/2017, 295-325.
"Allure of the Light, Fear of the Dark: Nighttime Illumination, Spectacle, and Order in Fin-de-Siècle Istanbul" Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 2017, Vol 37, No 2, 280-298.
"Between the Real and the Imaginary: Late Ottoman Istanbul as a Crime Scene" Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 4, No. 1, May 2017, 95-116.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Professor Preben Kaarsholm
Roskilde Universitet, Denmark
(March - June 2021)
From Slaves to Citizens: Aspirational Strategies and Changing Life Course Regimes among the Durban “Zanzibaris”
Preben Kaarsholm is professor of global and international development studies at Roskilde University. His research interests have shifted from romantic anti-capitalism and anti-imperialist movements in Europe to settler states and postcolonial development in Southern Africa. He has published widely on violence and democratic struggles, and on moral debates and local politics in urban slum settlements. In recent years, his research has focused on the Indian Ocean, on transnational Islamic movements, and on networks of labor migration and control. He has extensive experience in doing collaborative research with universities in Africa and India, and is a coordinator of the AEGIS collaborative research group on Africa in the Indian Ocean.
Kaarsholm’s re:work research addresses the transmutations in form of unfree labor recruited across the Western Indian Ocean from slavery to indentured labor to migrant and contemporary forms of contracted labor. His research is concerned in particular with relations between South Asia, the African Indian Ocean islands, and Southern Africa, and investigates both the sending and the receiving end of recruitment, the changing frameworks of regulation within which labor was sourced, as well as the shifts in self-understanding articulated by laborers and their relatives away from subalternity to aspiring citizenship.
Publications
„From Abolition of the Slave Trade to Protection of Immigrants. Danish Colonialism, German Missionaries, and the Development of Ideas of Humanitarian Governance from the Early Eighteenth to the Nineteenth Century“. Atlantic Studies 17, Nr. 3 (2020): 348–74.
mit Bodil Folke Frederiksen. „Amaoti and Pumwani. Studying Urban Informality in South Africa and Kenya“. African Studies 78, Nr. 1 (2019): 51–73.
„Indian Ocean Networks and the Transmutations of Servitude. The Protector of Indian Immigrants and the Administration of Freed Slaves and Indentured Labourers in Durban in the 1870s“. Journal of Southern African Studies 42, Nr. 3 (2016): 443–61.
„Islam, Secularist Government, and State–Civil Society Interaction in Mozambique and South Africa Since 1994“. Journal of Eastern African Studies 9, Nr. 3 (2015): 468–87.
„Zanzibaris or Amakhuwa? Sufi Networks in South Africa, Mozambique and the Indian Ocean“. The Journal of African History 55, Nr. 2 (2014): 191–210.
„Transnational Islam and Public Sphere Dynamics in KwaZulu-Natal. Rethinking South Africa’s Place in the Indian Ocean World“. Africa 81, Nr. 1 (2011): 108–31.
Last updated: March 25, 2021.
Professor Patricia Landolt
University of Toronto
(April - June 2021)
Politics and Policy in the Global City
Patricia Landolt is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 2001. Professor Landolt studies the relationship between global migration and social inequality through a community-engaged research practice with a focus on transnational migration, precarious work and precarious legal status, and, the politics of noncitizenship. Her current projects examine noncitizenship and precarious legal status as primary fault lines of social inequality in settler-colonial Canada. They reveal the material and discursive fragilities of liberal multiculturalism as a project of nation-state formation.
She currently has two projects on the go. First, the Citizenship and Employment Precarity (CEP) project (with Professor Luin Goldring of York University) examines the relationship between immigration status upon arrival (in Canada) and job prospects over time. The CEP has successfully concluded a 20-minute online survey in six languages with 1300 working age adults living in the Greater Toronto Area who entered Canada without permanent residence. Analysis of the findings began in January 2021 and early results about the relationship between precarious legal status entrance categories, status trajectories and precarious work outcomes over time will be published in May 2021. In a second project, Landolt considers the politics of precarious noncitizenship with a focus on access to healthcare and public education; two institutional arenas that are central to the liberal, multicultural understanding of citizenship in Canada. In this work, she draws on the theoretical and methodological contributions of assemblages thinking to examine probationary power and the production of the multi-scalar conditionalities of precarious noncitizenship. This research has also led her to consider questions of precarious noncitizen belonging in relation to Treaty Citizenship as a central and perhaps only sustainable modality of membership in Canada.
While at re:work she will continue to work on her book-length manuscript tentatively titled Educating the Non/Citizen: The Conditionalities of Liberal Membership. The project is based on 120 in-depth interviews conducted between 2009 and 2019 with many different types of school workers. In this project (with Paloma Villegas of California State-San Bernadino), Landolt considers how public education workers in Canada’s largest school board produce the material and discursive border zones of access to schooling for precarious legal status families. The project centres the professional training, roles and dispositions of public sector workers. It analyses how public sector workers’ understanding of Canada’s place in a global migration system, and their ideas about race, class, and family structures come together to produce secondary border zones that set the terms of access to schooling for precarious legal status families. These exercises in defining border zones and access to schooling shed light on the conditionalities of membership at the heart of the liberal multicultural project.
Publications
Landolt, Patricia, Luin Goldring & Paul Pritchard. 2021. “Decentering methodological nationalism to survey precarious legal status trajectories”. International Journal of Social Science Methodology, https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2020.1866339
Villegas, Paloma, Patricia Landolt, Victoria Freeman, Joe Hermer, Ranu Basu and Bojana Videkanic. 2021. “Contesting Settler-Colonial Accounts: Temporality, Migration and Place-Making in Scarborough, Ontario”, Studies in Social Justice. https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v14i2.2211
Goldring, Luin and Patricia Landolt. 2021. From Illegalized Migrant toward Permanent Resident: Assembling Precarious Legal Status Trajectories and Differential Inclusion in Canada. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1866978
Landolt, Patricia. 2020. “Assembling the Local Politics of Noncitizenship: Contesting Access to Healthcare in Toronto-Sanctuary City”, Social Problems https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spaa046
Landolt, Patricia and Luin Goldring. 2016. “Assembling Noncitizenship through the Work of Conditionality,” Citizenship Studies 19(8): 853-869
Goldring, Luin and Patricia Landolt (editors). 2013. Producing and Negotiating Non-Citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Goldring, Luin and Patricia Landolt 2011. “Caught in the Work–Citizenship Matrix: the
Lasting Effects of Precarious Legal Status on Work for Toronto Immigrants,” Globalizations 8 (3): 325-341
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Professor Carola Lentz
Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany
(April - July 2020)
Carola Lentz is senior professor of social anthropology at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. Since 1987, she has been conducting research on labour migration, ethnicity, the history of chieftaincy, land rights, and the politics of belonging in Northern Ghana and Burkina Faso.
Her current research project explores the changing career strategies and home ties of the members of an emerging middle class in Northern Ghana. She also supervises a group of junior researchers who are studying the 2010 African independence celebrations of nine different countries.
In autumn 2011, she was appointed president of the German Anthropological Association.
Furthermore she received the prestigous 2014 Melville J. Herskovits Award for her study Land, Mobility, and Belonging in the West African Savanna (Indiana University Press). The African Studies Association presents the Herskovits Award to the author of the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English during the preceding year.
In November 2020 she became President of Goethe-Institut Germany.
Publication
Elites or Middle Classes? Lessons from Transnational Research for the Study of Social Stratification in Africa. Working Papers of the Department of Anthropology and African Studies of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Bd. 161, 2015.
“‘I Take an Oath to the State, Not the Government.’ Career Trajectories and Professional Ethics of Ghanaian Public Servants”. In States at Work. Dynamics of African Bureaucracies, herausgegeben von Thomas Bierschenk und Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, 175–204. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa. Natives and Strangers. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013.
mit Thomas Bierschenk, und Matthias Krings, Hrsg. Ethnologie im 21. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Reimer, 2013.
“The 2010 Independence Jubilees. The Politics and Aesthetics of National Commemoration in Africa”. Nations and Nationalism 19, Nr. 2 (2013): 217–37.
mit Andrea Behrends. “Education, Careers and Home Ties. The Ethnography of an Emerging Middle Class from Northern Ghana”. Zeitschrift Für Ethnologie 137, Nr. 2 (2012): 139–64.
Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Die Konstruktion von Ethnizität. Eine politische Geschichte Nord-West Ghanas, 1870-1990. Köln: Köppe, 1998.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Professor Marcel van der Linden
International Institute for Social History (IISH), Amsterdam, Niederlande
(April - September 20)
Why Do Workers (Not) Rebel?
Marcel van der Linden (1952) is Honorary Fellow at the International Institute of Social History (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), where he served as Research Director between 2001 and 2014. He is also emeritus professor of Social Movement History at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He received his PhD (1989) cum laude from the UvA. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo (2008), the René Kuczynski Prize (Vienna 2009) and the Historikerpreis (Bochum 2014). He was visiting professor in Vienna (2003 and 2008), held the Marcel Liebman Chair at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (2009-10) and was Concurrent Professor at the University of Nanjing (2009-12). He is a co-founder of the Association of Indian Labour Historians (1996), the European Labour History Network (2013) and the Global Labour History Network (2015). He also is and has been President of the International Social History Association (2005-10, 2010-15, 2015-20). His books and articles have been published in seventeen languages.
At re:work he will be working on a book manuscript, Why Do People Not Rebel?, and he will finalize four volumes of The Global History of Work: Critical Readings (forthcoming in 2019).
Publications
with Gerald Hubmann, eds. Marx’s Capital. An Unfinishable Project? Boston: Brill, 2018.
with Hofmeester, Karin, eds. Handbook Global History of Work. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018.
with Kocka, Jürgen, eds. Capitalism. The Reemergence of a Historical Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
with Karl Heinz Roth, eds. Beyond Marx. Theorising the Global Labour Relations of the Twenty-First Century. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
Workers of the World. Essays Toward a Global Labor History. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
Transnational Labour History. Explorations. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Dr. Sybille Marti
Universität Zürich, Switzerland
(February - December 2020)
Invisible and Insecure. A History of Informal Labour in the 20th Century
Sibylle worked at the Research Unit for Social and Economic History and at the Center “History of Knowledge” in Zurich. Currently, she is a lecturer in modern European history at the FernUniversität in Hagen. Her PhD focused on the history of radiation research and radiation protection in Cold War Switzerland. She co-edited volumes on the imaginary of the Cold War as well as on Switzerland’s armament culture during the Cold War. She was a research fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the University of Chicago, the German Historical Institute Paris and the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. At re:work, she works on her second book about the history of informal labour in the 20th century. This research project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). It explores the boundaries between formalized and non-formalized labour and examines the actors, discourses, and practices that produced knowledge about informal types of work.
Publications
‘Economic Boom, Workers’ Literature, and Morality in the West Germany of the 1960s and Early 1970s’. In Moralizing Capitalism, edited by Stefan Berger and Alexandra Przyrembel, 293–314. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019.
‘Precarious Work—Informal Work: Notions of “Insecure” Labour and How They Relate to Neoliberalism’. Journal of Modern European History 17, no. 4 (2019): 396–401.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Professor Nicole Mayer-Ahuja
Universität Göttingen, Germany
(October 2020 - March 2021)
Frontiers of Control: Managerial Power Versus Workers’ Power
nicole.mayer-ahuja(at)sowi.uni-goettingen.de
iis at the Institute for Sociology at the Universität Göttingen. She is a sociologist and undertakes her research from a historical and transnational perspective. Her focus is on the tension created by the conflicting priorities of the entrepreneurial strategies of capitalism and the economic, political and social regulation of the production and reproduction of manpower. She has published work on mass unemployment in the Great Depression, on the history of casualization in the German Federal Republic since 1973, how Internet service providers organize their labor, and German-Indian project work in the software sector.
http://www.sofi-goettingen.de/nc/personen/detail/name/nicole-mayer-ahuja/
Publications
with Wolfgang Dunkel, und Heidemarie Hanekop, Hrsg. Blick zurück nach vorn. Sekundäranalysen zum Wandel von Arbeit nach dem Fordismus. Frankfurt M. ; New York, NY: Campus, 2019.
“Normalarbeitsverhältnis”. Ein langer Abschied oder: Zeit für einen neuen Aufbruch?“ In Sozialstaat unter Zugzwang. Zwischen Reform und radikaler Neuorientierung, herausgegeben von A. Doris Baumgartner und Beat Fux, 165–86. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019.
with Klaus Dörre, Dieter Sauer, und Volker Wittke, Hrsg. Capitalism and Labor. Towards Critical Perspectives. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2018.
„Die Globalität unsicherer Arbeit als konzeptionelle Provokation. Zum Zusammenhang zwischen Informalität im ‚Globalen Süden‘ und Prekarität im ‚Globalen Norden‘“. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 43, Nr. 2 (2017): 264–96.
„Everywhere Is Becoming the Same“? Regulating IT-Work between India and Germany. German Writings on India and South Asia. New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2014.
Wieder dienen lernen? Vom westdeutschen „Normalarbeitsverhältnis“ zu prekärer Beschäftigung seit 1973. Berlin: Ed. Sigma, 2003.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Dr. Michael Pesek
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Germany
(July 2020 - June 2022)
Publications (Selection):
Tanz der Hoffnung, Tanz der Macht. Über Populäre Kulturen und Kolonialismus im östlichen Afrika. Berlin: Das Arabische Buch. (1997)
Geschichte und Performance in Lamu, Kenia (1880-1925). In Fiebach, J. & Mühl-Benninghaus, W. (Hrsg.), Theater und Medien an der Jahrhundertwende . Berlin: Vistas, 117-168. (1997)
Tanz und Text. Über Geschichte, Performance & Oralität. In Schmidt, H. & Wirz, A. (Hrsg.), Afrika und das Andere- Alterität und Innovation. Münster: LIT. (1998)
Kreuz oder Halbmond. Die deutsche Kolonialpolitik zwischen Pragmatismus und Paranoia in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1908-1914. In Heyden, U.v. & Becher, J. (Hrsg.), Mission und Gewalt. Stuttgart: Steiner, 97-112. (2000)
Eine Gründungsszene des deutschen Kolonialismus. Carl Peters' Expedition nach Usagara, 1884. In Klein-Arendt, R. & Bechhaus-Gerst, M. (Hrsg.), Die (koloniale) Begegnung. AfrikanerInnen in Deutschland 1880-1945. Deutsche in Afrika 1880-1918. Berlin: Peter Lang, 255-268. (2002)
Sulayman b. Nasir al-Lamki and German colonial policies towards Muslim communities in German East Africa. In Bierschenk, T. & Stauth, G. (Hrsg.), Islam in Africa. Münster: LIT, 211-229. (2002)
Islam und Politik in Deutsch-Ostafrika, 1905-1919. In Wirz, A., Bromber, K. & Eckert, A. (Hrsg.), Alles unter Kontrolle- Disziplinierungsverfahren im kolonialen Tanzania (1850-1960). Hamburg: LIT, 99-140. (2003)
Bürokratische Ordnung und koloniale Praxis. Herrschaft und Verwaltung in Preußen und Afrika. In Osterhammel, J. & Conrad, S. (Hrsg.), Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1871-1914. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 87-106. mit Andreas Eckert. (2004)
Koloniale Herrschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika. Expeditionen, Militär und Verwaltung seit 1880. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus. (2005)
Die Ankunft des Anderen. Empfangszeremonien im interkulturellen und intertemporalen Vergleich. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus. Baller, S., Pesek, M., Schilling, R., & Stolpe, I. (Hrsg.) (2008)
Das Ende eines Kolonialreiches. Ostafrika im Ersten Weltkrieg. Frankfur a. M.: Campus. (2010)
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Derek Peterson
University of Michigan, USA
(October - December 2019)
Idi Amin and the Making of Modern Uganda: A History of Institutions and Ideas
Derek R. Peterson is Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Michigan. He was formerly Senior Lecturer in History and Director of African Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research is about the intellectual and cultural history of eastern Africa. He directs an ongoing project to organise, catalogue, and digitise endangered government records in Uganda; and in recent years he’s been working with curators to renew the public displays at the Uganda Museum in Kampala. His work as a public historian was recognised in 2017 with the award of a ‘Genius’ fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
While at re:work Peterson will be writing up a book tentatively entitled 'Idi Amin and the Making of Modern Uganda: A History of Institutions and Ideas’. The book uses the newly-catalogued archives of local government to explain why so many Ugandans found reason to support Idi Amin’s regime. Peterson argues that the Amin government worked by transforming hitherto obscure social issues into vital political matters that demanded urgent action. The book focuses on particular institutions—the radio station, the archive, the museum, the monument—that imparted meaning and direction to the time. By hastening and reorienting Ugandans’ sense of history, the Amin government made mundane affairs of public life into moments an an everlasting struggle to redeem black Ugandans’ destiny.
Publications
with Isabel Hofmeyr. ‘The Politics of the Page: Cutting and Pasting in South African and African-American Newspapers’. Social Dynamics 45, no. 1 (2019): 1–25.
with Emma Hunter, and Stephanie Newell, eds. African Print Cultures. Newspapers and Their Publics in the Twentieth Century. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016.
with Kodzo Gavua, and Ciraj Rassool, eds. The Politics of Heritage in Africa. Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival. A History of Dissent, c. 1935-1972. African Studies Series 122. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
with Giacomo Macola, eds. Recasting the Past. History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa. New African Histories Series. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009.
Creative Writing. Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya. Social History of Africa. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Professor Seth Rockman
Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
(March - June 2021)
Plantation Goods and the National Economy of Slavery in the Industrializing United States
Seth Rockman is associate professor of History at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island (USA). Rockman completed his doctoral studies at University of California–Davis in 1999, taught for several years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and joined the Brown faculty in 2004. His research focuses on the United States in the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War, with particular attention to labor history, slavery studies, and the history of capitalism. Rockman serves on the advisory board of Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, and has recently held elected positions in the Organization of American Historians and the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic. In May 2016, Rockman delivered a keynote address at “Free and Unfree Labor in Atlantic and Indian Ocean Port Cities, c.1700– 1850,” a conference at the University of Pittsburgh.
Publications
„Paper Technologies of Capitalism“. Technology & Culture, im Erscheinen.
with Sven Beckert, Hrsg. Slavery’s Capitalism. A New History of American Economic Development. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
„What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?“ Journal of the Early Republic 34, Nr. 3 (2014): 439–66.
Scraping By. Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
„The Contours of Class in the Early Republic City“. Labor. Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 1, Nr. 4 (2004): 91–107.
Welfare Reform in the Early Republic. A Brief History with Documents. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Ellen Rothenberg
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA
(März - Mai 2021)
re:working labour
Since the early eighties, Ellen Rothenberg’s work has been concerned with the politics of everyday life and the formation of communities through collaborative practices.
Influenced by the social and political actions of the sixties; the civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements, she began locating her work outside conventional institutional venues; shifting her performances and sculpture to the street, city parks, subway platforms and other public spaces, broadening the audience for her work. At the same moment, Rothenberg began to immerse herself in research, particularly feminist histories of labor and social action. Partnering with historians, forensic scientists, research librarians and archivists, she developed a practice that includes and recognizes intellectual workers and material fabricators in a non-hierarchical approach.
From her 1970’s performances to her 1980’s installations, to her collaborative approach in the 1990’s, Rothenberg has probed formal boundaries for what they can produce, designing responsive structures that encourage participation. This strategy continues to drive her work, and can be seen as an esthetic, political, and social force. Inclusive, generative, collaborative, open... these are essential characteristics of her ongoing work. Expanding this approach internationally in the 1990’s Rothenberg produced a hybrid pedagogy in her teaching as well. Working with established communities, and forming new ones has become an essential part of her working process.
Investigating through multiple permutations: graphics and publication, sculptural objects, performance, installation, moving images, and public events, Rothenberg rejects a singular approach to material and concept, while retaining taut attention to detail and materiality in her work.
Ellen Rothenberg’s recent public projects and installations focus on global migration and the political and social response in destination countries; the intertwined histories of electoral activism and of voter suppression; and the possibilities for individual and collective action. Her research repurposes the archive through presence and emplacement - inhabiting architecture, public spaces, and sites of everyday life.
Working and living between Chicago and Berlin, Rothenberg is currently a Research Fellow at RE:WORK, IGK Work and Life Course from the Global Perspective at Humboldt University in Berlin and Professor, Adj. at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As Inaugural Faculty Research Fellow in SAIC’s Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice during 2018-19, Rothenberg and Daniel Eisenberg curated and organized RE:WORKING LABOR, an international symposium and exhibition on contemporary representations of labor and the future of work.
Exhibitions and Performances (Selection)
- The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA
- The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA
- The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, USA
- The Museum of London, Ontario, Kanada
- The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, USA
- Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen, Deutschland
- Royal Festival Hall, London, UK
- Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu, Romania
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Professor Mahua Sarkar
Binghamton University, Vestal, NY, USA
(September 2019 - January 2020)
Bidesh Kara (Going Abroad): Bangladeshi Contract Migrants and Contemporary Guest Work.
Mahua Sarkar is Professor of Sociology, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Binghamton University, New York. Recently, she has been France-ILO Chair and Fellow at the Institut d’Etudes Avancées de Nantes, France, EURIAS (European Institutes for Advanced Study) Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Fellow at Re:work, Arbeit und Lebenslauf in globalgeschichtelicher Perspektive, Humboldt University, Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, and Visiting Senior Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Trained as a historical sociologist, Professor Sarkar’s diverse, inter-disciplinary research agenda and publications span a range of topics including contemporary transnational migration, especially guest-work regimes, gestational surrogacy as a new form of labour, religious nationalisms, Muslim identity formation and the gender question in colonial Bengal, and the politics of methods in the human sciences.
Professor Sarkar has two ongoing projects. The first is an advanced book project, entitled Bidesh Kara (Going Abroad): Bangladeshi Contract Migrants and Contemporary Guest Work. It combines political economic and macro historical analysis with ethnography, life histories, and archival research to offer in-depth insights into the consequences of mobility for the migrants and their families, even as it situates contemporary guest-work within the history of free and forced/constrained labor forms under global capitalism. Her second project focuses on commercial gestational surrogacy as a unique optic through which one can study questions related to transnational flows—of people, objects and power—poverty and uneven development, emergent technologies, and racialized and gendered labour regimes.
Publications
- Work out of Place. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018.
‘When Maternity Is Paid-Work. Commercial Gestational Surrogacy at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century’. In Women’s ILO. Transnational Networks, Working Conditions, and Gender Equality, edited by Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann, 340–59. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
‘L’action incertaine. Le contrat de travail temporaire transnational en tant que risque [Uncertain Action. Transnational Temporary Contract Work as Risk]’. In Action et Incertitude. Les épreuves de l’incertain, edited by Marc-Henry Soulet, 457–83. Basel ; Berlin: Schwabe Verlag, 2018.
‘Constrained Labour as Instituted Process. Transnational Contract Work and Circular Migration in Late Capitalism’. European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie 58, no. 1 (2017): 171–204.
‘Between Craft and Method. Meaning and Inter-Subjectivity in Oral History Analysis’. Journal of Historical Sociology 25, no. 4 (2012): 578–600.
Visible Histories, Disappearing Women. Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Dr. Daniel Tödt
IAAW, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Between the Decks and Docks of Imperial Port Cities: Temporary Work and Changing Life Courses of Africans in Marseille and Antwerp (1880s-1960s)
Dr. Daniel Tödt is assistant professor at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and teaches African history. In 2017/2019 he held a fellowship at the International Research Center „Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History“ at the same university. Previously, as a postdoctoral fellow, he was a member of the International Graduate Research Program Berlin-New York-Toronto “The World in the City: Metropolitanism and Globalization from the 19th Century to the Present” based at the Center for Metropolitan Studies, Technical University Berlin. He studied European ethnology, African studies, and political science. His dissertation on African elite formation in Belgian Congo was awarded the ZEIT-Stiftung Prize of the German Historical Association. His main research interests are African history in the 19th and 20th century, social history of colonialism, global maritime labour, urban history, and (post)colonial migration.
His research project at re:work traces the eventful biographies of African dockers and seafarers in the French and Belgian empire. It analyzes how they moved back-and-forth between different fields of labour: legal, illegal, non-work, and casual labour. While stressing the temporariness of their personal and work biographies, the project illuminates the multitude of fleeting opportunities for making one’s living in a complex, mutually constitutive, yet asymmetric imperial world. The consistently subaltern status of these colonial subjects in port cities and on steamships provides a way to interrogate the extent of mutual influence, horizontal connectedness, and vertical coercion within Empires of work.
Literatur
‘Making Second Imperial Cities: Modern Ports, Colonial Connectivity and Maritime Globalization’. Moderne Stadtgeschichte 2 (2019): 115–39.
Elitenbildung und Dekolonisierung. Die Évolués in Belgisch-Kongo 1944-1960. Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft, Band 228. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018.
‘Vers une histoire culturelle des élites africaines - Parcours d’une recherche inachevée’. In Archives Afrique Europe. Besoins? Collaborations? Avenirs? La RDC, le Rwanda, le Burundi et la Belgique, edited by Pierre-Alain Tallier and Sabine Eyenga-Cornelis, 141–55. Bruxelles: Algemeen Rijksarchief, 2013.
‘Les Noirs Perfectionnés. Cultural Embourgeoisement in Belgian Congo during the 1940s and 1950s’. Working Papers Des Sonderforschungsbereiches 640 4 (2012): 1–23.
Vom Planeten Mars. Rap in Marseille und das Imaginäre der Stadt. Münster: LIT, 2011.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Dr. Nitin Varma
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
(January - June 2021)
Domestic Workers in Colonial India
Nitin Varma studied history at the University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi). He completed his doctorate in 2011 at the Humboldt University, Berlin on coolie labour in the colonial tea plantations of Assam. ‘Coolie’ is a generic category for ‘unskilled’ manual labourers in South Asia. In the nineteenth century there was an attempt to recast the term in discursive constructions and material practices for ‘mobilized-immobilized’ labour working in mines, at plantations and in other colonial capitalist enterprises. Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise that straddled the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). His book Coolies of Capitalismpublished in 2016 makes a case for the ‘production’ of coolie labour in the history of the colonial-capitalist plantations in Assam. The main thrust of the book is to interrogate and situate the presumed unfettered influence of colonial-capitalism in defining and ‘producing’ coolies, with an emphasis on the attendant contingencies, negotiations, contestations and crises. This interrupted the abrupt appearance of the archetypical coolie of the tea gardens (i.e., imported and indentured) and situated this archetype’s emergence, sustenance and shifts in the context of material and discursive processes.
Nitin Varma recently collaborated on a three-year ERC Starting grant project (2015-2018) on domestic servants in colonial India. The aim of the project was to bring the rather neglected domestic work and workers within the fold of labour history and into sharper focus and also evaluate the possibilities and limits of transregional networks, connections and histories. This project aimed to simultaneously focus on the ‘local’ and translocal practices of domestic work through the prism of servants along multiple lines of enquiry: How were servants recruited? What were their conditions of employment and work? Was working as a servant a phase in their lifecycle or did these servants spend their lives with their employers’ family? How did such practices mutate over space and time? At re:work Nitin Varma plans to complete a series of publications from this research, including edited volumes, special issues of journals and a monograph.
Publications
‘Servant Testimonies and Anglo-Indian Homes in Nineteenth-Century India’. In To Be at Home. House, Work, and Self in the Modern World, edited by Felicitas Hentschke and James Williams. Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018.
Coolies of Capitalism. Assam Tea and the Making of Coolie Labour. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016.
‘Unpopular Assam. Notions of Migrating and Working for Tea Gardens’. In Towards a New History of Work, edited by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, 227–44. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2014.
‘Coolie Strikes Back. Collective Protest and Action in the Colonial Tea Plantations of Assam, 1880–1920’. In Adivasis in Colonial India. Survival, Resistance, and Negotiation, edited by Biswamoy Pati, 186–215. New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, 2010.
‘For the Drink of the Nation. Drink, Labour and Plantation Colonialism in the Colonial Tea Gardens of Assam in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century’. In Labour Matters. Towards Global Histories. Studies in Honour of Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, edited by Marcel van der Linden and Prabhu P. Mohapatra, 295–318. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2009.
‘Chargola Exodus and Collective Action in the Colonial Tea Plantations of Assam’. Sephis [= Special Issue on Labour in Memory of Late Rajnarayan Chandavarkar] 3, no. 2 (2007).
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Dr. Aslı Vatansever
Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Germany
(October - December 2020)
Precarious Trajectories. Early-Career and Mid-Level Researchers Between Resistance and Compliance
Aslı Vatansever (PhD, University of Hamburg, 2010) is a sociologist of work with a focus on precarious academic labor. Currently, she is visiting fellow/ research associate at the re:work Institute of the Humboldt University, Berlin. Her books include Ursprünge des Islamismus im Osmanischen Reich. Eine weltsystemanalytische Perspektive (Sources of Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, Dr. Kovac Verlag: 2010), Ne Ders Olsa Veririz. Akademisyenin Vasıfsız İşçiye Dönüşümü (Ready to Teach Anything. The Transformation of the Academic into Unskilled Worker, Iletisim: 2015 – co-authored), and At the Margins of Academia. Exile, Precariousness, and Subjectivity (Brill: 2020, forthcoming).
While at re:work Vatansever will be working on a project entitled ‘Precarious Trajectories. Early-Career and Mid-Level Researchers Between Resistance and Compliance’. The immense teaching load, the constant ‘publish-or-perish’ pressure and the inherent vulnerability of fixed term employment status make resistance a risky and time-consuming endeavor for precarious researchers. Trapped in a forcibly prolonged “junior researcher” status, non-tenured academics usually find themselves struggling to resist precarization, while, in the meantime, trying to “play by the rules” in order to advance in their career. In view of the experiences of the academic precariat organizing around initiatives like Mittelbau and Netzwerk für Gute Arbeit in der Wissenschaft (Network for Decent Work in Academia) this project will address the following questions: Under what circumstances do the participants of anti-precarity initiatives manage to sustain resistance in the face of precarious working conditions and forced mobility? How do they cope with the material and emotional challenges of job insecurity? What are the perceived and experienced risks of active resistance with regard to the career advancement?
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: March 25, 2021
Miloš Vojinović
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
(January - June 2020)
Science for Statecraft: the British Empire and New Sciences 1890-1920
mvojin222@gmail.com
Miloš Vojinović studied history at the University of Belgrade, and he worked at the Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences. His first book Political Ideas of Young Bosnia examines the emergence of the radical anarchist and nationalist student movement known as Young Bosnia on the eve of the Great War. In 2017 Miloš moved to Berlin where he was a fellow of the Global Intellectual History Graduate School. Miloš was awarded with a research scholarship by the German Historical Institute in London, he was a research visitor at the Centre for History and Economic in Cambridge and visiting scholar at the Department of History of Princeton University.
He submitted his PhD thesis “Science for Statecraft: the British Empire and New Sciences 1890-1920” in December 2020. In his dissertation he follows how the emergence of the four new fields of human sciences (geography, imperial history, economic history and international relations) was caused and shaped by the imperialist project to unite various parts of the British Empire into a single political entity. He analyses how the knowledge production was moulded by the goals of the disciplinary pioneers - namely, by their hope to use education to pacify anti-imperialist attitudes of working classes and to disseminate conviction about the malevolent nature of the Empire. During his stay at re:work, Miloš Vojinović is working on a book project related to his dissertation.
Publications
“1918 and a Hundred Years of Habsburg and Yugoslav Historiography”. Slavic Review 78, no. 4 (2019).
“Young Bosnia and the Sarajevo Assassination in the Context of 19th Century European Revolutionary Traditions”. In Polemos kai Epanastasi sta Othomanika Balkania, edited by Dimitrios Stamatopoulos. Athens 2019. (in Greek)
“Political Ideas of Young Bosnia: Between Anarchism, Socialism and Nationalism”. In Südosteuropa - Jahrbuch Band 42 - Der Erste Weltkrieg auf dem Balkan: Ereignis, Erfahrung und Erinnerung, edited by W. Höpken, W. van Meurs. Frankfurt am Main: 2018.
Political Ideas of Young Bosnia. 2015.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Dr. Hadas Weiss
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
(October 2020 - September 2022)
Financialized Adulthood in Germany
Hadas Weiss (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2009) is an anthropologist of contemporary capitalism with a focus on financialization, social reproduction, ideology and the life course. She has conducted fieldwork in Israel, Spain and Germany. Before joining Humboldt University’s Center for Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History, she has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, at the Central European University Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest, at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, and at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study.
While at re:work, she will be working on a DFG-funded project titled “Financialized Adulthood in Germany.” It tackles the mismatch between the normative organization of the life course and contemporary lives in Germany where it is most conspicuous: in the tensions surrounding adulthood. Prolonged adolescence and concerns about aging cast doubt on the erstwhile view of adulthood as life’s pinnacle and on the values traditionally associated with it like commitment, responsibility and hard work. The project aims to make sense of this through the lens of financialization: tracing guiding notions about one’s role in society as an adult to the saving, investing and insurance practices in which they are anchored, as encouraging specific ways of placing one’s money in circulation.
Last updated: March 25, 2021
Maurice Weiss
Ostkreuz - Agentur der Fotografen
(September - December 2020)
In today's world, basically everybody is a photographer or at least, everybody has access to camera equipment; but not everybody has the eye and the intuition to know in an instant what’s worth photographing. Photographer Maurice Weiss (*1964 in Perpignan) knows when to trigger his camera; he prefers to wait just a split second longer than you would expect him to, even if thousands of people swarm around him, waving banners, laughing, partying or demonstrating.
The native Frenchman has proven his exceptional photographic eye for the first time on German soil on November 9th, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Back then he documented in a dynamic style the historical scenes that took place on both sides of the wall and by that, he caught one of the most memorable events of modern European history on film.
After the wall had come down, he didn’t rest either but followed and documented the political development in Berlin up to the German reunification and further. Back in those days he deeply connected with the German capital and its political stage and today he photographs in the Bundestag, the national parliament, almost on a weekly basis. He jumps from one job to another, from France to Italy via Algeria and Bulgaria. Surprisingly he still finds the time to follow his personal artistic projects. In Fall 2011, he went on a roadtrip from Marokko by Libia to Egypt in order to capture his view of the Arabic revolution. When it comes to portrait and documentary photography for media, Maurice Weiss is in great demand, taking assignments regularly from Der Spiegel, Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Amnesty Journal and Die Zeit among others. He works and lives in Berlin.
Last updated: March 25, 2021