Location: Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói-Brazil
Date: 3 – 6 December 2023
Subject: Service – Servility – Servitude
Submit paper proposals by: 15 July 2023
Labour history has long been framed through the ‘free/unfree’ divide. Moreover, slavery, wage labour, indentured work and convict labour, as well as other labour relations, have traditionally been studied in isolation from each other. In the last decades, however, labour historians have highlighted the need to move beyond the ‘free/unfree’ divide (van der Linden and Brass, 1997; van der Linden, 2008), expanded the range of labour relations under study, and insisted on the relevance of a processual perspective (De Vito, Schiel and van Rossum, 2020; Schiel and Heinsen, forthcoming). Especially the latter approach highlights the complex making of labour coercion, and offers the possibility to rethink key concepts, e.g. the ‘working class’, and periodisations in labour history.
Building on these new insights, the summer school foregrounds the potential of the concepts of ‘service’, ‘servility’ and ‘servitude’ to provide further entry points into this expanded labour history. At the same time, it seeks to uncover the historical importance of service and servile forms of labour that have been marginalized through discourses that focus on ‘free/ unfree’ labour, or have been addressed within isolated fields of research.
We welcome paper proposals:
- focusing on any geographical and chronological context;
- addressing different aspects of the triad ‘service – servility – servitude’;
- exploring aspects like race, gender, sexuality, and even an intersectionality perspective in connection to the applicants’ research themes.
Check out the FULL CALL (PDF).