Events

In Europe, discussions about China often revolve around state power, geopolitical rivalry, and economic strength. But who built China’s rise? Drawing on the concept of infrastructural power of labor, hundreds of millions of Chinese workers whose labour has powered one of the most profound economic transformations of our time.

Focusing on the kiosks that rapidly appeared along the Albanian coast in the 1990s and early 2000s, the seminar examines these structures not merely as marginal or temporary architectural objects, but as socially embedded environments.

We are all familiar with the story of political transformation, serial regime change and the remaking of East Central Europe in 1989, with repercussions far beyond the region. The events of that year saw at once the acceleration of history and the supposed end of it, depending on one's perspective. This seminar seeks to revisit how participants at the time -…

We work because we have to, but also because we like to: from hunting-gathering starting 700,000 years ago to the present era of zoom meetings, humans have always worked to make the world around them serve their needs. But we do not work alone, any work is co-operative, and this asks for organization: who is doing what, and under which conditions?

This roundtable will explore the intersections of care work, informal labor, and labor migration in East-Central Europe. Drawing on both academic research and practitioners' perspectives, we will analyze how crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic have exposed and intensified existing vulnerabilities, while also generating new forms of collective response and…

Long before taxi drivers shut down city center streets to protest ride-sharing apps, rewards were being offered to catch those textile workers who, in the Luddite protests, "wantonly and feloniously" smashed the knitting frames they held responsible for their impoverishment. In our roundtable, we consider these and other ways in which people have…

Das Jahr 2026 markiert den sechzigsten Jahrestag des Anwerbeabkommens Österreichs mit Jugoslawien. Das Podium bringt zu diesem Anlass Künstler:innen und Aktivist:innen zusammen, die sich in ihrer Arbeit für die Sichtbarkeit und Anerkennung der Gastarbeiter:innen und ihrer Nachfolgegenerationen einsetzen. Während die Leistung der ersten Generation nach wie…

In the Anthropocene era, extractivism has become a central concept for analyzing the global economy and ecology. Countries in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe that previously pursued endogenous industrialization now increasingly reorient toward primary commodity exports. This transformation is driven by the expansion of demand for raw materials, the…

Gender and labor structured modernity and underpin our current, post-modern, late capitalist age. What are new ways of understanding what gender does to work and what work does to gender? What transformative potential do gender and work hold in an age of simultaneous crises?

Labor history has undergone profound renewal over the past two decades, expanding beyond its traditional focus on industrial workers and trade unions to encompass global, gendered and non-waged forms of work across time and space. This roundtable brings together historians working at the cutting edge of the field. We discuss labor history's new directions:…

Alexandra Ghiţ's 'Welfare Work Without Welfare' argues that women activists, workers, and homemakers in the Romanian capital Bucharest ensured others’ well-being in the interwar period through their "austerity welfare work".