This event is part of the RECET Festival of Historical and Social Sciences "Transformations of Labor".
Event venue: Campus of the University of Vienna („Altes AKH“), festival tent in Hof 1
Position of the tent: https://goo.gl/maps/8FjYQNtdnaUiKCcs6
Roundtable Discussion with Anna Calori (University of Glasgow), Goran Musić (University of Vienna), Manca G. Renko (University of Vienna) and Johannes Kleinmann (ZZF Potsdam), chaired by Daria Tashkinova (University of Vienna).
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: What methodological and conceptual frameworks are reshaping our understanding of the past right now? What does labor history have to offer for debates about work today?
Anna Calori is a historian whose work focuses on the history of economic cooperation in the Non-Aligned Movement and on the labour history of South-Eastern Europe. She is Lecturer in Contemporary Economic History at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. Before joining Glasgow, she was a Marie-Curie COFUND postdoctoral research fellow at RECET, University of Vienna. Her first monograph, titled “Engineering Global Socialism: Ownership, Non-Alignment and Corporate Culture in a Bosnian company”, has recently come out with Indiana University Press.
Johannes Kleinmann studied history and economics in Freiburg im Breisgau and Mainz. He subsequently earned his doctorate through a joint supervision arrangement at Viadrina University in Frankfurt (Oder) and at RECET in Vienna (under the supervision of Philipp Ther). In April 2026, his dissertation, “Gender and Work in Poland: An Alternative History of Political and Socioeconomic Transformation, 1980–2004,” was published as a book. Johannes Kleinmann is currently a research associate at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam. As part of the “Digital Inequalities” research group, he is investigating within the German context, how work processes have changed in the wake of digital transformation and what social inequalities have accompanied this transformation.
Manca G. Renko is a historian specializing in the intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries. She has worked on several international research projects at the University of Ljubljana, ZRC SAZU, and the University of Vienna, where she is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow leading the project WILA 1919–1991 on women’s intellectual and artistic work in Yugoslavia. Alongside her academic work, Renko is active as an editor and writer focused on literature, theory, and popular culture. She previously directed the Fabula literary festival, edited the magazine Cukr, and co-founded the independent publishing house No!Press. Her 2024 essay collection Animal City received wide critical and public acclaim in Slovenia.
Daria Tashkinova holds a bachelor’s degree in European studies from Ural Federal University and a joint master’s degree in Global History from the Free University of Berlin and Humboldt University of Berlin. During her studies, she served on the editorial board of Global Histories: A Student Journal. After graduating, she spent several years working in German political think tanks, focusing on civil society cooperation and the protection of human rights in Eastern Europe and Russia. She is currently a PhD candidate in the RECET (University of Vienna) doc.funds project "The Dynamics of Change and Logics of Transformation: State, Society and Economy at Critical junctures". Her dissertation focuses on the labour migration and the implementation of the job assignment system in late Soviet Estonia and Latvia.
Goran Musić is a social historian of labor in socialist and post-colonial settings, approaching the field from a broader disciplinary background in Global History, Nationalism Studies, and Political Economy. After earning a PhD degree in History and Civilization from the European University Institute, he held positions at the University of Graz and Central European University. He is the author of Making and Breaking the Yugoslav Working Class: A Story of Two Self-Managed Factories (CEU Press, 2021). His current research advances knowledge about Yugoslavia's 'socialist globalization' through the example of Yugoslav companies in Zambia.
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