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
Alexandra Ghiţ's 'Welfare Work Without Welfare' (De Gruyter, 2025) 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". The book offers a novel interpretation of state-society relations after the First World War, showing that unpaid labor and gender relations were crucial in responding to economic crisis in an Eastern European urban setting and beyond. 'Welfare Work Without Welfare' contributes to the historicization of social reproduction work and the rethinking of the history of welfare states. Following a brief introduction by the author and a commentary by Manca G. Renko, there will be a panel discussion with Alexandra Ghiţ and Manca G. Renko moderated by Johanna Gehmacher.
Alexandra Ghiț is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leibniz Center for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) Leipzig. She is the author of the monograph Welfare Work without Welfare: Women and Austerity in Interwar Bucharest (De Gruyter, 2025) and one of the ten co-authors of the major monograph Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond: A New Transnational History (UCL Press, 2025), among others. Currently, she is working on gendered postwar reconstruction before the Cold War (1944–1948), in Romania placed in transnational perspective. Her other research interests include women’s political thought in Romania and Moldova across the 20th century, and international trade union cooperation in the 1990s.
Johanna Gehmacher is a.-o. Professor of History at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. Her research focusses on women’s and gender history, transnational history and the history and theory of biography. Her most recent book publication is Feminist Activism, Travel and Translation Around 1900: Transnational Practices of Mediation and the Case of Käthe Schirmacher (Palgrave MacMillan 2024). Johanna Gehmacher is also a member of the editorial board of the journal Oesterreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften.
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.
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In cooperation with F*GG Lab.
