Laura Plochberger studied BA Cultural and Social Anthropology in Vienna and MA International Development at the Universities of Vienna and Duke University, USA. Laura is a PhD candidate in the doc.funds project  “The Dynamics of Change and Logics of Transformation: State, Society, and Economy at Critical Junctures”. She received the 1000 Jahre Niederösterreich Stipend issued by the State of Lower Austria as well as the Arbeiterkammer Oberösterreich Science Award 2023.

Research interests:

• History of Austrian Imperialism
• Decoloniality
• History of Forestry
• Workers Histories
• Catholicism and Empire

Project: 

Of Spruce and Men: Woodworkers' labor organizing in the Romanian Bucovina at the End of the Habsburg Empire

My dissertation explores the impact of the end of the Habsburg Empire on the wood-producing sector in Bucovina in the period 1896–1940, a key sector for the region. Works have emphasized the essential role of the wood-producing industry in the formation of national states in CEE (Bemmann 2024). This impact goes beyond descriptions of the wood-producing businesses in Bucovina as extractive peripheries of the
Austrian-Hungarian empire (Daheur 2024). The impact of the wood-producing sector is explored from a labor studies point of view, centering people employed in the wood-producing industry. Specifically, I look at precarity in labor conditions. I ask how descriptions of precarity, as well as their contestation, change connected to the socio-economic transformations in the wood-producing sector in the period. I define precarity as a mode of governance, that is not a fallout from the norm of secure employment but much rather, a necessary condition for the re-production of Capitalism (Millar 2017). In the context of precarity of workers in the wood-producing sector, I am especially interested in coercion in the labor relations, as well as the role of women and children.

Bemmann, Martin (2024): Wood-based Businesses and the Economic Development of Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries – An Introduction. In Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History
Yearbook 65 (2), pp. 279–305. DOI: 10.1515/jbwg-2024-0015.

Daheur, Jawad (2024): Cheap Labour on the Timber Frontier : Migration of Forestry Workers from Austria- Hungary to Southeast Europe, ca. 1880–1914. In Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History
Yearbook 65 (2), pp. 307–341.

Millar, Kathleen M. (2017): Toward a critical politics of precarity. In Sociology Compass 11 (6), Article e12483. DOI: 10.1111/soc4.12483.

Publications: (forthcoming)

Plochberger, Laura (2024) Die Fichten von Unten sehen: Ökologische Geschichte im Schatten der Westlichen Moderne. In: Arbeiterkammer Oberösterreich: Zeitschrift WISO 3/4 2024

Plochberger, Laura/ Fahrwald, Dorothea (2024) ‘Nehmen Sie Platz?’ Reflexionen über intergenerationellen, interkulturellen Dialog am Beispiel des Begegnungsprojekts ‘Auf dem Diwan’. In: Reiss, Wolfram/ Kozmann, Verena (Hg.) Interkulturelle und Interreligiöse Begegnung - Grundlage für religionswissenschaftliche und berufliche Expertise? Sammelband. Verlag tba.