Throughout its history, industry and industrial labor have played various roles in different societies all over the world. They have been and continue to be implicated in the production of value, in political constellations and in individual live making projects. In this exploratory workshop we try to approach the question of which patterns of mobility (spatially and socially) correspond to those different functions of industry and industrial labor. How do people, materials, money, and ideas move in the context of the factory? Which movements are facilitated, and which are blocked? What moves industrial labor?
MECAM WINTER TALK
Fri 12 Nov 2021 | 18:00–19:00
Fri 12 Nov 2021 | 18:00–19:00
Industrial Labor, Inequality and Mobility
Speakers: Görkem Akgöz (re:work / HU Berlin), Christian Strümpell (Hamburg U), Mohamed Slim Ben Youssef (Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain), Goran Musić (U of Vienna), André Weißenfels (FU Berlin / MECAM Fellow 2021)
Online event
Görkem Akgöz is a Gerda Henkel fellow based at re:work – Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History. Her main areas of focus are the histories of labour and political economy, women and gender, and social movements and culture. She is the founder and co-coordinator of the Factory History Working Group of the European Labour History Network.
Christian Strümpell is a research associate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Hamburg University. His research interests cover the anthropology of labor and work, class, caste, and gender, and he has done extensive research on these topics in India and Bangladesh. He has held research positions at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, in Halle, Germany, at Heidelberg University, and at Humboldt University in Berlin. He is co-editor of an edited volume on Industrial Labor and Uneven and Combined Development (coming forward).
Mohamed Slim Ben Youssef is a PhD fellow in Political Sociology at the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC). His research focuses on the mobilization of labor in Tunisia after the revolution in 2010, processes of democratization at the workplace and the simultaneous deterioration of the material reality of workers. He also participates in a collaborative multi-sited research project on Decathlon that is coordinated by the IRMC.
Goran Musić is a fellow at the Research Platform for the Study of Transformations and Eastern Europe, University of Vienna. He is a social historian of labor in East-Central and Southeast Europe, approaching the field from a broader disciplinary background in Global History, Nationalism Studies and Political Economy. His current research project is entitled Sewing the Periphery Together: European Textile Production Subcontracting and the Transformation of Labor in the Balkans and Maghreb
André Weißenfels is a research associate at the Center for North African and Middle Eastern Politics at the Otto-Suhr-Institut, FU Berlin, and a PhD fellow at the Berlin Graduate School for Muslim Cultures and Societies (BGSMCS). His work focuses on the everyday dimension of political economy, postcolonial epistemology, and autonomous practices of self-governance. In his PhD thesis he analyzes how the lives of Tunisian workers are linked to global economic structures and to the post-colonial development policies of the Tunisian state.
The talk will be held virtually via Webex. The working language will be English.
