[Reader-list] VIIIth International Conference of Labour History

[Jeebesh]

Call for Papers
VIIIth International Conference of Labour History

March 18-20, 2010 Delhi India.

The Association of Indian Labour Historians (AILH) in collaboration  
with the VVGiri National Labour Institute( VVGNLI)  is organizing the   
8th International Conference to be held at Delhi on March 18-20 2010 .  
We invite proposals for paper presentation at the conference from  
historians, social scientists, labour activists and organizations on  
the themes outlined below.



LABOUR HISTORY: EXPANDING THE FRONTIERS


For more than a decade historians in India and outside have been  
questioning the framing assumptions of labour history and re-drawing  
its boundaries –temporal, spatial, sectoral. What we see in recent  
years is a stretching of frontiers and a blurring of lines that  
separated the rural and the urban, the formal and the informal, the  
organized and the unorganized, the free and the unfree, the modern and  
the pre-modern, the public and private, the local and the global.


What does this stretching of boundaries mean for the writing of labour  
history? How do these shifts in perspective unsettle terms and  
categories with which historians operated? The issue for us today is  
not just the inclusion of groups considered marginal, residual but of  
foregrounding and centering what lay on the margins of labour  
history.  Most histories of labour operated with an assumption of a  
homogenous spatial division of environment of work such as the  
division between the rural/urban or domestic/ factory. Movement was  
assumed to be from one pole to the other. This homogenous division or  
unilinear movement can no longer be sustained. There is a need to  
develop frameworks with which to grapple with the idea of the radical  
heterogeneity of the category of labour.


In the present context of globalisation and liberalization, spatial  
inequalities between and within nations have intensified. New spaces  
of labour, such as Special Economic Zones, Free Trade Zones have been  
produced and familiar places of labour such as the neighbourhoods  
(hatas chawls , bustees and kampongs ) and factories have been  
restructured. How do we then conceptualise labouring spaces that are  
heterogenous? How do we take into account the mutually constitutive  
ways in which labouring forms interact with different spatial  
environments? We invite scholars to rethink and reformulate spatial  
histories of labour focusing simultaneously on the production of  
spaces by labouring activities and also on the ways in which different  
spatial organizations shape labour forms.

This conference proposes the need to study the multiple linkages  
between forms of labour, labouring identities and labouring spaces.  
The reconceptualisation of heterogenous labour necessitates drawing on  
conceptual resources of other fields of research: on space and  
geography, on forests and agriculture, on transport and  
communications, on crime, law and war, on migration, disease and  
medicine and many other histories and see them in their inter- 
connection with histories of labour. We specially invite social  
scientists of other disciplines to engage with the questions raised by  
histories of labour. The conference aims to link together histories of  
the present and the past by inviting scholars, researchers and  
activists, engaging with contemporary scenarios and those studying the  
many pasts of labour in a common platform. We would like contributions  
from different regional and national contexts to develop a comparative  
and trans-national perspective.


The conference will be organized around two main rubrics:

1. Spatial histories of labour : Although notions of space have been   
implicitly a part of histories of labour, yet there is need to push  
and explore how labour is involved in the production of specific kinds  
of spaces and how spaces impact on labor. Possible lines of inquiry  
that can be developed are:

·      labouring lives and the production of urban space

·      spaces of leisure and sociability

·      Spaces of Resistance

·      Infra-structure, public works and the creation of new spatial  
grids

·      The workshop, the factory and the domestic as spaces of work

·      Law regulation and the constitution of spaces.

·      Movement and  migration

1.     Linked histories: Labour needs to be seen in terms of its  
connections with other histories. It will be important to see how  
scholars working on caste, race, gender, environment, rural society,  
forests, tribals, crime and punishment, cinema and representation, and  
other areas look at their work through the prism of labour and  
labouring identities. Some themes that can be discussed at the  
conference are:

Labouring lives and dalit histories

Race ethnicity and labour

Crime criminality and labouring classes

Visualising work, representing labour: art, cinema and histories of  
labour

Labour, capital and tribal lives

Ecological regimes and labouring lives

Masculinity femininity and labouring identities

Labour movement and social movements


Submission schedule and other information


Abstracts of the papers and panels proposed should reach us by  
November 15. We will inform selected participants by November 22.  
Those who wish to set up panels should contact us immediately in the  
next two weeks so that the schedule can be made out.

We will take care of board and lodging for all participants for the  
duration of the conference.

Our financial resources will allow us to pay the invited participants  
2nd class A/C rail fare from any part of India. We regret, that the  
AILH will not be able to fund international travel. We will however  
strongly support applications of international participants for travel  
funding to their respective institutions or other funding agencies


Important Dates:
November 15- Panel and Paper abstracts
November 22- Final Selection of Papers and Panels
February 18-    Final Submission of Papers.

  Abstracts and papers should be submitted electronically

to  ailhconference at gmail.com


For panels and other information contact

Prabhu Mohapatra (prabhuayan at gmail.com )

Chitra Joshi( chitrajos at gmail.com)



About the AILH

The AILH is an association of historians, social scientists, labour  
rights activists and organizations founded in 1996 December to promote  
scholarly studies of labour. The Association has since 1998 held seven  
International Conferences on labour history on various themes. Two  
major collections of essays based on recent conferences have been  
published ( Labour Matters: Towards Global Histories, Tulika Books,  
New Delhi 2009, and India’s Labouring Poor, Foundation Books, New  
Delhi 2005). The Association in collaboration with the VV Giri  
National Labour Institute, NOIDA has also set up an Archives of Indian  
Labour, the largest online depository of labour related documents and  
other resources. The archives  can be accessed at www.indialabourarchives.org 
.  For further information on the Association and the VVGNLI see www.vvgnli.org 
.