19-20 January 2023
Bonn, Germany

Deadline for Abstracts: 15 November 2022

The WORCK Working Group 2 began with the ambition to study work-related coercion in designated worksites, seen as loosely defined spatial entities. These sites were related to wider spatially and institutionally defined settings (fields). Whereas the exploration of the spatial aspect of this undertaking has progressed smoothly, particularly through a collaboration with Working Group 3, one crucial aspect remains to be tackled, and that is the matter of temporality and historical change. This aspect was also highlighted at last year’s WORCK conference in Vienna; it is time to reinstate the question of historical change, and causes for chance in relationship to coercion within worksites.

We suggest that a good starting point for an analysis of the temporality of coercion would be the study of historical change on sites and fields. We need to start asking questions on why and how coercive practices change across time within specific sites. Under which circumstances did the interactions of actors (conflicts, negotiations, collaborations) within given sites produce change at the everyday level. Moreover, we can interrogate how far change emerges from social processes that take place within or beyond the site (i.e. how larger historical events impact on the site, but also how trans-local change produces larger societal changes at the legal, political, economic and cultural levels).

We want to initiate a discussion about historical change from the bottom up. What are the processes that we can detect in our studies of specific and  connected worksites, which change over time? In connection to the overall aim of WORCK, we welcome contributions from all parts of the globe, and dealing with periods from the antiquity to the present, in order to generate a more nuanced picture of historical change. We encourage papers with an empirical foundation.

At the crossroads of these different perspectives, we would like to invite proposals for papers to a two-day workshop, Coercion, worksites and historical change, organised by WORCK Working Group 2, in Bonn 19-20 January 2023. The workshop is open to all members of WORCK, as a forum where we can start discussing the question of the temporality of coercion.

We aim to begin the workshop with a keynote discussing historical change from a theoretical perspective and concluding with a roundtable discussion addressing the main issue of the workshop, coercion, worksites and historical change or the nexus time/space in a diachronic perspective
To this end, we invite abstracts of 500 words, and a very short CV.

Send it to goran.ryden@ibf.uu.se, no later than 15 November 2022.

Organisers: Christian De Vito, Nico Pizzolato, Göran Rydén and Amal Shahid

Find the CfP as a PDF-File here.