Extended deadline: 1 March 2021

Guest editors: Natalia Jarska (Warsaw, Poland) and Hanne Østhus (Bonn, Germany)

A recent intervention from labour history has pointed out how “the persistence and transformation of coercion across world empires, gender regimes, and historical eras” run counter to the classic narratives of a development from unfree to free labour within the emergence of a modern or modernised world. Instead, the authors propose a radically different approach wherein research “links the stories of work and production with those of violence, expropriation, marginalization, and criminalization.” (De Vito, Schiel & Van Rossum 2020: 2)

This special issue addresses this intervention from the particular approach of intersectionality, and aims to demonstrate how the intersectional approach offers unique insights into this topic. We will achieve this through explorations of how markers such as gender, age, legal status, class, race, religion or sexual orientation shape and are shaped by systems and practices of coercion, bondage and marginalisation and systems and practices of labour and production.

Feminist and gender studies scholars’ exploration of how gendered relations and configurations of power shaped past and present societies is an important starting point when investigating bondage, coercion, marginalisation and violence. Moreover, scholars within this field have re-evaluated the concept of work. The concept no longer excludes work that happened in the household or reproductive labour. Moreover, this re-evaluation undermined the binary between productive and unproductive work posited by economists since the eighteenth century, and it challenged divisions between public and private spheres, where what happened in private was seen as outside the realms of economy and therefore not considered work. Moreover, the gendered perspective has been crucial in disbanding the idea of an evolution from bonded to free wage labour beginning with the Industrial Revolution.

This assessment has been reinforced by recent developments within global labour history, which have also demonstrated that there was and is no unambiguous shift from unfree to free labour that followed a scheme(s) of “modernisation”. Such research has emphasized how “free” and “unfree” forms of labour relations co-exist and even re-enforce each other. Scholars within global labour history have sought to bring together various forms of bondage such as serfdom, slavery, convict labour and/or tributary labour, but also to underscore the importance of context and peculiarities of time and space. Research on bonded and coerced labour has therefore revealed and sought out connections and links between regions and areas and attempted to overcome Eurocentric ideas of labour. It has,
however, rarely used insights from intersectionality or feminist studies in its analysis.

This Special Issue seeks to remedy this. It combines insights from global labour history with feminist studies and gender history, arguing that connecting these different historiographies will bring new insights. It also contends that the best way to do so is through the intersectional approach.

We welcome contributions from various periods and geographical areas, as well as papers addressing different form of labour and production. We believe that this broad approach to the study of intersectionality and coerced labour will uncover new and interesting patterns, practices and experiences of coercion. Therefore, this Special Issue will help incorporate intersectionality into the major discussion on labour and coercion. We are open to diverse methodological perspectives on intersectionality, and to both empirical and theoretical papers. In order to overcome the entrapping of the historical framework of a transition from unfree to free labour or from pre-capitalist to capitalist societies, we seek research on both historical and contemporary societies.

The papers can employ a variety of social markers and categories, for example, but not limited to, sex, gender, age, legal status, class, race, religion and/or sexual orientation. The papers should explicitly make clear which categories  are chosen and why. We argue that making the theoretical underpinnings explicit will lead to a better understanding of how coercion and marginalisation has operated across time and space.

The Special Issue is a result of the international COST Action “Worlds of Related Coercions in Work” (WORCK), funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union, specifically Working Group 4 “Intersecting Marginalities”. WORCK unites over 150 researchers from various countries interested in exploring ways that acts of bigotry and persecution based on different social markers interrelate to create a system of asymmetrical dependencies and discriminations. It analyses systemic injustice, social inequalities and coercive mechanisms at work in new ways, with a focus on the interrelations between power structures and individual agency. However, we also encourage people who are not members of WORCK to contribute to the Special Issue.

If you are interested in contributing, please send a title and a up to 500-word abstract to
Natalia Jarska (njarska@ihpan.edu.pl) or Hanne Østhus (hosthus@uni-bonn.de) by 1 March
2021.

You can find the full CfP as a PDF-File here.