WORCK Conference 2 / ELHN Conference 4: Historicising the Concept of Europe in Global History

The conference is a joint event of the COST Action “Worlds of Related Coercions in Work” (WORCK) and the “European Labour History Network” (ELHN).

Thanks to this cooperation, the conference offers a rich five-day programme of plenary events and parallel sessions, organised either by the ELHN or the WORCK network.

The first three days (30 August to 1 September 2021) are dedicated to the activities and individual projects of the working groups of both networks, framed by a joint opening event, a keynote lecture and a roundtable discussion organised by the ELHN, as well as an exhibition on labour and coercion, and a film screening and roundtable discussion organised by the WORCK network.

The last one and a half days (2 to 3 September 2021) are devoted to a specific topic of the WORCK network: Under the title “Historicising the Concept of Europe in Global History”, the WORCK network invites for a conceptual discussion on the place of Europe in global labour history. Over the last three decades, global history has fostered a number of key contributions to the ongoing rethinking of the temporal and spatial constructs foundational to historical writing. These debates have led to a widening of horizons and have opened up new research agendas, in labour history as well as in social history in general. Today, it is no longer feasible to write the history of the world as a history of European expansion. And the history of work can no longer be framed as the history of supposedly Western models and their contribution to modernity. Yet, global history has only rarely confronted the highly unstable historical construct called “Europe”. Therefore, these last one and a half conference days are dedicated to the need to historicise Europe as a conceptual frame in global history and will discuss social inequalities in Europe – both in the past and the present. The respective discussions will be led by invited experts on the basis of a joint reader.

The conference is carried out as a hybrid event.

On-site participants meet at the venue in the city centre of Vienna. All lecture halls and seminar rooms for the plenary and parallel sessions are situated at the university campus.

Online participants connect to the conference via Zoom. Several virtual tools (i.e. virtual tea kitchen, brainstorming board etc.) will help online participants to connect and exchange across and between the sessions.

The conference is composed of

• plenary sessions (highlighted in green) taking place in the lecture hall C2 of the conference venue in a professional hybrid setting,
• parallel paper sessions, working group meetings and writers’ workshops (highlighted in red) take place in one of the other lecture halls or seminar rooms of the university campus. Most conference rooms are technically equipped for hybrid settings, while some remaining sessions will take place entirely via Zoom,
• an on-site exhibition at the venue.

While most of the panels will take place in hybrid modus, onsite participants are nonetheless required to bring their own computer and headset to the conference venue. All registered conference participants will receive a password-protected link to the conference website with all access details via email shortly before the start of the event. In addition, on-site participants will also receive a printed conference programme together with their conference materials.

The full conference programme and the paper abstracts can be downloaded here:

Programme [PDF]

Abstracts [PDF]

WORCK Conference Reader_Historicising Europe in Global History [PDF]

Exhibition Booklet [PDF] 

The link to access the virtual elements of the conference is sent via email to registered participants. As outlined above, also on-site participants will have to access some parts of the programme via this link.