Doctoral and Postdoctoral Workshop; Univ. of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Department of History, The Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Time: 12.-13.11.2026
Venue: Ljubljana
Proposals by: 15.07.2026
Keynote: Jane Whittle (Univ. of Exeter)
Across past societies, countless individuals lived and worked in the service of others. From the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, domestic servants, agricultural laborers, apprentices, soldiers, clerks, and other dependents occupied positions that were essential to the functioning of households, institutions, and states. Service relationships structured everyday life and social order, shaping hierarchies of authority, gender, age, and status. In many societies, service was a common stage in the life cycle, particularly for young people who entered domestic or agricultural service before marriage, while others spent much of their lives in positions defined by dependence and obligation.
Yet service was rarely a straightforward form of employment. Those who served often occupied ambiguous positions between dependence and autonomy, obligation and contract, belonging and subordination. Service could be embedded in life-cycle labor systems, household hierarchies, patronage networks, and institutional structures ranging from estates and workshops to courts, monasteries, and administrative bureaucracies. In rural societies in particular, forms of labor performed within households and farms – by servants, family members, and especially women – were central to economic and social life. At the same time, such labor did not necessarily constitute »service« in a strict sense. The conference therefore also welcomes contributions that examine how women’s work and family labor intersected with, but were not identical to, relations of service, and how these boundaries were historically constructed and negotiated.
This workshop situates service within the social and economic structures of the Ancien Régime, where relations of dependency, hierarchy, and obligation were central to the organization of work and everyday life. Rather than approaching service merely as a category of labor, we propose it as a broader analytical lens encompassing dependency, discipline, authority, and negotiation. We are particularly interested in … read more and source (Web).
Source: HSozKult (Web)

ifk. Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Kunstuniversität Linz in Wien
Jahrestagung des Österreichischen Netzwerks für Migrationsgeschichte