IFRWH (Web) Conference in conjunction with the 23rd International Congress of Historical Sciences and Joint Session IFRWH and ISHA for the Poznan 2020 Conference Engendering the History of Capitalism

Venue: Poznan, Poland
Time: August 2020 (t.b.a.)
Abstract submissions due 2 April 2018

The aim of the 2020 IFRWH-meeting ist to explore gender and women’s history from the multiple vantage points of movement and social movements. The organiszers invite scholars to submit papers, panels and roundtables that engage histories of women and gender in both motion and movements read in a range of different ways. These include but are not limited to the following:

• Women and Gender in Motion. What happens to gender and to women when they travel? What are the gendered histories of the major movements, both involuntary and voluntary, that have marked the Early Modern and Modern worlds, including Transatlantic slavery, settler colonialism, mass migration, indenture, and refugee displacement? How does our analyses of women and gender change when we put these different forms of motion at the centre of our analyses?
• Women and Gender in Movements. In the past few years women have taken the frontlines of movements like Idle No More and Black Lives Matter, they have posted with the hashtag #MeToo, marched on Washington D.C., and protested dress codes in Iran. How do these histories prompt us to re-examine the history of women and gender in social movements in the past? How has gender shaped the histories of a wide range of social movements, including but not defined to abolitionism, the labour movement, feminism, civil rights/anti-racism, environmentalism, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered/two-spirited rights, anti-colonialism movements, internationalism, and peace?
• Women’s and Gender History in Motion. How and why have the practice of women’s and gender history changed? What are the analytics, theories, and methodologies that are shaped and are reshaping women’s and gender history? How might women’s and gender historians respond to the shifting intellectual, political, and social terrain of our work?

REVISED DEADLINE FOR submitting proposals is 2 April 2018.

Paper proposals: Please submit a one-page abstract with a title, short description of the paper and its relation to the overall theme, plus contact information.

Panel proposals (usually three papers, a commentator and a chair): Please include a proposed title, a short description of the panel’s theme, a short abstract of the proposed papers, and contact information for all participants. Suggestions for commentators and chairs are welcome.

Roundtable Proposals (usually 4-5 shorter presentations and facilitator). Please submit a proposed title, a one paragraph description of the roundtable’s theme, a short description of each speaker’s proposed focus, and a suggested chair/facilitator.

Proposals for papers and panels should be sent to Adele.Perry@Umanitoba.ca.

The IFRWH/FIRHF is an affiliated organization with the ICHS/CISH. Participants in the IFRWH Congress must register centrally for the ICHS/CISH 2020 Congress. The online registration form for the ICHS 2020 can be found at https://ichs2020poznan.pl/en/. All participants need to register through this online form but payment can be made at a later date. If you have any questions about the registration, please contact CongresCISH@gmail.com

For other questions and suggestions, please write to Adele Perry, Vice President, IFRWH/FIRHF, or visit the website at http://www.ifrwh.com/.

CALL FOR PAPERS: JOINT SESSION IFRWH AND ISHA FOR THE POZNAN 2020 CONFERENCE ENGENDERINGTHE HISTORY OF CAPITALISM

Over the last decade, scholars have rediscovered capitalism as economic process, analytic, and historical force. This “new” history of capitalism emerged in response to developments of our time, including neoliberalism and uneven and the unequal globalization and financialization that appeared to have reshaped the world economy. As Jürgen Kocka underscores in Capitalism:The Reemergence of a Historical Concept (2016),the end of the Cold War, the prominence of ideological market liberalism, the Great Recession and growth of capitalist development within all sorts of regimes has sparked renewed interest. We now have robust reconsideration of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the violence of primitive accumulation, and the continuum between free and unfree labor. The significance of banks, risk-taking speculation, and other means of and other means of financing capital have joined studies of labor conflict, commodification, and appropriation of resources. Waged labor no longer seems as central to the definition of capitalism as it once did, though it retains a prominent place in historical scholarship.

While some question whether a “new” history of capitalism is more than a repackaging of business, labor, and economic history, we argue that it has the potential to explain the relationship between regions and sectors as well as between people. Rich research under its rubric, however, too often stands apart from women’s history, the history of sexualities, and gender analysis.
Reproductive labor refers to those activities that make people through the tasks of daily life necessary to develop and sustain labor power. These activities are both material (like feeding), emotional (like love), and assimilative (like transference of norms and values), whether occurring in the family, school, church, workplace, or community. Conflated with the unpaid, usually intimate, duties of mothers, wives, and daughters, reproductive labor, when commodified as employment, rarely has commanded adequate wages or even recognition as work. Women’s responsibility for caring for and maintaining households has justified low pay, irregular working hours, short-term jobs, and exclusion from labor law. But such unwaged, low-waged, or non-waged work has served capitalist economies in multiple ways over time and space.

It is not just that the working (or capitalist) class has two sexes, but that sexual divisions of labor, gender definitions, kinship and family formation, and normative sexuality have shaped even as they have reflected the mode of production. Indeed, reproductive labor stands as part of but also as its own force in the making of capitalist social relations. Reproductive labor refers to those activities that make people through the tasks of daily life necessary to develop and sustain labor power. These activities are both material (like feeding), emotional (like love), and assimilative (like transference of norms and values), whether occurring in the family, school, church, workplace, or community. Conflated with the unpaid, usually intimate, duties of mothers, wives, and daughters, reproductive labor, when commodified as employment, rarely has commanded adequate wages or even recognition as work. Women’s responsibility for caring for and maintaining households has justified low pay, irregular working hours, short-term jobs, and exclusion from labor law. But such unwaged, low-waged, or non-waged work has served capitalist economies in multiple ways over time and space.

For this joint session, we seek papers that intervene in the various debates surrounding the history of capitalism through gender analysis. Papers might be micro or macro, looking inside the firm or shopfloor, the community or family, or global processes. We invite historians of sexualities and gender to consider how their research intersects with the history of capitalism and we ask historians of capitalism to consider the place of gender, sexualities, and reproductive labor in their analysis. The resulting session will thus serve two purposes: first to present new empirical research, whether social, economic, cultural, or intellectual history in orientation; second, to advance the engendering of the history of capitalism and reinforce the materialist (re)turn in the
history of gender and sexuality that is connecting the discursive to social and economic processes.

To be considered, please send short abstract to Eileen Boris, eboris@ucsb.edu, by 2 April 2018.