Newcastle University
Keynote Speakers: Professor Sian Moore, University of Greenwich and Professor Jan Windebank, University of Sheffield
Website: https://womenworkandactivism2018.wordpress.com/
Abstract Submission: Please send to womenworkactivismconference@gmail.com by 31st July 2018
Sponsored by: Labour and Society Research Group, Newcastle University and Gender Research Group, Newcastle University
Work by women: pay deficit; inferior employment status; fewer promotion prospects; less social value; greater precarity; often invisible and unmeasured. All this is true despite decades of legislation surrounding citizenship, human rights and employment rights. This historic problem is one that the post-2008 global crisis has exacerbated through welfare cuts and a neo-liberal and gendered drive on the part of employers to render labour markets more ‘flexible’. However, women have not passively accepted these inequities. From the Bread and Roses strike that inspired International Women’s Day to the Grunwick dispute in the 1970s, women have organised, resisted and challenged unequal treatment, and workplace injustice.
We welcome historical and theoretical investigations of women, work, and activism. Possible topics include – but are not limited to – the following:
Invisibility and visibility of women’s work
Equal pay and gender discrimination in the workplace
Women and workplace protest, organisation, and resistance
Organising women in trade unions: recruitment and union strategies
Emotions of labour and the labour of emotions
Visualising, photographing, and representing women’s work
Women and work in literature
Intersections of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation at work
Homeworking and domestic labour
Women and unfree forms of labour
Sex workers, the law, and resistance
Methodological problems of researching women’s work
Technology and the future of women’s work
Creative industries, new media, and women’s work
This conference will bring together scholars from different disciplines including History, Sociology, Politics, Geography, Economics, Industrial Relations, English & Other Literatures, Business & Management, Gender & LGBT+ Studies, Modern Languages, and Media & Cultural Studies.
Abstracts are invited for individual 20-minute papers, for 3-paper panels, and for roundtables. We also welcome submissions for the postgraduate poster competition. Please submit 250-word abstracts (plus 100-word biography) for each paper or poster. We particularly encourage PGR and ECA colleagues (we hope to secure funding to assist PGRs, please contact the organisers).
Alongside the main program we will be running a postgraduate poster competition sponsored by History Workshop Online. The winning PGR will have the opportunity to publish a contribution, of about 500 words, plus a link to their poster, on History Workshop Online highlighting the interconnections of their work with historical and contemporary radial histories from below. We welcome submissions from PGR students at any stage of their research and in any discipline. Please do not hesitate to get in touch via the conference email address above for further information and for any informal enquiries.