Frontline and Essential Workers Face the Beast exhibit is currently on view at the American Labor Museum.  The exhibit features original paintings of frontline workers by New York contemporary artist Steve Derrick.  Mr. Derrick used photos of frontline workers posted on social media to paint portraits.  He sent the completed paintings to the workers he portrayed as a way to thank them for their labor during these trying times.

Millions of men and women worldwide are part of the essential workforce on the frontlines of the Covid19 pandemic.

The recent revival of Marx scholarship has shown his relevance to urgent present-day issues. It has sometimes been forgotten that in order to fully appreciate his work, we need to know how it related to issues and movements in his own time. Therefore, Nineteenth Century Prose invites papers for a special issue on Karl Marx in his own times. Contributions can attend to social conditions, movements, persons, texts, cultural and political events that made an impression upon him, as well as his impact on others. The deadline is 31 October 2021.

Le travail est une de ces notions problématiques qui ne se laissent pas aborder au travers d'une définition qui fait consensus. Son contenu et son sens varient selon les époques et les cultures (Mercure et Spurk, 2019). À la question qu’est-ce que le travail, les sciences sociales proposent différentes réponses. Pour certains, c’est un phénomène anthropologique propre à l’être humain dans son rapport avec la nature. Karl Marx (1867) par exemple définit le travail comme un processus dans lequel l’être humain, par une action physique, transforme la nature en quelque chose qui lui est utile.

The integral contribution of mobile, migrant and transient workers to the development of early and late-modern European agriculture, industry and commerce has been increasingly recognized by labour and migration historians alike. While scholars of these fields have traditionally focused on the young migrant male and the industrial labourer, the diversity of itinerant workers has since the 1970s been underlined, as well as the complexity of transnational, regional and local moves.

A virtual workshop for graduate students organised by the Oxford University Labour History Group
25-26 May 2021

Call for Papers