The Body and Health in Feminist Labour History
W dniach 14-16 października 2026 r. w IH PAN odbędzie się konferencja pt. The Body and Health in Feminist Labour History. Konferencja jest wpółorganizowana przez Feminist Labour History Working Group (https://socialhistoryportal.org/elhn/wg-feminist) oraz Instytut Historii PAN, Central European University, Uniwersytet w Padwie, University of California w Santa Barbara oraz University of Ioannina.
Organizację konferencji wspiera Polska Akademia Nauk oraz Narodowa Agencja Wymiany Akademickiej.
W imieniu organizatorów serdecznie zapraszamy!
The Body and Health in Feminist Labour History
Warsaw, The Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences
14-16 October 2026
Address: Rynek Starego Miasta 31
Wednesday 14 October 2026
9.00 – 9.15 Registration
9.15-9.30 Introduction
9.30-11.15 Session 1: Labour Productivity and the Body
Chair: Eloisa Betti
Zsófia Anna Veszely “(Re)production, Ageing and the Body in State-Socialist Hungary”
Andrea Ragno „The Female Body at Work between Medical Discourse and Gender Medicine: Menstruation and Productivity in the Italian Context”
Nikos Kastrinakis “Female Workers’ Health, Experiences of Accidents and the Making of the Non-Productive Body in Interwar Greece”
Athena Michalakea “Health, Productivity, and Penal-Welfare Governance: The Body of the Sex Worker in 20th Century Greece”
11.15-11.45 Break
11.45-13.15 Session 2: Gendering Healthcare Workers
Chair: Jaśmina Korczak-Siedlecka
Marek Maj “Midwives’ Letters and Proletarianization in the Free City of Kraków”
Katarzyna Szarla “Occupational Exposure and the Gendered Healthcare Labour during the HIV/AIDS Crisis in Poland, 1980s — 1990s”
Fanni Svégel “Working with Women’s Bodies: Pregnancy as a Terrain of Expertise in Socialist Hungary”
13.15-14.15 Lunch Break
14.15-16.00 Session 3: Gender Violence and Domestic Workers in the Americas
Chair: Agata Błoch
Emily E. LB. Twarog, Elisa Frühauf Garcia “Women Domestic Workers in Brazil and the United States: Gender Violence, Colonial Legacies, and Survivance”
Mariana Sarkis Olson “Domestic Work and Violence on Trial: Ecclesiastical Justice in Colonial Mexico Trial”
Suelen Siqueira Julio “Indigenous Women and the Worlds of Labor: Gender, Race, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro”
Eileen Boris “Dora’s Body”
16.15 – 16.30 Break
16.30 – 17.30 Session 4: Gendering the Working Time
Chair: Susan Zimmermann
Anne-Valérie Zuber “Robots Day and Night, No Thanks! Feminist Mobilisations Against Women’s Night Work in the Swiss Watchmaking Industry (1984–1992)”
María Nieves García-Pintor “The Eight Hours Campaign and the Medicalisation of Women Workers’ Bodies in Spain, 1870–1910”
20.00 Dinner for registered participants
Location: Cafe Kulturalna
Address: Palace of Culture and Science, Pl. Defilad 1, 00-901 Warszawa
Thursday 15 October 2026
9.30-11.15 Session 5: Constructing Gender Difference
Chair: Dobrochna Kałwa
Intaek Hong “The Red Body: Hygienic Womanhood and Constructing Masculine and Feminine Female Workers’ Body in Postcolonial North Korea, 1953-1965”
Xuan Jin “Offshore Risk and Onshore Reproduction: Gendered Bodily Governance in Postwar Taiwan’s Port Society”
Grace Simpson „Anaemic Housewife to Waged Worker: the Female Body in European Mining-Related Publications (1947-75)”
Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska “Reproducing Labor Force: Debating Polish Immigrant Women’s Reproductive Labors in the Turn-of-the-Twentieth Century United States”
11.15-11.45 Break
11.45-13.30 Session 6: Expertise and Governance of Labour
Chair: Barbara Klich-Kluczewska
Mart Chmielewski “Disabled Bodies at Work: The Case of Invalids’ Cooperatives in State Socialist Poland”
Karolina Siewak “Health and Work of Rural Women in Poland in the 1960s and 1970s: Medical and Sociological Perspectives”
Anna Ivanova “Gendered Labour in Soviet Agriculture in the 1970s”
Selin Çağatay “Rethinking the genealogy of ‘reproductive rights’: Gender, labour, and the forgotten actors in family planning education, 1960s-1980s”
13.30-14.30 Lunch Break
14.30-16 Session 7: Workers’ Mobilisations and Activism
Chair: Emily Gioielli
Georgia-Taygeti Katakou “ARMS! SOFT VELVETY READY FOR THE NEXT WASHING UP: Greek feminists and the body as a terrain of protest (1974-1989)”
Judit Acsády “Intersections of Feminist Activism and Early Sociographies about Women Workers’ Conditions in Industry at the Beginning of the 20th Century in Hungary”
Eloisa Betti, Liliosa Azara “Hands off, dear colleague! The “Discovery” of Sexual Harassment in Italian Workplaces in the 1980s”
16.15 – 16.30 Break
16.30 – 18.00 Special Event – Exhibition “The ‘80s Look at Us”
Location: The History Meeting House (Dom Spotkań z Historią)
Address: ul. Karowa 20, 00-324 Warszawa
19.30 Dinner for registered participants
Location: Restauracja Gruzja
Address: ul. Chmielna 5. 00-021 Warszawa
Friday 16 October
9.45 – 11.15 Session 8: Narrating Gendered Experiences of Work
Chair: Mart Chmielewski
Thanasis Betas “Elderly female worker… Frequently absent due to illness. Work, Health, and Gender in the Greek Tobacco Industry, 1945-1980”
Kirill Goriachok “Body and Celluloid: Conditions of Female Labour in Early Soviet Film”
Eszter Varsa “Always on my own: An Intersectional Analysis of Three Peasant Women’s Recollections of their Working Lives in the First Half of the 20th Century in Hungary”
11.15-11.45 Break
11.45-13.15 Session 9: Roundtable „The Body and Health in Feminist Labour History: New Trends in Historiography”
Chair: Natalia Jarska
Speakers: Jan Burek (Warsaw University), Izabela Mrzygłód (GHI/IH PAN, Warsaw), Leda Papastefanaki (Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences)
13.15-14.15 Lunch
Scientific Committee: Eloisa Betti (University of Padova), Eileen Boris (University of California Santa Barbara), Natalia Jarska (Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences), Leda Papastefanaki (Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences), Eszter Varsa (Central European University) and Susan Zimmermann (Central European University)
Organising Committee: Mart Chmielewski, Natalia Jarska
flh.conference.warsaw@gmail.com
Project co-organised by the Polish Academy of Sciences
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