The biennial conference of the European Labour History Network (ELHN) once again attracted a large number of researchers from all corners of Europe, as well as from the US, Latin America, Africa, and India. In Uppsala, there were nearly 250 registrations, approximately 50 of which were online. There were 236 presentations in 72 sessions spread over three days of the conference.
The ELHN conference is thus one of the largest academic events worldwide in labor and social history. The conference is held biennially, alternating with the larger (and related) European Social Science History Conference. This is already the fifth conference, following editions in Turin (2015), Paris (2017), Amsterdam (2019), and Vienna (2021).
The conference's content reflects the research conducted in the network's twenty working groups, including those on Economic and Industrial Democracy, Memory and Deindustrialization, Feminist Labor History, Precarious Labor, Labor and Coercion , and so on. We were introduced to innovative approaches such as Historical Semantics of Coercion, The Caribbean: Bedrock of Anti-Imperialism?, Laboring Elderly, Conceptual Debates on Precarity, Recruitment and Refusal in Military Labor, and Women Negotiating Change in Industrial Workplaces .
The conference was organized by our colleagues at the Swedish Labour Movement's Archives and Library (ARBARK in Swedish) in collaboration with Uppsala University. Amsab-ISG has been involved with this research network from its inception, even at its founding meeting in Amsterdam in 2013. Amsab staff member Donald Weber serves on the ELHN board and was also involved in the organization this year.
A special moment during the conference was the screening of the documentary "A Sad Truth " (75 min.), about the deportation camps for refugees established in Denmark since 2015. It features particularly moving testimonies about the desperate situation of refugees in Denmark, who are sometimes told after five years that they are being deported and immediately sent to a closed camp. Director Helle Stenum attended the screening and participated in a discussion afterward. Her previous, multi-award-winning documentary, "We Carry It Within Us: Fragments of a Shared Colonial Past," about Denmark's (post-)colonial history, is available online. Highly recommended!
