Debates in the Histories of Work and Workers

This course examines theoretical and empirical issues in the modern history of labor, conceived on a global scale. The class is organized around the development of major debates, including: skill, deskilling, and the labor process; gender and the labor of social reproduction; the spectrum between free and unfree labor; the science and measurement of work and the conception of the laboring body; race, ethnicity, and migration at work; the meaning and experience of labor in colonial societies; the meaning and experience of labor in socialist societies; and the relationship between labor processes and workers’ ideology and political activity and organization. The class will strike a balance between reading historiographical and theoretical classics and new research that can be put into conversation with those classics.

HIST 64403 | EALC 64403 | CCCT 64403