https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6220-7849
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ABSTRACT
This article deals with the recent developments of labour history in and about the Nordic countries. We identify patterns, problems and possibilities in these recent developments in the field – roughly within the last two decades. Our main source of analysis is the research presented and exchanged in the Nordic labour history journals, the Nordic Labour History Network, the labour history associations, the archives and libraries. We relate current trends to developments in European and Global labour history. We claim that the revival and expansion of Nordic labour history must also be understood through its exchange with labour history outside the Nordic sphere and with other disciplines and research fields. The expansion of the field occurred through increased attention and sensitivity to the specificities of various forms of labour, the lived lives of those who work, the places in which work takes place, the various ways in which workers form collective practices and structures, and how they understand themselves in relation to as well as within and outside the parties and institutions that organise and claim to represent workers and labour interests.
Acknowledgments
This article is originally written at the invitation of the general editor of the Scandinavian Economic History Review. It has been elaborated through a collective writing process along with online meetings as well as previous encounters in the spaces of the Nordic, European, and Global Labour History Networks. It is the product, not least, of the exchanges that have happened in the two latest Nordic Labour History Conferences in Reykjavik in 2016 and Copenhagen in 2022. During the latter, we also held a plenary session presenting to our colleagues our preliminary ideas on the outline, purpose, and scope of the article and inviting their reflections and comments. We are grateful for the contributions and the discussions with our colleagues in these networks.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For the conferences see http://www.nordiclabourhistory.org/ latest accessed 28 June 2022
2 The list of prizes can be found here: https://sfah.dk/aktuelt/arbejderhistorieprisen/tidligere-prismodtagere/ (last accessed October 20, 2022)
3 The Finnish title was originally translated in English as the Finnish Society for Labour History and Cultural Traditions, but it was later the Society’s website assumed the shorter version of the name.
4 https://research.abo.fi/en/projects/kommunicerande-konsumtion-kringvandrande-f%C3%B6rs%C3%A4ljare-och-kulturm%C3%B6t (last accessed June 8, 2022)
5 (https://research.tuni.fi/hex/). The history of experiences was scrutinized widely by labour history-oriented scholars years before the academy project started. For example, Eerika Koskinen-Koivisto’s dissertation (2013) examines female labourers’ experiences related to work, class, and gender. The dissertation concentrates on Koskinen-Koivisto’s grandmother and the narrated oral history of her life story.
6 “Centre for the Study of the Literatures and Cultures of Slavery”, Aarhus University; «In the Same Sea”, ERC-funded project led by Gunvor Simonsen, University of Copenhagen (not only on but including slavery); the five-book project on Denmark and the colonies, Gad forlag 2017.
7 https://fireburnfiles.dk/ (last accessed June 8, 2022). See also the documentary We Carry It Within Us - fragments of a shared colonial past by Helle Stenum: https://wecarryitwithinus.com/home/
8 “For general information, see the websites of the respective projects. G&W: https://gaw.hist.uu.se/vad-ar-gaw/. LUMEN: https://lumen.au.dk. The pillars of rural society: https://1703.hi.is/en/278-2/ (Accessed 20 April 2022).
9 There was quite a substantial literature on this from the 1980s and 1990s, see, among others, Dybdahl, Citation1982-Citation84; Edgren, Citation1987; Lindström, Citation1991. For a more recent contribution, see Bloch Ravn, Citation2008.
10 Malin Nilsson and Carolina Uppenberg’s projects on crofters, “Hushåll i arbete. Genus, arbetsorganisation och ekonomisk omvandling studerat genom 1800- talets torparhushåll”, Lund University, and the previously mentioned Icelandic project, The Pillars of Rural Society.
11 See much of the recent work of Johan Heinsen, for example the on the use of CATMA “Grammars of Coercion Towards a cross-corpora annotation model”, with Juliane Schiel and Claude Chevaleyre, Working paper, WORCK (accessed 19 April 2022).
13 Most notably, the Nordic Labour History Conference, the European Labour History Network (ELHN) and the ERC-funded COST Action “Worlds of Related Coercions in Work” (WORCK).