Why Work? Compulsion, Coercion, and Narratives of Labor

Thomas Adams is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of South Alabama and 2025/26 Faculty Fellow at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University. 

Dr. Jana Tschurenev leads the Research Group “Democratising the Family? Gender equality, parental rights, and child welfare in contemporary global history” (DEMFAM), funded by a Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council (ERC) at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include comparative and international education, the history of women’s professionalism, and the history of public, private and familial care since the 19th century.

Supurna is a feminist academic specializing in sociology and political science. Working as an Assistant Professor at Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, her research focuses on issues of gender, labor, violence, marginalities, and intersectionality. She has published a monograph, edited collections, and articles in peer reviewed journals. She has been part of several national and international research projects and have held research fellowships. She writes nonfiction for children.

I am a Professor at the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa.  My current research focuses on Changing Work at Sea - with an interest in understanding why working conditions in the seafood sector (at sea; in pre-processing work at port) continue to be unacceptable by any terrestrial standards, and considering how welfare organizations are able (or not) to support migrant fish workers on distant water fishing fleets.

Anne Callahan is a PhD student in American Studies at Boston University. She studies representations of work and leisure in 19th century North American media and examines the narratives people created to make sense of rapid industrialization and the emergence of a new class of industrial workers in this period.

I am a doctoral candidate at the CeMIS, Göttingen. My project, entitled The “Mill Girl” Phenomenon Reappears: Young Unmarried Women in the Global Textile and Apparel Industry, is a global historical inquiry which investigates the significance of historically reoccurring forms of patriarchal labor relations for the development of industrial capitalism. This project is funded by Hans Böckler Foundation. 

Mousumi Biswal is a doctoral researcher in the Department of English at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. Her work focuses on women’s domestic labor and everyday violence in rural India. Her dissertation combines film narratives with a hermeneutic-phenomenological analysis of interviews with rural housewives to examine how domestic space functions simultaneously as a site of constraint, labor, and violence.

Nikolay Kamenov holds a PhD title in Global History from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. He had taught at various universities in Switzerland, and, most recently, at the Center for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Göttingen and at the University of St. Andrews.  

Faith Blackhurst is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University. She holds a PhD in Spanish from UC Davis with an emphasis in feminist theory and research. Her work examines motherhood, domestic labor, and the maternal body in Latin American literature and culture, focusing on Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. She is especially interested in how feeding practices—such as breastfeeding and cooking—illuminate intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class.

Chloe Dolgin is a PhD student in McGill University’s English Cultural Studies department. Her research focuses on women’s housework in contemporary popular culture. She holds an MA in Media Studies. She is particularly interested in questions of collective affect, contemporary capitalism, the body, and feelings of apocalypse.

Emmanuel Velayos Larrabure teaches Latin American and Caribbean Studies at CUNY Hostos. His research explores the relationship between lettered and performative cultures in 19th-century Latin America. His work has been published in Hispanic Review, RHM, RCLL, Decimonónica, Chasqui, Transmodernity, New York History, A Contracorriente, and Confluencia. He received the 2020 Best Article in the Nineteenth Century Award (LASA) and the Sylvia Molloy Award for Outstanding Dissertation (NYU). 

Samuel Karagulin is a Ph.D. candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, where he studies the refusal of work in Russian literature. He also works as an assistant editor at The Yale Review.

Eric Allina is a historian of southern Africa, slavery, and of the global cold war, interested in how people and ideas moved from one place to another, and the consequences of those displacements. Publications include work on reading photographs as historical documents, colonial forced labor, law and labor mobility, and contentious language amidst nation-building. Current research focuses on African workers in East Germany in the cold war’s last decade and on trajectories of socialism in Africa.

Blair Rutherford is a professor of Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa. He has carried out ethnographic research on the cultural politics of rural livelihoods in different African countries for over thirty years. He has published two ethnographic monographs, co-edited four books, and numerous articles and book chapters.

Laura T. Murphy is a Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government Carr-Ryan Center and a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International and Studies. Her work focuses on forced labor globally, most recently on state-imposed forced labor in China. Her work has been funded by the NEH, the National Humanities Center, the Laudes Foundation, and Freedom Fund.