ZARAH Circular No. 6
18 December 2024
Dear colleagues, dear friends,
before the year comes to an end, we would like to launch our ZARAH Circular No. 6, sharing some information on our activities.
On 12 December 2024, we submitted the manuscript of our collaborative monograph Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond: A new transnational history, for copy-editing to our publisher UCL Press. Co-authored by all members of the ZARAH Team (Selin Çağatay, Mátyás Erdélyi, Alexandra Ghiț, Olga Gnydiuk, Veronika Helfert, Ivelina Masheva, Zhanna Popova, Jelena Tešija, Eszter Varsa and Susan Zimmermann), the massive volume will be published in print and open access in early 2025. Arranged in three sections, the ten book chapters discuss women’s activism within ‘classical’ labour movement settings, women’s gendered activist agendas and repertoires, and women’s labour activism across class and political divides. A commented chronology in pictures points to the book’s key concepts and approach and illustrates our key findings. Tables and appendices add information on women labour activists and their organizing and actions, within and beyond the region, across a time span of more than a century. The introductory chapter, our concluding essay and a section on concepts and terminology, help situate the history of women’s labour activism in our region of focus and transnationally within global labour and gender history. Women’s Labour Activism finds its place in the book series ‘Work Around the World’ which UCL Press publishes in association with the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The series editors at IISH provided invaluable support on the road to publication, as did (among others named in the book) Dorothy Sue Cobble who has also written a foreword to the book.
Several articles and book chapters by individual team members on themes integral to their component studies have been published in 2024, including on peasant women’s activism in Hungary in the late 19th century; rationalization and skills in the Bulgarian tobacco industry in the 1930s; transnational trade union collaboration and women workers’ education in Turkey between the 1960s and the 1980s; migrant women and trade unions in Austria and internationally between the 1960s and the 1980s; second wave feminists and women trade unionists in Austria in the 1970s and 1980s; and an article accompanying the English-language translation of a key text produced by a labour activist from our region.
One great news is that the volume Through the Prism of Gender and Work: Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries, which we edited (Brill 2024), has now been fully switched to open access, making available online all book chapters written by colleagues from Eastern Europe and around the world.
The ERC accepted our application for a one-year extension of the ZARAH project, moving the project end date from 2025 to 2026. All ZARAH team members remain research affiliates of the ZARAH project until the new project end date (insofar as they wish to). Doctoral candidate Jelena Tešija has won the prestigious 12-month Marietta Blau Grant of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, spending 12 months at the Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Some of the ZARAH researchers have moved or are moving to new positions. Ivelina Masheva is an assistant professor at the Institute for Historical Research at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Alexandra Ghiț is a researcher in the ERC-funded project “The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe” at the University of Vienna, Austria. Olga Gnydiuk will contribute to the project “Ukrainian History Global Initiative”. Eszter Varsa is Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Gender Studies at CEU in the winter term 2024-2025. Zhanna Popova has become a contracted researcher responsible for the development of the ZARAH public history website (see below).
The ZARAH project is indeed moving to its concluding stage. Our work at this stage is focused – besides developing new research avenues for the post-ZARAH period – on two main areas related to public history and the dissemination of our research results.
Firstly, we are completing our database ZARAH DB. The database has accumulated and continues to accumulate highly curated document records as well as the so-called special records on events, places, and – importantly – persons. The people records give detailed information on a large spectrum of women labour activists from the region studied in ZARAH, ranging from grass-roots militant activists to top-level functionaries. These records are sometimes linked to the extensive abstracts of interviews with the activist concerned. The information about Éva Laczkó, born 1942, Hungary, and an abstract of her interview (see people record and interview record) are but one example of what can be found in ZARAH DB.
Secondly, since spring 2024 we are moving into the decisive stage of translating our research results into the public history outlets that constitute the two concluding pillars of the ZARAH project. One is the ZARAH public history website, which Zhanna Popova and an excellent web design company have been contracted to develop. A comprehensive public history volume, written by Emily Gioielli, is the second public history output of the ZARAH project. The volume will be published in open access in English and several languages spoken in the region studied by ZARAH. The research of all ZARAH team members is the foundation on which both the website and the volume are built.
Please do not hesitate to turn to us with any idea, query or information you might wish to share. And just as a note: People interested in receiving our circular are kindly asked to write to zarah.info@ceu.edu.
In 2024, we have been doing our work while crueller wars and an even stronger presence of new and old fascisms encouraged unbridled racism, sexism, material exclusion, environmental destruction and violence, in all parts of the world, directly and indirectly. Not least, then, 2024 underscores the urgency and seriousness of witnessing and writing history critically and with a sense of hope for a more just world.
We wish you peaceful holidays and all the best for 2025!
The ZARAH Team
ZARAH Circular No. 5
20 December 2023
Dear colleagues, dear friends,
welcome to the ZARAH Circular No. 5, by which we share some new pieces of information on our activities.
You have not heard from ZARAH since quite some time – we have been quite busy moving forward our publications and some other activities.
We are happy to report that the ZARAH Team published a special issue “Women’s Labour Activism in Central and Eastern Europe and Internationally in the Twentieth Century” in the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 31 (2023) no. 2. Most team members contributed to the introductory article and authored individual articles. The contributions to the special issue are available open access on the journal website and the ZARAH website, where we also display all other ZARAH-related publications.
ZARAH team member Eszter Varsa received one of the Emma Goldman Awards 2023!
The volume Through the Prism of Gender and Work: Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries (Leiden: Brill 2024), edited by the ZARAH Team, is in press, and will be published in the coming weeks. We are delighted (and relieved) that this large piece of work is done.
We consider the volume a pioneering one on the road towards writing new histories of women’s labour activism in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. The book, published in the series Studies in Global Social History edited by Marcel van der Linden, arises from the international conference we organized in October 2021 under pandemic conditions. Back then, in an open call for papers, we invited colleagues to read sources with which they are working or plan to work “through the prism of gender and work”. The massive volume resulting from the conference assembles 18 contributions on nearly 600 pages. This includes our introduction, in which we present the chapters collected in the volume, discuss key clusters of the scholarship published in many languages, and deliberate merits and problem zones of a long-term, transregional, integrative und critical approach to the history of women’s labour activism in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. All contributions to the book will be (or become) accessible open access (with a short delay).
On the ZARAH Blog, our Guest Blog Series IV “Through the Lens of Women’s Work and Activism”, brings together ten amazing pieces of work, written by guest contributing researchers. Published between November 2022 and April 2023, the ten blog posts discuss unknown, unexpected, and exciting original sources, and showcase the authors’ inspired thinking about the history of women’s labour-related activisms.
ZARAH DB, our project database, has new features and includes a growing number of documents.
Encouraged by the news about a global data project of the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam on labour activism, the Global Hub Labour Conflicts, we decided to make accessible the Metadata Hierarchy on which ZARAH DB is built. The Metadata Hierarchy includes all pre-set keywords we can use when describing items included in ZARAH DB, ordered into categories and sub-categories. On the website, we display this structured list of key concepts as a coloured table. We hope that with ZARAH’s combined focus on a less known region and women’s labour activism, we can contribute to the development of a global vocabulary and a global network of data on labour conflicts and labour activism. We discussed possibilities of collaboration with the researchers responsible at IISH for the Global Hub Labour Conflicts.
We continue to generate core entries in ZARAH DB, including entries which refer to documents in English and of high relevance for women’s labour activism in our region of focus and beyond. One example is the newly added document “Enhancing the Role of Women in the Building of a Developed Socialist Society: Decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party of March 6, 1973”. We hope to inspire many people to look into the history of women’s labour activism via making available documents of this kind.
The last two news items that we can share concern the 4th ZARAH Annual International Workshop which took place between 16 and 18 October in Vienna, and the work on the manuscript of our collaborative monograph Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond: A New Transnational History.
The detailed book proposal, as revised after peer review and publisher’s review, was accepted by UCL Press in autumn 2023. During the 4th International Workshop, we discussed (initial) chapter drafts with the two invited international experts, Diane P. Koenker (University College London) and Leda Papastefanaki (University of Ioannina), and received insightful and thought-provoking feedback.
Other sessions of the workshop were dedicated to the discussion of ongoing research of the two experts, and Leda Papastefanaki gave a public lecture at CEU at the time of the workshop.
Please do not hesitate to turn to us with any idea, query or information you might wish to share. And just as a note: People interested in receiving our circular are kindly asked to write to zarah.info@ceu.edu.
Best wishes,
Susan Zimmermann (Principal Investigator) and Lukas Neissl (Program Manager), on behalf of the entire ZARAH Team
ZARAH Circular No. 4
17 October 2022
Dear colleagues, dear friends,
welcome to the ZARAH Circular No. 4, by which we share some new pieces of information on our activities.
We are excited to report that results of the international conference “Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries” which we organized in October 2021 are assembled in the manuscript of an edited volume “Through the Prism of Gender and Work: Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th to 20th Centuries”, submitted to the Brill Publishers series “Studies in Global Social History”, edited by Marcel van der Linden. The peer review has recommended the volume – as “a wonderful collection of case studies, which are informative, fill many blank spaces, and clarify many things” – for publication, requesting various revisions which we are currently facilitating and undertaking.
In early October 2022, we organized a series of events, starting with a public lecture by Mahua Sarkar (University of Toronto) on 10 October 2022. The lecture took place in conjunction with the 3rd ZARAH Annual International Workshop. At the workshop, we discussed work in progress with Sylvia Hahn and Mahua Sarkar who participated as invited international experts. We also made first steps, in collaboration with invited public history and digital humanities experts, towards designing the public history elements of ZARAH.
In the near future, we will start publishing our fourth blog series. This time we have invited colleagues working from and on many places to present a glimpse of their ongoing research on the problems of women, work and activism in Central and Eastern Europe.
We have organized a double session entitled “An Inclusive History of Women’s Labour Activism: Forms and Scales of Organizing and the Politics of Women’s Work” at the 14th European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC) taking place on 12-15 April 2023 in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Finally, we are happy to share that our proposal for a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe (JCCEE) titled “Women and the Gendered Politics of Work in Central and Eastern Europe and Internationally: Multi-Level Activism and Governance in the 20th Century” has been accepted and is scheduled for submission and peer view in 2023.
Please do not hesitate to turn to us with any idea, query or information you might wish to share. And just as a note: People interested in receiving our circular are kindly asked to write to zarah.info@ceu.edu.
Best wishes,
Susan Zimmermann (Principal Investigator) and Lukas Neissl (Program Manager), on behalf of the entire ZARAH Team
ZARAH Circular No. 3
29 November 2021
Dear colleagues, dear friends,
welcome to the Circular No. 3, by which we share some new pieces of information on our activities.
Before we all left for our summer break, our database, which we consider a milestone in our project work and a relevant open access research tool for all, went online; in autumn, soon after our return to Vienna, a series of inspiring events took place. We briefly report on all these here. Finally, just a few days ago, we published the Introduction to our third Blog Series on Transnational Links and the History of Women’s Labour Activism; more contributions from our team will follow at regular intervals until spring!
Please do not hesitate to turn to us with any idea, query or information you might wish to share. And just as a note: People interested in receiving our circular are kindly asked to write to zarah.info@ceu.edu.
Best wishes,
Susan Zimmermann (Principal Investigator) and Lukas Neissl (Program Manager), on behalf of the entire ZARAH Team
ZARAH Circular No. 2
12 April 2021
Dear colleagues, dear friends,
welcome to the ZARAH Circular No. 2! The ZARAH Circulars function as a channel of communication, sharing information on our ERC project “Women’s labour activism in Eastern Europe and transnationally, from the age of empires to the late 20th century” and related activities, and initiating and informing about various kinds of collaboration. Today we would like to share two pieces of information.
- In the previous ZARAH Circular we had disseminated a call for contributions for an international workshop/conference on “Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries” aimed at bringing together researchers from various backgrounds and encouraging mutually beneficial discussions and collaborations, resulting in a highly visible international publication. We received an impressive number of innovative and exiting paper proposals and are looking forward to the next stage of this collaborative project. We are excited to publish the attached draft program of the conference that will take place on 14-16 October 2021 at the Central European University in Vienna. The event brings together scholars with diverse backgrounds, at varying stages of their careers in leading research institutions in Europe and beyond.
- In the academic year 2020/2021 we have published two series of entries on the ZARAH Blog: Blog Series I: Finding Women in the Sources and Blog Series II: Putting Activists Centre Stage. The introductions to the blog series and the individual entries give insight into the process and various dimensions of research on the history of women’s labour activism. The two series published so far discuss opportunities and limitations of different types of primary material and illustrate how a focus on individual activists’ careers and life stories can help to develop our understanding of the history of women’s labour activism. We hope that the ZARAH Blog sparks interest in the history of women’s labour activism, and that the considerations and examples on how to do such research can serve as inspiration for scholars, students and activists alike.
Please feel invited to turn the attention of your colleagues to the ZARAH Circular. People interested in joining our mailing list are kindly asked to contact Ivelina Masheva, handling ZARAH’s network and public outreach, via zarah.info@ceu.edu.
Please do not hesitate to turn to us with any idea, query or information you might wish to share.
Best wishes,
Susan Zimmermann (Principal Investigator) and Lukas Neissl (Program Manager), on behalf of the entire ZARAH Team
Draft Program “Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries“
ZARAH Circular No. 1
27 November 2020
Dear colleagues, dear friends,
we would like to thank you for having joined our mailing list and warmly welcome you amongst the recipients of our ZARAH Circular No. 1. Via this newly established channel for communication, we will be sharing information on our ERC project “ZARAH: Women’s labour activism in Eastern Europe and transnationally, from the age of empires to the late 20th century” (https://zarah-ceu.org/) and initiating various kinds of collaboration.
With this first ZARAH Circular we would like to disseminate a Call for Contributions discussing “Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries”. Herewith, we aim to provide a forum for bringing together researchers from various backgrounds and to encourage mutually beneficial discussions and collaborations, resulting in a highly visible international publication. The specific steps and deadlines are outlined in the attached Call. Please feel free to disseminate the Call.
Please also feel invited to turn the attention of your colleagues to the ZARAH Circular. People interested in joining our mailing list are kindly asked to contact Ivelina Masheva, handling ZARAH’s network and public outreach, via zarah.info@ceu.edu.
Please do not hesitate to turn to us with any idea, query or information you might wish to share.
Best wishes,
Susan Zimmermann (Principal Investigator) and Lukas Neissl (Program Manager), on behalf of the entire ZARAH Team