About

The WORCK publication platform documents the ongoing working and discussion process as well as collaborative research results and publications of an international scientific network of labour and social historians, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists (www.worck.eu).

WORCK comprises four working groups representing four different methodological approaches to the study of coercion in labour relations. All working group members contribute to the overarching methodological question of the working groups by starting from the concrete, from the empirical case they know best. Working Group 1 (Grammars of Coercion) analyses the semantics of the document. By studying the semantic patterns of coercion, it seeks to understand the underlying social taxonomies of historical and contemporary societies and helps to develop a new analytical language to think and speak about bondage and coercion in a long-term and globally comparative perspective. Working Group 2 (Sites and Fields of Coercion) studies the nameable site of coercion, the place of work and its specific practices in order to understand the basic logic of deployment of a work environment and its links and interrelations to broader fields of coercion. Working Group 3 (Im/Mobilisations of the Workforce) starts from the trajectory of the (im)mobilised worker and considers mobility and displacement as well as immobilisation as key aspects of the political economies of labour coercion. Working Group 4 (Intersecting Marginalities) addresses the concrete interaction of competing “marginalisers” (such as origin, ethnicity and race, religious and cultural affiliation, legal status, age as well as gender and sexual orientation) in the making of asymmetrical power relations.

The publication platform enables mutual exchange, collaboration and comparison within and beyond the scientific network of WORCK – on the level of empirical tradition (texts, images, monuments), statistical material and geodata as well as on the level of analytical categories and hermeneutic interpretation. It contains source documents, datasets, maps and bibliographies as well as data stories, research papers and conceptual contributions to ongoing debates in labour and social history. And last but not least, the platform provides a forum for scholars, policymakers and representatives of civil society to discuss current developments in the world of labour.

The WORCK Publication Platform is based on DKAN. DKAN is an open-source data management platform.