Punish or Rehabilitate through Work: Institutions, Discourses, and Agency in Central, Eastern, and Western Europe

Ve dnech 13.–15. listopadu 2024 proběhne v Kampusu Hybernská mezinárodní worskhop na téma „Trestat nebo napravovat prací“. Workshop otevře přednáška Sigried Sigrid Wadauer (University of Vienna) na téma „(Il)Legitimate Means of Sustenance? Variations, Hierarchies, and Differences in Work and Livelihood and The Spectrum of Possible Consequences“.

Anotace přednášky

Debates over economic crises, labour markets, and vagrancy in the 19th and early 20th centuries frequently point out the ambiguity of being out of work. They emphasize the difficulties of clearly distinguishing between those who were not working because they could not find employment or who were not capable of working and those who (in the eyes of observers) were deliberately avoiding honest ways to earn a livelihood. Policies such as establishing labour intermediation and job placement or introducing unemployment benefits acknowledged and formalized the status of work-seekers and the unemployed yet there was no clear dichotomy of working and being out of work, but rather varieties of doing so in more or less legitimate ways. What remained in place was a broad repertoire of institutions and a variety of measures to help and support individuals as well as the flipside of that coin – to discipline and (apparently) coerce them into working. The lecture will emphasize possibilities and problems of empirical approaches to these topics by drawing on sources and examples from late 19th- and early 20th-century Austria.