O'Connell Initiative Past Events
2022
Carework and the Hidden Labor of Capitalism: Bringing the History of Caregiving to the History of Capitalism
"Carework and the Hidden Labor of Capitalism" brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the problem of 20th-century capitalist transformation and the "crisis of care" that has accompanied it.
Fordham University
Thursday, October 20 – Saturday, October 22, 2022
The "Carework and the Hidden Labor of Capitalism" conference could not happen at a more opportune moment. The Covid-19 pandemic vaulted unpaid caregiving, paid care work, and capitalism’s habits of exploiting the women who bear the brunt of this work into public consciousness. But for several years before Covid-19 and its unequal ramifications arrived on the scene scholars of gender and labor had already been turning with renewed attention to capitalism and the problem of social reproduction. Historians—as well as feminist economists, sociologists, and others—had begun to probe the historical roots and dimensions of our contemporary “crisis of care.” Bringing this emergent group of scholars together now is an opportunity to add scholarly heft to public debate.
The conference will also tackle a crucial missing hole in the burgeoning study of capitalism. Calls to “engender capitalism” have proliferated in recent years. What women’s and gender historians have long known is that there is no capitalism apart from gender constructs. Crucially, capitalism produced gender by recruiting women into certain work sites and into unpaid care labor. In turn, that gendered reproductive, caregiving, and social-reproductive labor kept capitalism afloat. To take on the project of engendering capitalism is to open up a wide array of big questions that promise new lines of inquiry and new insights.
One such question brings the problem of paid and unpaid carework front and center in the history of capitalism. As historians Tracey Deutsch and Nan Enstad have recently framed it: “What does an economy look like if we start with carework, or with the question of how people get what they need rather than how they produce a commodity?” This question will be the launching point for the conference.
The World that Latin America Created: Capitalism and Development in the Post-WWII Era
Dr. Margarita Fajardo, Sarah Lawrence College
Thursday, March 3, 2022 | 1:00 pm
Dr. Fajardo is a graduate of Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia and Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Duke University. She is the author of The World that Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Development Era, published in February 2022 with Harvard University Press, as well as articles in Latin American Research Review, Cold War Science, and other outlets.
Reeducation Camps and the Politics of Morality and Citizenship in Socialist Mozambique
Dr. Benedito Machava, Yale University
Thursday, March 31, 2022 | 1:00 pm
Dr. Machava is a historian of colonial and post-colonial Africa. Raised and educated in Mozambique, he received his PhD at Michigan University in 2018. His research focuses on liberation struggles, decolonization, nation building, socialism and socialist experiments in Africa. His current book manuscript, The Morality of Revolution: Reeducation Camps and the Carceral Regime in Socialist Mozambique, 1974-1990, examines the politics of public morality, carcerality/punishment and citizenship in post-independence Mozambique. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, among others.
SPRING 2020
Speaker: Victoria Smolkin
Affiliation: Wesleyan University
Title: “A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism”
Location: South Lounge, LC
FALL 2019
Speaker: Westenley Alcenat
Title: “We Are Not What We Seem: The Wealth of American Capitalism and the ‘Exceptionalism’ of Haitian Poverty”
Affiliation: Fordham University
Location: South Lounge, LC
Speaker: Bathsheba Demuth
Affiliation: Brown University
Title: “The Ethical Choice of Whales: Bowheads, Hunters, and the Nature of History”
Location: South Lounge, LC
Speaker: Sheila Fitzpatrick
Affiliation: University of Sydney
Title: “Who Owned Europe’s Postwar ‘Displaced Persons’? A Cold War Tussle Between the Soviet Union and Its ‘Capitalist’ Wartime Allies, 1945-50”
Location: McNally Amphitheater, LC
Additional Past Events
Gabrielle Hecht (Stanford) “Residual Governance: Mining Afterlives and Molecular Colonialism, seen from an African Anthropocene”
Peter Hudson (UCLA) "The African Origins of Racial Capitalism"
Tariq Omar Ali (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign) “A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta”
Book launch for Dr. Kirsten Swinth's new book “Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family” in conversation with Jennifer Mittelstadt (Rutgers).
“Unveiling Money: Counterfeits, Arbitrage, and Finance across the Arabian Sea”, based on Dr. Johan Mathew’s recent book Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea (University of California Press, 2016).
Talk by Dr. Daniel Immerwahr (Northwestern University), “Fireball Express: How the U.S. Military Laid the Foundations for Globalization”
Conference on “The United States and Global Capitalism in the Twentieth Century” at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus
Talk by Dr. Vanessa Ogle (University of California-Berkeley), “Twilight Capitalists: The Global Cold War and the Unmaking of Postwar Capitalism”
Book launch event for Dr. Yuko Miki for her new book Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Colonial Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Discussant, Dr. Amy Chazkel (CUNY - Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center)
Lunch with Dr. Dave Hamlin and Dr. Samantha Iyer on their work supported by the O’Connell Initiative
Book launch event for Dr. Christopher R. W. Dietrich for his new book Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Discussant, Dr. Toby C. Jones (Rutgers University).