Hi everyone,
Next year the International Sociological Association Congress is being held in
Toronto and I am co-organizing a session with Chris Tilly on "Indigenous
people's movements and labour movements" (description at foot of email) for the
International Sociological Association's Congress (Toronto, July 15-21 2018).
Most participants at the meeting are sociologists, but we also welcome
submissions from union researchers and labour activists. Submissions must be
in by SEPTEMBER 30. It would be great if anyone is interested in submitting
something! Please feel free to forward this call.
For basic info on the Congress, see
http://www.isa-sociology.org/en/conferences/world-congress/toronto-2018/ ;.
To submit, go to
https://isaconf.confex.com/isaconf/wc2018/webprogrampreliminary/Session10140.html
and click the "Submit an abstract" button. You will need to create an account
with ISA if you do not have one already.
If you have any questions, please feel free to direct them to me
Suzanne Mills, School of Labour Studies & Geography and Earth Sciences,
McMaster University
smills@xxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:smills@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Or to
Chris Tilly, Department of Sociology, UCLA
tilly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:tilly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
CONNECTIONS BETWEEN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES' MOVEMENTS AND LABOUR MOVEMENTS
Suzanne Mills (McMaster University) and Chris Tilly (UCLA)
Indigenous peoples' movements have expanded dramatically in scale and impact in
Latin America in recent decades (with movements in Southern Mexico and Bolivia
particularly visible) but are ongoing on every continent. Critical scholarship
about Indigenous struggles often focuses on control of lands, waters and
resources or on subsistence economies. These themes are often viewed as
unrelated to labour and worker identities. Consequently, there has been less
attention to Indigenous people as wage labourers. None-the-less, worker
movements have been engaging with Indigenous peoples-and Indigenous people's
movements have engaged with labour and employment issues-in diverse and
contradictory ways around the world. This session seeks to bring scholarship
about labour movements into conversation with research about Indigenous workers
in capitalist and subsistence economies.
For example:
Indigenous communities' efforts to remedy labour market discrimination and
alleviate poverty through increasing access to wage employment
Industrialized resource extraction (mining, lumbering, large scale monocrops),
which may recruit Indigenous workforces and/or potentially pit extractive
workers against Indigenous communities.
Overlap and mutual learning between worker and Indigenous movements (for
example, interchanges between Bolivian miners and indigenous movements).
Explicit alliances of labour organizations with Indigenous organizations (a
recent example is alliances at Standing Rock in the USA).
The formation of associations of Indigenous small producers as an alternative
form of labour organizing (e.g. peasant organizations, Bolivian miners'
cooperatives).
Exclusionary union tactics and practices such as 'job control unionism' that
maintain racialized job hierarchies
We welcome cases from a variety of global regions.
