Work, Crisis, and Transformation in and beyond Europe
20–24 July 2026 | Bildungszentrum Mattli, Morschach (Switzerland)
The world of work is being reshaped by intersecting crises: socio-ecological breakdown, intensified migration regimes, geopolitical instability, and the reorganisation of global production. These transformations profoundly affect labour relations and relations of care and social reproduction, while also opening possibilities for new forms of organising, solidarity, and collective knowledge production. Critical labour studies offer analytical tools to analyse these changes by foregrounding power, and worker agency, and spatial relations.
This interdisciplinary Summer Retreat for Labour Theory and Research brings together researchers working on labour from critical, feminist, and political economy perspectives. The programme covers six thematic streams: (1) Socio-ecological crisis and labour; (2) Labour migration: (3) Labour and digitalisation; (4) Global production networks (5) Care work and social reproduction, (6) Authoritarianism, Militarisation and Labour; Each participant will join two of these streams.
Instead of classic paper presentations, we aim to facilitate interactive workshops that will require participants to read and prepare key readings before the start of the retreat. In the afternoons and evenings, there will be ample space for field trips and to socialise. Furthermore, the retreat includes open spaces for the development of ideas for joint teaching, collaborative research projects, and follow-up meetings, helping to build a sustainable scholarly network beyond the event. Participants are required to commit to being in Morschach for the complete duration of the retreat (July 20th from 4 p.m. until 12:30 p.m. on July 24th). The retreat is open to academics at all career stages, including senior scholars and early-career researchers. Five places are reserved for advanced Master’s students. The participation fee of 120 Swiss Francs (≈ 130 €) includes room and board for the duration of the retreat. A limited number of travel scholarships and childcare support will be available for those in need. Please indicate whether you require either on the application form. Please find below a detailed overview of the programme.
Please register using the form below by February 20th 2026. Successful applicants will be notified in the beginning of March.
We are looking forward to a week of discussing labour research with you!
The organising team (in alphabetical order)
Antonie Schmiz, Barbara Orth, Bettina Engels, Christiane Meyer-Habighorst, Jeremy Auerbach, Karin Schwiter, Michaela Douch, Oliver Pye, Stephan Liebscher, Yannick Ecker
Programme Overview:
Below you find the preliminary programme and short descriptions for the research streams.
1. Socio-ecological crisis and labour
- How are workers, trade unions, and communities engaging with socio-ecological transformation and just transition processes?
- What roles do labour struggles play in conflicts over socio-ecological transformation, and how can worker agency and social justice be centred in responses to socio-ecological crisis, particularly for marginalised forms of labour?
2. Labour migration
- How do migration regimes and legal status shape labour precarity, worker rights, and possibilities for collective organising?
- How can migrant workers’ experiences and agency be centred in analyses of contemporary labour geographies?
- How can migrant workers be conceptualised as subjects of global working classes?
3. Labour and digitalisation
- How does digitization intensify and obscure occupational health risks, including psychosocial stress, algorithmic exhaustion, ergonomic injuries, and reproductive health harms?
- How does the rush to integrate AI into workplaces foreclose alternative futures of work, such as collective ownership of AI systems, worker-led design, or the refusal of automation that undermines dignity, care, and ecological sustainability?
- How does AI increase workload, immaterial labour, and competitiveness?
4. Global production networks
- How do workers construct their own scales of action within GPNs?
- In what ways are GPNs spatial histories of labour struggles and movements?
- How can GPNs be analysed as networked groups of workers along value chains, embodying agency?
- How can a spatially informed analysis of GPNs be used to develop new transnational organising strategies?
5. Social reproduction and care work
- How do current developments such as commodification and digitalisation shape the socio-spatial organisation and provision of paid and unpaid reproductive labour
- and affect care workers?
- How are the struggles of care workers and people in need of care connected to broader structures such as welfare and gender regimes across different scales (household, local, regional, national, global)?
- How is social reproduction shaped along the lines of social inequalities and contributes to reproducing and reshaping these inequalities?
- In what ways do care chains, welfare restructuring, and the longstanding feminisation and migrantisation of care work shape labour relations, recognition, and struggles for labour rights?
6. Authoritarianism, Militarisation and Labour
- How do authoritarian politics, economic protectionism and the militarisation of production affect class relations?
- What are the consequences of increasing investment in industries that intertwine economic and geopolitical drivers (e.g. defence manufacturing/arms production) for labour (working conditions, labour markets) and workers?
- What alliances between workers’ and social movements and new forms of (international) solidarity evolve?
Application Form
The application period has expired. We will get back to all applicants soon.
