Our four broad themes are: Fair Pay, Generations at Work, Healthy Work, and Work and Workers.

Ideally, suggested items would be accompanied by about 30-75 words of description identifying their significance.

Please email your suggestions to: glosoc@sheffield.ac.uk

Thanks for your help!

The team has already assembled many items (including the images here), but we'd like your help crowdsourcing additional ones that can tell this important story. All contributors will be credited on our exhibition page. Please note that any items suggested need to be open-access or copyright-free.

These will include excerpts of policy documents; excerpts of oral history interviews; songs about work; protest posters; paintings; photographs of child workers, workplace safety devices, agricultural and industrial workers around the world, etc.

We're creating an educational resource that brings original historical materials into public view, telling the complex story of social rights related to work and encouraging reflection on social rights in the world today. It will feature ca 300 items.

Crowd-sourcing opportunity! At GLOSOC, we are putting together a virtual exhibition on Work and the Global History of Social Rights since the nineteenth century. The exhibition is targeted at school students and adults, and we need your help and suggestions for items to include!

Happy Labour Day! To mark the occasion, our project member @roryhanna.bsky.social has authored a blog on the 1955 protests by the labour movement in West Germany demanding a five-day week - with some very pertinent contemporary resonances!

medium.com/p/bc26223cafcf

We are very happy to announce our exciting program for our first project workshop, 5-6 June, on "Writing Global Histories of Socio-Economic Rights"

See www.glosoc.org/events/ for a text version of the programme and for details to register for online and in-person attendance.

Call for Papers for our first event! Join us at our hybrid workshop - Writing Global Histories of Socio-Economic Rights at the University of Sheffield, 5-6 June 2025. Please send us a keyword, abstract, and bio at glosoc@sheffield.ac.uk. The deadline is 15 February. See more details below!

We've published our first two blogs for our GLOSOC project. Find out about the diversity of approaches to social rights across both time and space in Europe and Africa. From Bismarck's Germany to the era of Structural Adjustment, we sketch the broad outlines of our project.

medium.com/@glosoc

And finally, our postdocs are Dr. Rory Hanna (Sheffield) and Dr. @nielsboender.bsky.social (Edinburgh). Historians of Germany and Kenya, respectively, they will be at the historical coalface conducting much research (and running the social media channels!) over the three years of the project!

Our co-investigators are Professor Stefan Berger (RUB) and Dr Maxmillian Julius Chuhila (Dar es Salaam), who contribute particular insight into social rights and intellectual histories in Germany and Tanzania.

The principal investigators are Dr Julia Moses @sheffielduni.bsky.social
and @emma-edin.bsky.social (Edinburgh), who bring years of experience in the history of social policy and transnational intellectual exchanges across Europe and Africa.