Discourses on gendered labor have been at once fluid and constitutive of labor hierarchies. In this project, co-edited with Bridget Kenny, we examine such discourses and social relations

from four places considered as ‘peripheral’ to debates and to capitalist developments across the twentieth century. We frame this issue through three considerations. First, the variability and variety of discourses, and the centrality of women’s paid and unpaid work to economic projects of state and non-state actors demand further careful investigation. Second, the impact of global patterns and cultures of inequality on women’s work, and the impact of women’s work on (re)shaping patterns of inequality have very seldom been conceptualized from the vantage point offered by (post)colonial and semiperipheral geopolitical locations and attendant historical experiences. Third, the very labor process itself constitutes gendered identities, norms and valences as well as resistant subjectivities and antagonisms.

In this project, co-authored with Malak Labib, we focus on the international circulation and local appropriations of scientific management based on a comparison between Turkey and Egypt, two late industrialising economies with visions of labour modernization at the heart of debates around citizenship, nation-state construction, and welfare politics. The project would contribute to the historiography of modern Egypt and Turkey, development history, and the emerging field of management history.

In 1976, the Textile, Knitting, and Clothing Industry Workers’ Union (Türkiye Tekstil, Örme, Giyim ve Deri Sanayi İşçileri Sendikası, TEKSİF) and the Asian American Free Labor Institute (AAFLI) collaborated on a program that aimed at increasing women’s union participation, part of a global trend that emerged after the declaration of the United Nations Decade of Women in 1975. In this project, co-authored with Büşra Satı, we uncover a hitherto little-known chapter of women’s international trade union activism, which was entangled in tensions at global, national, and local levels in the late Cold War period.