This article challenges the dominant narrative of AI in Iran as a symbol of national success and technological sovereignty by examining its materiality. The Iranian government often underscores AI’s role in countering sanctions and securing national interests. However, this national narrative overlooks the complex realities of AI’s implementation. By examining the material endpoints of AI – such as data centers, supercomputers, and digital labor – this article reveals a fragmented vision of AI, one that is entangled with global neoliberal practices. The analysis uncovers the sociopolitical and economic forces shaping AI in Iran, arguing that it reflects both the nation’s ambitions and its vulnerabilities, offering a nuanced perspective on AI and its role in contemporary Iranian society.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Euro-American colonialism remade the lives of thousands of Samoan, Melanesian, and Chinese workers on coconut plantations in Samoa. Since plantation discipline was strict, workers resisted the heavy demands on their bodies through a broad arsenal of behaviors, ranging from keeping crops for themselves to making appeals to the state to waging violent attacks on overseers. Resistance against colonial subjection turned workers in Samoa into subjects of their own lives and allowed them to forge bonds of solidarity beyond the spatial, social, and racial boundaries maintained by colonial administrations. In doing so, Samoa's workers shaped their own version of Oceanian globality.

After 1973, employers in Japan who had been promising to adopt a weekend system began to withdraw those plans. Thus began a yet-unfinished debate in Japan about how to balance need for employee rest with the demands of employers to increase economic output. The Liberal Democratic Party's current approach to the overwork problem, including its recent labor reforms—which emphasize granting legal flexibility to employees without creating firm regulations to prevent employers from demanding excessive labor—reflects the continued refusal of employers and political leaders to accept the need for employee work-life balance.

Active from the 1960s onward, Tsujimura Kazuko (1941-2004) was an avantgarde dancer who aimed for a “dance without body, without dancing.” This paper examines how Tsujimura sought, unconsciously or consciously, to reveal how the body was harnessed for—and constructed from—production in the increasingly capitalist world of high-economic growth Japan. As we shall see, through her limited, but often tense, movement in dance, in her use of costumes in fragmented installation pieces, and in her social alliances, she sought to undo the notion that the body was an expression of free agency.

This essay examines the integration of accompaniment methodology with public humanities and policy work through case studies from activist research in New Orleans. The concept of accompaniment involves providing active, supportive engagement alongside marginalized communities to address systemic barriers and foster mutual understandings. This essay highlights how accompaniment can provide support in navigating bureaucratic challenges and inform immigration policy. It also explores how accompaniment can inform public humanities work, like the development of a digital timeline and physical exhibition documenting Black labor history in New Orleans. This approach underscores the transformative potential of combining accompaniment with public humanities to enhance community empowerment, inform policy, and challenge systemic inequities. By engaging with community experiences and integrating insights from both historical and contemporary struggles, this essay chronicles the development of accompaniment methodology and shows how this approach can enrich public humanities scholarship and policy work, creating more inclusive and responsive solutions to social challenges. Accompaniment serves as a vital tool for bridging academic inquiry with social justice, making public humanities research more relevant, ethical, equitable, and impactful.

Across the twentieth century, hundreds of women worked as nurses, cooks, cleaners, and teachers on Mexico’s railroads. They have been overlooked in histories of the railroads and Mexican industrialization more broadly, their limited number perhaps suggesting that their work is not of analytical importance in understanding processes of economic development and class formation. On the contrary, these women’s work constituted many of the most coveted labor rights of the postrevolutionary railroad workforce, itself a symbolic vanguard of Mexico’s working class and one of the most important beneficiaries of the expansion of social and economic rights ushered in by the Mexican Revolution. The gendered division of labor characteristic of the railroads was neither accidental nor insignificant. Railroads used the feminization of the work of social reproduction to write off structural failures and predictable shortcomings in welfare provision as failures of femininity. Women became scapegoats for the consistent violation of workers’ rights through underfunding and understaffing. In tracing this process, the article models a historiographical and methodological intervention with broader relevance. It suggests that the social and labor rights that expanded around the world in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries must be studied not only from the vantage of legal or political history, but as themselves questions of social and labor history. Making these rights real depended on socially reproductive work that has often been marginal in accounts of industrialization and economic development. It is impossible to understand the political economy of social and economic rights without understanding women’s work.

Diversified farming systems appear to be one means of meeting the sustainability challenges facing livestock farming systems and of facilitating the renewal of future generations of farmers in a context of climatic, economic and social change. However, although work seems to be an essential issue for livestock farms, few studies have explored the impact of on-farm diversity on work. This study aims to fill the gap in our understanding of the various ways in which on-farm diversity affects work. We applied a framework combining six dimensions of work with three forms of on-farm diversity (diversity of management entities, diversity of farming activities, diversity of workers) to six studies that had been conducted previously on livestock farms. Our results highlight a wide range of links between on-farm diversity and work. We show that on-farm diversity affects various dimensions of work in multiple ways, which can be both positive and negative. For example, while there may not be a strict and clear relation between on-farm diversity and workloads, diversity provides flexibility for organizing the distribution of working time. Moreover, on-farm diversity seems to more frequently reinforce the meaning of work for farmers. Our results also show that there are multiple interactions between the six dimensions of work studied. Our study points to the need for a comprehensive approach to understanding the multifaceted and interconnected nature of work dimensions in diversified farming systems. Further research is recommended to explore these relationships more deeply to support sustainable and attractive diversified farming systems.

“Imperial Crucible” tells the story of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) from the company’s founding in Pittsburgh in 1888 through the 1950s. Although scholars have long contended that American multinational corporations played a pivotal role in the industrialization of the United States, the building of a global working class, and the transformation of European empires, they have tended to see these stories as distinct, rather than interconnected. In contrast, Imperial Crucible focuses on a single firm to draw together the political-economic, working-class, and imperial history of American business. What the industrialists behind Alcoa built, I argue, was not a multinational but a transimperial corporation.

This article considers a significant but overlooked set of policy developments in the latter half of the twentieth century: the extension of collective bargaining rights to most health care workers, many of whom were formally excluded for three decades under the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments. Drawing on primary sources including archival records, an exhaustive review of congressional testimony, and rulings from the quasijudicial agency governing private sector industrial relations, this article shows that health care workers did so in two interrelated processes. First, in coordination with the civil rights movement, workers mobilized and used both disruptive and legal social movement tactics. Second, in doing so they drew the state into and revealed its position in the collective bargaining process between workers and health institutions, facilitating what is conceptualized as cross-domain policy feedback. Cross-domain policy feedback occurs when a policy in one domain (e.g., public health spending) influences the politics of a policy in a seemingly separate one (e.g., labor and employment relations). Such effects, this article suggests, are likely to occur when a policy is relatively large in scale, implicates actors with a diverse set of interests, and offers significant ambiguity and discretion in its implementation. Empirically, this article is the first to chart the institutionalization of collective bargaining rights for health care workers, among the largest group of private sector employees in the postindustrial economy. It also offers a new theoretical and conceptual framework through which to study the ways by which public policies reshape political dynamics—an enduring research agenda for students of American politics and policy.

As labor in the capitalist system practically tripled to some three billion workers, solidary organizations of labor simultaneously dwindled in relative size and power. This is true globally but also for the historical core countries. While this is a paradox, it is not a contradiction. Capital is a (spatialized) social relationship. The globalization of capital since the 1970s has shifted the power relations with localized labor fundamentally in favor of capital, as Charles Tilly noted in this journal almost thirty years ago. Over time, power balances within capitalist states, and between capitalist states and transnationalizing capital, have reflected that basic class-relational shift. This article explains why the globalizing cycle of weakened labor may now be reversing.