By Nurçin İleri. This essay centres on a series of photographs, which I first came across at an auction in November 2020. These black and white images depict Istanbul’s first urban scale power plant, the Silahtarağa campus and extension of the grid to the city in the early 1910s.
By Svitlana Pidoprygora. In the autumn of 2013, Euromaidan started in Ukraine as a response to the authorities’ decision to end European integration processes and focus on the Customs Union with the Russian Federation. Thousands of people went to protests in Kyiv and the central squares of other Ukrainian cities, demonstrating society’s support for the European vector of development and protesting against the arbitrariness of the authorities.
By André Bank. Internationally, the standing and profile of Tunisia’s General Labor Union (French: ‘Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail’, UGTT) has been shaped by three broad images: The first image emanated from the UGTT’s active participation in the so-called Jasmine Revolution in 2011, when its leadership and members protested the ‘ancien régime’ of President Zine Abidin Ben Ali.
By Alyssa Miller. In a 2012 essay published on the webzine Nawaat, sociologist Hela Yousfi alleged that the Ennahda party – then head of Tunisia’s transitional government and dominant partner in the ‘Troika’ coalition – was surreptitiously attacking the UGTT by dumping garbage in front of its regional branches.
By Rick Halpern. The first decades of the twentieth century were a remarkable period for heavy industry across much of North America and Europe. Mass production of goods such as rubber and steel – and consumer products like automobiles and radios – reached unprecedented levels.
By Hala Auji and Nurçin İleri. Capitalism’s far-reaching social, industrial, and cultural implications on the socio-political aspects of production, labor, and class struggle are well-documented. Scholarship on labor has emphasized the social and economic aspects of the capitalist economy and the history of working classes in a global context.
By Rick Halpern. The 1930s were a formative period for documentary photography in the United States. The twin phenomena of the Great Depression and the emergence of a militant workers’ movement gave photographers interested in the working class a surfeit of material to shoot.
By Barbara Mittler. No Handshakes, no Hugs and no Bises: The global call for social distancing has significantly changed rules and gestures of conduct and etiquette that had travelled the world for centuries. The handshake is one such example.
By Yaprak Melike Uyar. Due to globally unified measures for controlling the Covid-19 pandemic, it has been almost one year since musicians have not met their audiences.
In this interview with Katarzyna Falęcka, the Lebanese filmmaker and artist Akram Zaatari discusses his practice based on collecting and studying photography.
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research is a platform for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are interested in transregional exchange and research on current issues. TRAFO is the blog of the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) and the Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (Bonn).
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