CFP: Voix ouvrière / Workers’ Voice

The labour movement in Canada, as elsewhere in the world, is facing significant challenges in a context marked by increasing wealth inequality, environmental crisis, heightened repression of dissent, as well as growing threats to the rights of association and of assembly. The rise of the far right is prompting a resurgence of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and a myriad of other attacks against marginalized groups.

To help address these pressing issues, as Silke Neunsinger notes in a forthcoming piece in  Labour / Le Travail, “labour history expands the horizon of political possibility by preserving experiences through which workers have confronted uncertainty, organised collectively, and imagined social alternatives.”[1] Echoing Neunsinger’s call for a “collaborative and co-produced” approach to labour history, we believe researchers should consider how we can act as partners in sharing past experiences of mobilization and the knowledge generated from them to serve as a catalyst for social transformation. Beyond the academic world, social movements generate essential knowledge that deserves to be documented, not only for historical memory, but above all so that it can be adapted and implemented in other activist contexts.

To this end, we seek papers for a themed issue of the journal Labour / Le Travail coedited by Lauren Laframboise and Benoit Marsan that will explore the theme of Voix ouvrière / Workers’ Voice. Articles, in French or English, will be between 10,000 and 12,000 words (including footnotes) and may be methodological, theoretical, historiographical in nature or deal with past or present research or creations highlighting the "Workers’ Voice" and its dissemination. Contributions that mobilize a history-from-below approach, oral history, workers' inquiry, or public history, or projects of an artistic, cultural, or collaborative nature, are particularly welcome. We also invite non-academic contributions from individuals involved in unions, community-based and grassroots organizations, as well as other activist contexts.

To express interest, please submit a provisional title and a brief description of your proposed article by 30 September 2026 to the following email addresses:

lauren.laframboise@concordia.ca, marsan.benoit.2@uqam.ca

The submission deadline for full draft articles will be 1 December 2026. More details on submission guidelines are available at https://lltjournal.ca/index.php/llt/about/submissions.

About Lauren Laframboise and Benoit Marsan:

Lauren Laframboise is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling in the Department of History at Concordia University. She is also a labour organizer with the Concordia Research and Education Workers’ Union (CREW-CSN).

Benoit Marsan is an associate professor and lecturer in the Department of History at Université du Québec à Montréal and lecturer in the Department of Industrial Relations at Université du Québec en Outaouais. He is also a labour relations officer at the Syndicat des professeures et professeurs enseignants de l’UQAM (SPPE-CSN).

[1] Silke Neunsinger, “History for Future Struggles: Labour History, Collective Experience, and the Politics of Possibility,” Labour / Le travail, forthcoming.