Emerging Scholars' Forum at the BAA Conference 2025

Discussions about the future of work have been fueled by the challenges, problems, and opportunities arising from hyper-globalization, forced and voluntary mobilities, digitization, robotization, AI, as well as climate and ecological transformations. National and international institutions are grappling with what labor should and will look like in the decades and centuries to come. At times, such discussions are linked to a critical assessment of the future of capitalism, ideas of degrowth, of societies and economic systems beyond capitalist foundations. Current academic and public discussions are also about new forms of labor and prosperity, about entrepreneurship and innovation, thus rethinking and reconfiguring older utopias.

In five sessions and three keynote lectures, the Bavarian American Academy’s Annual Conference 2025 will explore a variety of themes and questions related to those timely debates about “Labor, Unions, and the Future of Work.” Beyond that, and independent of its specific topic, the conference includes an Emerging Scholars’ Forum, where doctoral candidates affiliated with Bavarian universities get the opportunity to present work-in-progress to an interested expert audience.

Application Criteria
Specifically, we invite doctoral researchers at Bavarian universities to submit proposals including an abstract (300 words) along with a short biographical note (100 words).

While we welcome proposals relating to the conference topic, such a connection is not mandatory. Abstracts will be selected solely based on their academic quality. However, research projects need to be situated in a discipline represented in the Bavarian American Academy, preferably in the fields of history, political sciences, sociology, economics, law, area studies, geography, American literary and cultural studies, or art history.

Submission
Please submit your application materials by March 15, 2025 to both Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schmidt (kerstin.schmidt@lmu.de) and Dr. Christoph Straub (straub@amerika-akademie.de).

Photo: BAA Seminar 2024 ©Bavarian American Academy