Eszter Kollar (KU Leuven)
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- When:
- 14 April 2026 12 h 30 – 14 h 15
- Where:
-
University of Montreal
Room 422, Department of Philosophy, 2910 Édouard-Montpetit Blvd., Montréal QC
You are cordially invited to the second conference in the Invisible Labour lecture series organized by the Ésope Chair, in collaboration with the Centre de recherche en éthique. For this second event, we are pleased to welcome Eszter Kollar (KU Leuven), who will give a talk entitled “On the Normative Significance of Colonial Legacies for Justice in Labour Migration.” The conference will be held in English.
The event will take place on April 14, 2026, from 12:30 p.m. to 2:15 p.m., in room 422 of the University of Montreal’s Department of Philosophy (2910 Édouard-Montpetit Boulevard, Montreal, QC). Please register via the following link.
Abstract
Colonial systems of labour organization, structured through racial hierarchies and differentiated migration schemes, re-emerge in contemporary labour immigration regimes that differentiate migrants by skills and rights. How this resurfacing should be properly accounted for in normative theorizing, and what its normative implications are, remains insufficiently understood in contemporary political philosophy. This paper aims to address that gap. First, I argue that a historically informed mapping of the structural processes of colonialism and capitalism enables theories of migration justice to capture a previously overlooked dimension of injustice in today’s differentiated labour immigration regimes: namely, that racialization as skill devaluation is a key form of labour control that is reinforced through contemporary border control regimes and their stratified migration systems. Second, I argue that a historically grounded understanding of injustice and labour deepens our normative grasp of what is unjust about contemporary labour migration and border control. It paves the way for rearticulating the normative problem of differentiated skills and rights through borders as a seemingly race-neutral, meritocratic organization of labour that, in fact, perpetuates a global racialized hierarchy. The injustice of differentiated labour migration regimes thus lies not merely in the restriction of migrant workers’ rights that conflict with liberal-democratic principles of social and political equality. Contemporary borders are a crucial site of global structural injustice, whereby present-day labour migration regimes systematically constrain the rights, mobility, and opportunities of racialized workers from the Global South, devalue their labour through border control, and expose them to persistent conditions of exploitation and marginalization.
The Lecture Series on Invisible Work is an initiative by Denise Celentano (University of Montreal), holder of the Aesop Chair, in collaboration with the Centre de recherche en éthique.
For more information, please contact Denise Celentano at the following address: denise.celentano@umontreal.ca.
General information about the Lecture Series: The concept of invisible work describes the forms of work that fall outside the traditional model of waged employment and are not recognized, in a monetary and/or symbolic sense, to the point that even their nature as “work” is often disputed. Invisible work takes place behind the scenes of more recognized and valued work. Given its liminal nature with respect to long-established categories, it serves as a prism for exploring a number of issues, from recognition to social segregation to the critical questioning of the normative assumptions behind what is supposed to count as “work.” The notion of invisible work promises to shed light, as it were, on the mechanisms of valorization that operate behind social cooperation. This series of lectures, open to the public, explores the subject from both a philosophical and interdisciplinary perspective.
