Dr. Carolyn Taratko

since 2024
Head of a junior research group as part of the DFG Emmy Noether programme

since 2023
Research associate at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam

2020 – 2023
Research assistant at the University of Erfurt, DFG Research Unit "Voluntariness"

Summer semester 2020
Research assistant at the Chair for the History of Knowledge, University of Konstanz

2019 – 2020
Max Kade Postdoctoral Fellow at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin

2019
Doctorate at Vanderbilt University (USA) under the supervision of Professor David Blackbourn: "Feeding Germany: Food, Science, and the Problem of Scarcity, 1871-1923"

2019
Visiting Fellowship, Leibniz Institute of European History (Mainz)

2017
Predoctoral Research Fellow, Dept. I, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

2017
Visiting Doctoral Fellowship, German Historical Institute, Washington DC

2016 – 2017
IIE Fulbright Research Fellowship, Berlin

2014
Council for European Studies Pre-Dissertation Fellowship

2014
M.A. in History at Vanderbilt University (USA)

2008 – 2012
B.A. in History and French Literature at Trinity College (USA)

Voluntariness, Decolonisation, and the Regulation of Labor in (Post) Colonial Ghana

This project analyzed voluntariness during a period of decolonisation, thereby focusing on an often-overlooked political principle of (post) colonial governance By drawing on the example of the British Gold Coast/Ghana, it explores the ways in which voluntary practices shaped the political and social order during the transition from late colonial "indirect rule" to independence. In doing so, the project also explores the changing significance of voluntariness as a norm and resource in this particular period.

It examines the appeal to participate actively as citizens in the making of a new Ghana and a new Africa. In particular, it focuses on changes to employment schemes and the reliance on labour brigades such as the Builder's Brigade in shaping new post-colonial subjects and citizens. These employment schemes were designed to realize important development projects, but also proved instrumental in shaping and disciplining citizens in newly independent Ghana. In this sense, the project explores the way that notions of work and occupation contributed to self-mobilization in a postcolonial regime that claimed to rule for and by the people.

The project investigates the colonial histories of organized forms of voluntary practices, as well as their many linkages with pan-African movements on the one hand, and the many newly founded socialist states on the other, focusing mainly on the German Democratic Republic. While focusing on the close ties between decolonisation and voluntariness, the project makes a significant contribution to the research group's aim of decoupling voluntariness from its generally assumed liberal genealogy in the Western world.

The project draws on governmentality studies by asking how humans are governed by voluntariness, as well as how they are shaped as future political subjects through a means of extrinsic and intrinsic incentives and regulation. It sets out to examine how ideas and practices of management and self-management were implemented in a postcolonial setting. Taking up contemporary studies in social anthropology, the project explores the ways in which voluntariness and work became objects of social scientific inquiry in the 1950s and 60s. Against this backdrop, it investigates whether these studies also contributed to reshaping political practices.

• History of Knowledge
• Environmental History
• History of European Colonialism in Africa
• Modern European History (Germany, France)

"Autarky from the Ground Up. Settlement Science and Agricultural Independence in Weimar Germany, in: Zahra, Tara/ Becker, Peter (eds.), A World of Contradictions. Globalisation and Deglobalisation in Interwar Europe, American Historical Review Forum, Oxford 2023, pp. 841-862. open access

Balancing the Books. Valuing Household Work in Weimar Germany, in: Gender & History 34, 2022, pp. 752-770. open access

Feeding Germany. Food, Science, and the Problem of Scarcity, 1871-1923, Nashville 2019.

with Amalia Ribi Forclaz, Experimenting with Scientific Management. New Approaches to Agricultural Labour in the Twentieth Century, in: Unger, Corinna/ van de Grift, Liesbeth/ Müller, Dietmar (eds.), Managing the Land. Rural and Agricultural Actors in Twentieth Century Europe, Berlin 2023.

Settlement and Colonisation in the German Moorlands, 1871-1933, in: Perspectives on Europe, 2015, pp. 128-132.

"Dominik Richert," in: Daniel, Ute/ Gatrelle, Peter/ Janz, Oliver/ Jones, Heather/ Keene, Jennifer/ Kramer, Alan/ Nasson, Bill (eds.), 1914-1918 Online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, Berlin 2018. open access