Information Officer, International Labour Standards Department

'88 » Ph.D. in History, Johns Hopkins » Information Officer, International Labour Standards Department, International Labour Organization, Geneva

I work mostly with lawyers and economists, and perhaps for this very reason my history background has been essential. Most of my colleagues believe their legal or economic paradigms are universal, “the” answer to today’s and tomorrow's social problems. We historians, of course, view everything as an expression of politics in its time, and it's often up to me to inject the critical look at what others see as a universal paradigm of development. For example, few people I work with realize the changing relevance and meaning of their work on freedom of association during and after the Cold War. In other words, my history training has given me the instinct to ferret out the political meaning of things which other disciplines take as being an objective truth.