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Mercedes Arbaiza (Bilbao, 1963) is a historian who earned her PhD in History from the University of the Basque Country (UPV\/EHU) in 1994, after which she gained pre-doctoral experience at the Department of Economics and Business of Pompeu Fabra University (UPF).Arbaiza has been a tenured professor at the Department of Contemporary History of the UPV\/EHU since February 1997, where she currently delivers lectures on social history and industrial relations to undergraduates at the Faculty of Industrial Relations and Social Work. She also lectures on subjects relating to the construction of modern societies from a gender perspective in different Master\u2019s degree programmes of the UPV\/EHU:
\u2022 Interuniversity MA in Contemporary History, \u2018The Contribution of Gender to Social Construction\u2019 (together with Miren Llona).
\u2022 MA in Feminist and Gender Studies, \u2018Feminism, Subject and Modernity\u2019.
\u2022 MA in Human Resource and Employment Management, \u2018Gender Politics and Employment\u2019 (together with Isabel Abella).
Arbaiza teaches the \u2018Circulation of Affections and Emotions II\u2019 module of the Master\u2019s degree programme \u2018Artistic Practices and Cultural Studies. Bodies, Affections and Territory\u2019, organised by the University of Navarre and the Huarte Contemporary Arts Centre.
Since 2001, she has formed part of the \u2018Modern Experiences\u2019 Consolidated Research Group of the UPV-EHU and is currently the principal investigator of the \u2018Modern Experience\u2019 Research Group of the Basque University System (IT 1784-22, 2022\u20132025), recognised by the Basque government as a group of excellence since 2019.
Arbaiza has performed her research in two stages. From 1990 to 2000, she formed part of the research team led by Manuel Gonz\u00e1lez Portilla in the fields of historical demography and social and economic history. In this context, she defended her PhD thesis in which she reviewed modernity in the Basque Country from a longue dur\u00e9e perspective (1825\u20131936), through a set of social practices that were considered to be \u2018private\u2019. In her desire to democratise the historical discipline, Arbaiza addressed social and cultural changes by analysing demographic and family regimes, land and tangible asset conveyance systems, the work experiences of men and women, their mobility patterns and their access to resources, depending on the forms of hierarchical or egalitarian authority.
Since 2001, Arbaiza has focused her research on reconsidering the object of study of modernity, drawing from the main thesis of the \u2018Modern Experience\u2019 research group of which she forms part. Giving priority to the cultural sphere as an example of subjectivity and human action, she has approached the issue of identities and the labour economy from a gender perspective. She has also broadened the field of the production of meaning of modern experience, placing the spotlight on two noteworthy lines of research: a) A history of the constitution of feminine identities in relation to labour in Spain, in the framework of the history of the formation of the working class in modern societies; and b) A feminist epistemological critique of the premises of the labour economy and the content of its categories.<\/p>\n