From burden to protagonist: Renewing conceptualisations of social reproduction through attention to marginalised children

Questions of social reproduction – or how lives are made, and labour power is replenished – strike at the heart of contemporary societies. Social Reproduction Approaches (SRA) demonstrate that this labour is existentially necessary but inequitably distributed and increasingly privatised or externalised in neoliberal regimes of accumulation. Children are hyper-present in SRA with childbirth and the physical, practical, emotional, and moral dimensions of children’s care often cited as the most exhausting and costly aspects of reproductive labour. This is particularly the case as services like childcare are typically unaffordable, inaccessible, or linked to conditionalities for marginalised groups. Despite their centrality to SRA, the ways children themselves may engage in life-making labour are typically obscured. Yet, the scant scholarship on the political economy of childhood reveals children’s participation in reproductive labour, arguing it is obfuscated simply because it is done by children. Childhood is hegemonically constructed as a protected, institutionalised, and future-oriented realm, part of its radical restructuring in neoliberal societies. To date, however, important insights about the ways that figurations of childhood and children themselves are imbricated in social reproductive labour are primarily micro-scalar and empirical. They focus on the necessity of children’s contributions to the sustenance of life in crisis contexts in the global South or in the absence of adults. This risks framing children’s reproductive labour as an exception rather than a question for empirical exploration and theoretical elaboration. In response, in this paper I offer two contributions to efforts to pluralise SRA. First, I heed recent critiques in childhood studies which point out that attending to children’s lives in the global South simply as empirical exemplars of difference may broaden understanding of the multiplicity of childhood, but this does little to rectify the (neo)colonial terms whereby Southern childhoods are rendered ‘non-normative’ and undesirable. Instead, I consider what theoretical and ethical insights children’s reproductive labour in the global South and in contexts of marginalisation and multiplicity in the North have to offer to SRA. Second, I move beyond a view of children as the subjects, objects, or burdens of social reproduction, centring them as protagonists and partners in life-making labour. In so doing, I build on intersectional insights about the gendered, classed, and racialised characteristics of reproductive labour, adding an understanding of the way that generation – or the socio-political positioning of humans as children, youth, adults, the elderly, and so forth – operates to invisibilise the expropriation and exploitation of children vis a vis the reproduction of labour power. Finally, and in conclusion, I argue that heeding the ways children’s varied contributions to life’s labour are understood, valued, and relationally practiced does not only promise renewed conceptualisations of SRA but this can offer glimpses into spaces which accumulation regimes fail to conquer and where their fragilities lie.