Pedagogies of Unlearning: Continuities and changes in how domestic workers unlearn cheapening in their everyday work life in expatriate households in Dar es Salaam.

African feminist scholarships (Fakier and Cock 2009, Britwum 2016, Mbilinyi 2016 Ossome 2021) have pointed at the necessity of broadening the theoretical and empirical scope of Social Reproduction research. In particular, the necessity to take into account historicizing perspectives which challenge perceptions which construct indigenous females as ‘instrumental vehicles for the reproduction of race and capital’ only (Tamale 2020: 4). Integral to this is challenging the pedagogical processes which produce such conceptions. Against this backdrop, I will outline research results which centre how women domestic workers who work in expatriate households in Dar es Salaam ‘learn’ (i.e meaning making processes) and ‘unlearn’ (i.e make a practical critique) (Mählck 2024 forthcoming) domestic work. This means interrogating how domestic workers learn and unlearn gender, race and class when they work in expatriate households and in their everyday ‘life’s work’ (Mbilinyi 2016, Katz 2004). A multimethod and multidimensional framework (Mählck 2016) is used to analyse contemporary oral history interviews with domestic workers (n =45) and colonial narratives (1940-1960) of gender and labour. This implies analysing interviews in relation to built environment, archival research and historical research. The results point at the various ways in which domestic workers in Dar es Salaam, historically and today, negotiate and sometimes resist and transform relations of production, individually and collectively. In this aspect this presentation shed new light on continuities and changes in the complex experiences of life-making under global capitalism and point at the necessity of pluralising SR across geographic spaces.