Pluralising Social Reproduction Approaches

The work of care and social reproduction has never been as important as in the aftermath of the pandemic when we have experienced as a society the importance of the nature, value and costs of care and social provisioning. At the same time the pandemic also revealed how deep inequalities between the global north and south affected the resources, access and mitigations, impacting differently the extent of people’s suffering and recovery in different parts of the world. By working across disciplinary boundaries, the paper will draw on existing debates on social reproduction, yet pluralising their theoretical premises, disciplinary boundaries and empirical reach, to suggest a global progressive agenda able to speak to the challenges that processes of life-making are facing worldwide. This global reframing through pluralising SRA, we hope, will enable us to also re-imagine policy initiatives locationally, and at a multi-scalar level. The paper will address pluralising SRA in three registers: address social reproduction approaches in the following ways: 1) Locationally - engaging with concrete analyses from multiple locations of the world, and in comparative perspective 2) Inter-disciplinarily - through a commitment to drawing from various disciplines and fields of studies 3) Contextually - with reference also to histories of colonial/neo-colonial relations that continue to cast a long shadow over theory building.