Pluralising Social Reproduction Approaches

The work of care and SR has never been as visible as during the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath, when the importance of nature, value and costs of care and social provisioning became apparent (Mezzadri 2022; Stevano et al. 2022; Akhter et al. 2022). The pandemic also revealed how deep inequalities in access to resources between and within the Global North and South differently impacts people’s ability to undertake SR in different parts of the world. SR offers an important theoretical framework for understanding the gendered division of labour that underpins who does paid/unpaid social reproductive work, how it is valued, and the resources allocated to supporting it (see for example, Bhattacharaya, 2017). However, most of these debates are theorised from experiences and localities in the Global North. This Workshop aims to explore what current SR debates can learn from the experiences of the Global South as well as from engaging with intersectional perspectives to develop new conceptual and methodological ways of thinking about social reproduction. We seek to build on existing debates about SR, to pluralise their theoretical premises by working across disciplinary boundaries, to expand the underpinning empirical cases, and develop new methodologies to build a global progressive agenda able to speak to the challenges that processes of life-making are facing worldwide. This global reframing through pluralising SRA will enable us to also re-imagine policy initiatives at a multi-scalar level.

Akhter, S., Elias, J. and Rai, S. 2022. Being cared for in the context of crisis: Austerity, COVID-19 and Racialized politics. Social Politics 29 (4), 1121–1143, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxac035 Bhattacharaya, Tithi (2017). Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press. Mezzadri, A. (2022). Social reproduction and pandemic neoliberalism: Planetary crises and the reorganisation of life, work and death. Organization, 29(3), 379–400. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084221074042 Stevano, Sara, Franz, Tobias, Dafermos, Yannis and Van Waeyenberge, Elisa (2021). 'COVID-19 and Crises of Capitalism: Intensifying Inequalities and Global Responses.' Canadian Journal of Development Studies /Revue canadienne d’études du développement, 42 (1/2), 1-17.

1: Framing: How does SR account for experiences of life-making in global capitalism; why does it need pluralising?
2: Conceptualising: What do we understand by SR; how does this relate to other conceptual frameworks, such as care?
3: Locating: How, if at all, does location matter when it comes to SR?
4: Researching: What methods/methodologies can build alternative practices of knowledge building/creation on SR?

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