AAG 2006 1st Call for Papers

Household from a global perspective: multiple economies, labor, and
coping strategies

Convenors: 	Marianna Pavlovskaya, Hunter College, CUNY, USA
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		Helen Jarvis, University of Newcastle, UK
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Conference details: The 2006 Annual Meeting of the Association of
American Geographers, Chicago, Illinois, March 7-11, 2006
(http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/call_for_papers/call_for_papers1.html
)

Session abstract: 
The household is a valuable lens through which to view contemporary
trends of social transformation and economic transition. Diverse
economic processes operating across various scales - from global to
household - intersect in its daily life. Household members engage in
these "multiple economies" in order to secure income, domestic
reproduction, raise children, and care for the disabled, frail, and
sick. They work formally and informally, in many economic spaces - both
outside and inside their homes, do paid and unpaid work, produce and
exchange increasing amounts of goods, services, and emotional care.
Household research emphasises the integrated nature of people's everyday
lives and the way unequal distribution of a whole range of resources,
beyond those recognized by capitalist economy and measured by GDP,
mediates individual and household well being. 

The 'globalization' of production strikingly tends to bring about a
'localization' of social reproduction across a wide range of national
and regional contexts. First, as Nancy Folbre (2000) points out, as
'little welfare states' households increasingly take responsibility for
a host of services (education, health, pension security and the like)
once considered the responsibility of the state. Extreme creativity can
be observed in the way they stitch together a patch-work of arrangements
to ensure young children, disabled and frail elderly relatives are cared
for round the clock and all are clothed and fed. Second, increased costs
associated with the neo-liberal economic growth further undermine the
ability of households to purchase these and other services at the
market. Third, in addition to greater dependency on global economic
dynamics, increased transnational experience of households stretches
their multiple economies to global scale. The cost of privately
undertaking welfare services disproportionately falls to women and is
especially high for ethnic minority women according to a transnational
'care chain' of class and gender relations. 

While interest in the hidden economies of informal income generation,
unpaid domestic labour and networks of reciprocity and exchange has
grown, research tends to remain area and discipline specific. We would
like to bridge household research underway across third world,
post-socialist and advanced post-industrial capitalist economies, and
place it in the context of the economic transformations taking place
globally and locally in those economies. 

The purpose of this session is to generate dialogue between household
researchers and identify common ground, shared experience, and
differences among world households recognized as a site of multiple
economies, coping strategies and identities.  Papers might consider, but
not be limited to, any of the following themes:

-	Intersections of paid and unpaid work in various economic
systems
-	Transnational and local systems of personal ties
-	Holistic conceptions of consumption, production and
social-reproduction
-	The complexity and contradictions of daily economic struggles
-	Strategies households adopt to cope with economic crisis and
rampant privatization/ neoliberalism
-	Intersections of gender, class, and ethnicity in multiple
economies
-	How capitalist are the households in neo-liberal economies?
-	Geographies and scales of household economies: from global to
local
-	Connecting multiple economic spaces of households 
-	Households, states, markets, and non-markets

If you are interested in participating in this session, please submit a
title and short abstract (must not exceed 250 words) to either of the
organizers by 30 September 2005.