Life's Work in crisis: social reproduction and the contemporary moment 2011 Annual Meeting of the Association of Geographers, Seattle, April 12-16
Session Organizers: Kendra Strauss (University of Glasgow) and Katie Meehan (University of Oregon)
Our contemporary moment is defined by crises in the relations of both production and social reproduction. Governments enact drastic cuts to social spending and welfare services in the name of deficit reduction, states ‘get tough’ on immigration but not financial profiteering, and oil gushes into the Gulf of Mexico but BP cannot be censured because of the effect on UK pensions. At a moment such as this the dialectic between economic and social reproduction needs critical attention and radical interpretation.
In their 2004 collection on geographies of social reproduction, Life’s Work, Katharyne Mitchell, Sallie Marston and Cindi Katz pointed out the necessity of problematising “the very categories of production and social reproduction, which determine the nature and value of “work” in far too limited ways”. In doing so they were drawing explicitly on Katz’s characterisation of the “messy, fleshy” aspects of material life. In this session, we aim to build on these debates to explore how new and emerging articulations of materiality--such as Jane Bennett’s recent conceptualisation of “vibrant matter”--can be brought into conversation with critical and radical approaches to the production/reproduction binary. In this sense we seek to understand sites of social reproduction without pre-imagining categories of social difference, which include the full range of material beings and objects (human, nonhuman, objects, subjects, assemblages, etc).
We believe the contemporary juncture, with its multiple discourses of social, economic and environmental crisis, is an important one for re-focusing on social reproduction. We encourage contributions that challenge, or identify lacunae within, existing theorisations and applications of the concept of social reproduction.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
Social reproduction, flexible labour markets and ‘workfare’
The role of assemblages in social reproduction
Social reproduction and the environment
Migration, immigration and new mobilities
The intensification of social reproduction and new forms of precariousness
Care, work and labour in the era of non-standard employment
Social reproduction, finance and the ‘credit crunch’
Geographies of the diverse economy
New materialist ontologies of life’s work
Abstracts should be sent to both Kendra Strauss ([log in to unmask]) and Katie Meehan ([log in to unmask]) by October 15, 2010. Please feel free to email us with any questions.
