Life's Work in crisis II: social reproduction and the contemporary moment
RGS-IBG international Conference: 31st August - 2nd September 2011 Sponsored by the Women in Geography Study Group.
Session Organizers: Kendra Strauss (University of Glasgow) and Katie Meehan (University of Oregon)
This session follows on from the two we have organised for the AAG Annual Conference in Seattle in April 2011. We are particularly interested in hearing from feminist scholars who do research on, or in, Europe and the Global South and who might have been interested in, but unable to contribute to, those sessions. This is, we believe, a particularly important time to revisit the issues raised in Life’s Work, and we will be actively pursuing ways of publishing the collected papers from the AAG and RGS sessions.
Our contemporary moment is defined by crises in both the relations of production and of 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. Feminist scholars have sought to highlight the dialectical interplay of labour and [unpaid] work, countering the sublimation of the latter, and the role played by the social construction of gender. At a moment such as this the dialectic between economic and social reproduction needs further 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 February 7th, 2011. Please also feel free to email us with any questions.
Dr. Kendra Strauss
Research Associate in Urban Political Economy
Department of Geographical & Earth Sciences
University of Glasgow
East Quadrangle, University Avenue Glasgow G12 8QQ UK