Apologies for cross-postings.
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Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting,
Tampa, FL, April 8-12th - 2014
Intimate Ecologies of Social Reproduction
Session organizer: Paul Jackson (Dartmouth College)
This session looks to build upon the long history of marxist-feminist debates on social reproduction to explore the more "biological" — fleshy and messy (Katz 2001) — aspects of everyday life through political ecology and its various subfields (urban political ecology, feminist political ecology, and political ecology of health). How is the non-human intimately integrated into social reproduction? Intimacy signals both the politics of close proximity (breathing, eating, toxins, viruses, exchanging fluids) and the emotional relationships with others (love, solidarity, power relations). David Graeber (2012) recently suggested that we recast the concept of social reproduction to be the “production of human beings…producing each other…[that] cannot be reduced to standard categories of political economy.” The notion of human beings producing-each-other reformulates the interconnected spheres of production and reproduction. At the same time this concept helps to make explicit the collective nature of disease, hunger, shelter, knowledge, thirst, technology, and work. As "lively capital" (Sunder Rajan 2012) increasingly mediates these intimate ecologies, what politics are emerging at the intersection of investment and survival?
Both theoretical and empirical studies are welcome. Themes can include, but are not limited to:
- biological and ecological processes of producing-each-other
- the ecology closest in
- toxic environments and environmental justice
- internalizing the environment (food, pharmaceuticals, breathing, etc)
- producing intimate urban life
- survival strategies
- intimate resources and economies
- infectious forms of life
- living with chronic conditions
- intimate entanglements of production and social reproduction
- uneven intimate ecologies
I invite potential participants to send their abstracts (300 words) to Paul Jackson (
[log in to unmask]) by October 15th, 2013.
+ Graeber, D (2012) in conversation with David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, Against the Grain, May 22nd 2012.
+ Katz, C (2001) Vagabond capitalism and the necessity of social reproduction. Antipode 33: 709–728
+ Pratt, G and Rosner, V (2012) The global and the intimate: feminism in our time. New York: Columbia University Press
+ Sunder Rajan, K (ed.) (2012) Lively capital: biotechnologies, ethics, and governance in global markets. Durham: Duke University Press