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Seeking
2 more papers to make up this panel. We are particularly interested in papers exploring
regions across the Global South:
Asia, South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East.
Call for Papers: AAG 2016 Annual Meeting, San Francisco 29 March - 2 April 2016
(Please forward as appropriate. Apologies for cross-posting.)
Transforming Regimes of (Re)production:
Gender, Labour Migration, and the City in the Global South.
Please note extended deadline for abstracts and geographical focus
Organisers: Hannah Schling (King's College London) and Tom Cowan (King's College London).
This session seeks to extend and complicate debates within planetary urbanisation (Brenner and Schmid 2011), to examine how labour migrants, in the context of transforming regimes of gender and industrial production across the Global South, (re)produce and transform the normative ‘urban’, and what implications this has for the form and type of politics engaged with at sites of production and reproduction.
In the advent of globalisation, countries across the Global South have undertaken well documented processes of urbanisation accompanying new processes of industrialisation, which have transformed vast areas of agricultural land into urban and industrial property, and integrated vast numbers of people into an urban and industrial workforce. In the process, workers’ means of reproduction, and the gendered relations implicated in them, have been reconfigured. While urbanisation has brought sites of production and reproduction closer together, many labour migrants and their households continue to live lives stretched across the rural and the urban, with complex and diverse migration patterns structured by both waged work and unwaged reproduction. These emerging geographies of labour have serious implications for the forms of politics engaged in at sites of production and reproduction.
Focusing in on labour migration, the panel seeks case-studies and empirical research which will examine how borders between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ are produced and transformed by workers mobility between sites of work, reproduction and subsistence. Further, the session will engage with the dialectical relationship between the regimes of industrial and urban production and the gendered relations and discourses in which migrant workers are entangled. We seek to address the question of how the gendering of work, labour mobility, and workers’ political identities intersects with the contemporary form of industrial and urban production, whilst remaining appreciative of the heterogenous, fragmentary ways of being in the world which interrupt/resist/consent to contemporary capital’s abstraction. Finally, the session hopes to engage with questions surrounding the agency of migrant labour in relation to contemporary forms of industrial production, asking when and to what extent do emerging conditions of labour become a contradiction for capital?
We request papers which seek to:
Offer analytical insight into relationships between modes of resistance and emerging forms of mobility, gender, and workers social reproduction
Challenge/disrupt/modify normative understandings of gender, labour migration and the “rural-urban” within critical geography
Offer site-specific engagement with the relationship between labour migration and emerging gendered and industrial regimes
Examine the continued relevance of existing theories of labour within the context of changing (gender/industrial/urban) relations of capital; such theories may include: feminisation of labour under globalisation; labour precarity; right to the city
Explore migrant workers’ active consent and contestation to contemporary regimes of social reproduction and industrial production.
Please send abstracts of 250 words to both Hannah Schling ([log in to unmask]) and Tom Cowan ([log in to unmask]) by Friday 23rd October 2015. Successful applicants will be contacted by the 26th October 2015. Once selected, participants must pay the registration fee and submit their abstracts online at the AAG by October 29th 2015.
References:
Brenner and Schmid (2011) "Planetary urbanization." Urban constellations 10-13