CFP: AAG 2017, Boston, April 5-9
Organizing at the Intersection of Reproductive and Environmental Justice
Organizers: Jennifer Gaddis, University of Wisconsin-Madison & Amy Coplen, Portland State University
Adjusted submission date: Tuesday, October 25, at 5 pm PST.

Capitalism relies on the devalued reproductive labor of women, people of color, and low-income communities as well as “free capital” provided by nature. In the past 50 years neoliberal policies have increased the precarity of life on Earth--from the struggle to earn a livable wage in a “flexible” economy, to lasting struggles of racial and gender injustice, and new environmental threats brought about by global climate change. Taking the stance that all environmental issues are indeed reproductive issues, we engage with Giovanna Di Chiro’s (2008) work on coalition politics, social reproduction, and environmental justice to highlight and envision intersectional approaches to organizing. Through what forms of political and collective action have systems that threaten social reproduction and environmental sustainability been contested? Where is the common ground? How is it identified and made viable? Should the responsibilities of social reproduction and the maintenance of healthy ecological systems be a private or public responsibility? How can we protect and value the work – both paid and unpaid, human and non-human – required to socially reproduce our societies? 

Labor organizing, for instance, has tended to center on the workplace as the site of resistance and on the waged laborer as the political subject. How can such organizing strategies be transformed, supplemented, or invigorated by strategies that also recognize the value of unwaged reproductive work? By charting a geography of coalitional politics and resistance, we aim to gain new insight on the spectrum of allies whose struggles for reproductive and environmental justice intersect in mutually beneficial ways. We welcome a broad range of papers on topics including, but not limited to:

  • Historical and contemporary cases that explain how the organization of social reproduction has changed, is changing, or could be changed, and to what ends for economic, racial and environmental justice.
  • Empirical work on how collective action can challenge and/or transform unjust systems of social provisioning.
  • Collective action at the intersection of care for people and planet.
  • Organizing in and across food systems, healthcare, education, etc. with an emphasis on reproductive and/or environmental justice.
  • Alternative economies and social provisioning (e.g. cooperative childcare, child-centered social movements, shared food provisioning, transportation collectives, etc.).
  • Feminist, ecofeminist, critical race, and critical sustainabilities approaches to organizing.
  • Strategic, relational visions for change that encompass reproductive, racial, economic, and environmental (and/or climate) justice as interconnected struggles.

Please send an abstract of 250 words to Amy Coplen ([log in to unmask]) and Jennifer Gaddis ([log in to unmask]) by Tuesday, October 25, at 5 pm PST.