Reproduction and the Public Sphere: Introduction

Music as Social and Cultural Reproduction: A Sociological Analysis of Educational Processes in Ontario Schools. Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Numéro 5, 1984, p. 1-373) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

The paper reflects upon the principles and practice of an alternative educational system operating in rural Mexico in the light of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural and social reproduction. Bourdieu’s theory seeks to explain processes of reproduction of power relations within schools and society; whereas alternative educational systems seek to expand educational access in deprived areas in order to counteract processes of social inequality. The paper argues that, although Bourdieu’s theory does not fully explain the gradual inclusion of more people from disadvantaged backgrounds into education through alternative educational systems, processes of social reproduction in deprived communities still occur mainly because of lack of state support after primary school level, and a shortage of better infrastructure and opportunities for this sector of the population. Since the widespread upward educational and class mobility of the rural poor has not yet been achieved, the paper concludes that the processes of cultural and social reproduction continue despite the introduction of alternative educational systems.

Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere

Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation

This thesis is an ethnographic exploration of the ways in which throughout their lives, mature and elderly pobladora women – women who live in working-class neighbourhoods in Chile – have negotiated classed and gendered positions through practices of social reproduction. It asks: How have pobladora women produced their gendered and classed subjectivities through practices of social reproduction in their positions as mothers, homemakers and/or wives? This research examines the values and the value that pobladora women have attached to the practices that ensure the social reproduction of their households, as well as the work of community organisations that respond to concrete reproductive needs. This, in light of historical configurations of gender and class in Chile. This work draws on more than ten months of intensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2017 in a working-class neighbourhood called Nuevo Amanecer, whose past and present are critical for the aims of this research. Ethnography with a feminist perspective has been used as both a method for gathering data and a form of writing, including a strong historical component. The main contribution of this thesis is that, through ethnography, it offers a bridge between different perspectives and theoretical frameworks on class between materialist – in particular Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) – and symbolic/moral approaches to class, which have often been seen as divergent. It also contributes to SRT by stressing the relevance of subjectivity to an understanding of processes of capitalist accumulation and the gendered organisation of social production/reproduction. Furthermore, by providing a more nuanced and less moralised understanding of the effects of class in women’s subjectivities in relation to wage work and care labour than that provided by mainstream feminist approaches, this thesis provides new insights to understand the persistence of social reproduction as gendered labour. It argues that, through the labours of social reproduction, pobladora women have waged symbolic struggles that position themselves and their families as dignified – classed and gendered – subjects.

This materialist reappraisal of ‘abject art’ locates Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection (Kristeva, 1982) within the contradictory spheres of social and biological reproduction that are produced by capitalism. The article argues that abject art is inherently tied to the sphere of social reproduction and consequently it proliferates with economic recessions and downturns, when the sphere of social reproduction is squeezed, controlled or abandoned. Abject art is symptomatic of what Nancy Fraser (2017) describes as capitalism’s ‘crisis tendency,’ and therefore the article utilises Marxist Feminism (Federici, 2012; Fortunati, 1995) and Social Reproduction Theory (Bhattacharya, 2017) to draw out the political economic facets of abject art. In defence of abject art’s efficacy to respond to transforming regimes of capitalist accumulation, I develop a new lineage of abject art in three distinct historical periods. I begin with the 1960s Tokyo avant-garde in the work of Hi Red Centre and their abject proofing of Tokyo, and secondly address the 1970s in an Anglo-American context, with maintenance works by Barbara T. Smith and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Finally, I reconsider the trauma and hedonism of the early 1990s in the work of Karen Finley and collaborators Bob Flanagan and Shree Rose. The article focuses on works that employ performance and the body to interrogate regimes of care, waste, the maternal and desire as facets of social reproduction. In doing so it reclaims abject art as an important aesthetic and political response that is capable of representing our ongoing crises of social reproduction under capitalism.

The need for theory in the sociology of education which deals with both structure and identity is discussed. It is argued that such theory is particularly relevant to an analysis of how schooling acts as an agent of social reproduction. Using Berger and Luckmann's social construction of reality theory (1966) as a basis, a number of theoretical perspectives which are relevant to the development of a theory of schooling and social reproduction are discussed. Two levels of analysis are considered: firstly the development of identity in the school context, and secondly the role of the education system in the reproduction of the social structure. Drawing on these ideas, the paper attempts to begin to move towards a theory of schooling and social reproduction which deals with both levels of analysis. It is suggested that the school processes which centre on school organization are significant mediators between identity and structure. It seems to be important that future empirical and theoretical work in sociology of education should focus on this mediating level. Only when we fully understand how schools replicate the social structure can we develop a viable pedagogy for change.

Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) takes as its starting point the recognition that household activity in the capitalist mode of production constitutes far more than the production of use values. The activities that take place within households are understood to be part of the entire process of reproduction of society, i.e. social reproduction. The proponents of SRT have stimulated much valuable empirical research on these activities. However, there are major problems in the SRT framework within which these activities are placed. Although presented in the form of a contribution to Marxist theory, SRT contradicts the most basic precepts of this theory. SRT diverges fundamentally from Marxist theory in its use of the term “social reproduction,” and in the related distinctions between “reproductive” and “productive” labor, and between “paid” and “unpaid” labor.

Propaganda, ideology, and democracy: A review of Jason Stanley, <i>How Propaganda Works</i>

Ted Striphas recently called for a return to the “problem of culture” within cultural studies. This is a political as much as a methodological provocation: “culture” became an object of analysis among mid-twentieth century scholars in dialogue with Marxist accounts of ongoing political crises. Taking a cue from this past, this essay rethinks culture in relation to the ongoing crisis in social reproduction via Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). Within some Marxist feminist currents, “social reproduction” refers to the reproduction of labor-power, Marx’s term for the capacity to work sold on the market in exchange for wages. Marxist feminists have theorized such matters at length via their analyses of the practices undergirding the reproduction of labor-power. SRT is not unfamiliar to cultural studies scholars, but those engaged with it tend to explore the representation of socially reproductive practices within culture rather than the ways culture itself contributes to labor-power’s reproduction. This is unsurprising. Historically, the field has discussed labor-power in terms of its circulation rather than its reproduction, detailing culture’s role in reproducing social systems. Drawing upon Michael Denning’s “labor theory of culture,” recent work in SRT, and Marx, I argue that culture functions in a socially reproductive capacity within the logic of capitalism. In doing so, it casts cultural struggle as a form of social reproduction struggle at the intersection of labor-power’s reproduction and that of the society that requires it. This essay constructs a systematic account of culture’s socially reproductive before using it to consider its historical expression in the current moment.

More and more companies are pursuing corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Current scientific literature mainly evaluates the underlying economic and non-economic motivations of CSR. This thesis aims to expand the current framework and empirically investigate the impact of managers’ social background on CSR perception. Therefore, I first review Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction with a special notion of the different forms of capital and the concept of habitus as well as existing research on CSR perception with an emphasis on stakeholder theory. In a next step, I developed an online questionnaire that combines these two concepts. This questionnaire was sent to students of the Bavarian EliteAcademy, a program that educates future leaders from all social backgrounds. The results of the regression reveal that social background is influential in determining the importance put on shareholder interests. Moreover, students align their ranking of stakeholder importance with their self-perception as stakeholders. Self-perception as shareholders shows most correlations with social background variables. These findings support the hypothesis that social background affects CSR perception. It is especially interesting that students who might assume future leadership positions are already now united by a similar habitus. Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Stakeholder theory, Bourdieu’s Social Reproduction Theory, Habitus, Leadership

“The Problem of Order” proposed by Talcott Parsons, which has been argued in many ways, is still one of the most important sociological theme among contemoporary authors such as Nilkas Luhmann and Anthony Giddens. How the problem of order is treated with in the theories of Luhmann and Giddens, is discussed here. Though both theories are of course different from each other, they both arrive at “the theory of reproduction”. From the viewpoint of reproduction, the order is not considered as a state just against the disorder (conflict), but a process which continuously renews the precedential order in time by human practice. Society fundamentally depends on “paradox” or “contradiction”, and the social order is inherently impossible. Therefore the social order can be only temporarily constructed. Luhmann and Giddens analyze these mechanisms, each relatively laying emphasis on an 'ideal' or 'real' aspect. Theory of reproduction indicates that simple dualism of order-disorder is ineffective, but it has a tendency to invalidate the distinction between stability and non-stability, which is a core of the problem order. It is necessary to utilize the theory of reproduction to analyze various modes of stability and non-stability.

This article offers an insight into the challenges faced by social movements when attempting to politicize the crisis of reproduction which took place during the COVID-19 syndemic in the city of Barcelona. The analysis provided here expands on the analysis of social reproduction theory and, more broadly, on Marxist feminist approaches. In fact, one of the factors accounting for the absence of politicization during the syndemic is the type of responses given to the emergency by the authoritarian neoliberal state, which were beyond those envisaged by the 10th thesis theorized by Marxism-Feminism and social reproduction theory. Thus, in this article, we argue that this situation is an opportunity to establish a dialogue between critical state theory and Marxism-Feminism to understand how the agency of the state may condition the social reproduction of life and block the emancipatory possibilities of care and the social struggles regarding the crisis of care, complementing thus the10th thesis of Marxism-Feminism.

The aim of this article is to articulate the theory of resistance with the theories of social and cultural reproduction, within the boundaries of the new sociology of education. Starting from the concepts of classification and framing developed by Basil Bernstein and of Pierre Bourdieu's social camp, the author defines some concepts which, in his opinion, are basic to establish the theory of resistance with conceptual rigour and analytical capacity. It will thus be possible to constitute a referential theoretical matrix for the development of counter‐hegemonic curricula, teaching materials and pedagogical practices, whose objective is to oppose the schools’ social and cultural reproduction in its different forms (of class, race, ethnic groups and gender), at its two levels—the reproduction of the sexual and social division of labour and of the inculcation of the dominant ideologies.

Drawing on the rich history of social reproduction theory (SRT), the book situates struggles over water within an account of capitalism that emphasises the continuing relevance of expropriation. Via an engagement with the Irish water charges protests and resistance to unconventional gas in Australia, the work explores the tension between life-making and profit-making that defines the new water commodity frontier. Struggles over water, as Moore shows, are about more than access or management of a resource. What is at stake are the social relations and institutions that allow water grabs to occur. Taking up David Harvey’s conception of a spatial fix and reading it through SRT, Moore develops the notion of a spherical fix to show how crises move through the conditions that make capitalist accumulation possible. The spherical fix highlights the dependency of accumulation on the expropriation of nature and socially reproductive labour, key dynamics of the global water crisis. The depletion of capital’s conditions of possibility are, however, only one part of the story. A central question raised is how class emerges in and beyond the points of contradiction that mark water’s commodification. What Moore finds are multiple labour powers that contain the potential to be world-making. Working at the points of contradiction, struggles over water both interrupt processes of capitalist reproduction and open a space for subversive rationalities. In Australia and Ireland, what has emerged is a time of reproductive unrest.