Social reproduction as social infrastructure: “Good treatment” of English-speaking older adults in Québec

674 Feminist Studies 46, no. 3. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Erica S. Lawson, Florence wullo Anfaara, Vaiba Kebeh Flomo, Cerue Konah Garlo, and Ola Osman The Intensification of Liberian Women’s Social Reproductive Labor in the Coronavirus Pandemic: Regenerative Possibilities In Liberia, a post-conflict country of five million people, the coronavirus pandemic has intensified women’s social reproductive labor to institutionalize peace, security, and gender equality. The challenges facing Liberian women are partly rooted in the conditionalities imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), civil wars, and the extraction of natural resources to enrich local “warlords” and international investors, all of which have eroded the health infrastructure as well as public trust. Traditional Marxist analyses of such challenges largely center commodity finance, private property, and labor for wages. Given that women are typically unable to benefit from capitalism in these ways, this commentary explores how we think about women’s social reproductive labor. Broadly informed by this question, we discuss the strategies that Liberian women have used to manage the coronavirus pandemic, how these strategies exemplify and extend women’s reproductive roles, and how women view the fallout from the virus as a threat to their fragile peace gains. We locate our examination at the site of gendered work in Peace Huts. These are community councils largely managed by Liberian women for transitional justice, security, and peace-building goals. This commentaryisbasedonresearchinprogresstodocumentwomen’ssocial reproductive labor in Peace Huts. The quotes presented are excerpted from recent conversations with Liberian women about the virus’s impact Lawson et al. 675 on their lives, including those who provide or use Peace Hut services, many of whom are at the forefront of pandemic containment. Feminist political economy interrogates gendered social reproductive labor and its contributions to capitalist modernity, even as it is undervalued . Women’s social reproductive labor, largely unpaid and invisible, sustains families and households, provides care for children, the elderly, and the sick, and “cushion[s] ‘crisis shocks’ whether associated with financial crashes, conflict outbreak or humanitarian disasters.”1 Feminist scholars further address how capitalism generates different forms of gendered debt traps for women, as they try to earn a living in informal sectors where their income-generating activities are precarious.2 Our thinking is framed by Nancy Fraser’s critique of a narrow view of capitalism, which focuses solely on the economy, to an expanded reading of it as an “institutionalized social order” that relies on, while simultaneously denying, the centrality of reproductive labor to its operationalization .3 Further, informed by the argument that social reproductive labor is essential to “the protection and strengthening of communities and intimate relations,” we understand this type of work as central to Liberian women’s mass protests against the fourteen-year civil war (1989– 2003).4 The continued and strategic deployment of this labor holds politicians and citizens accountable for maintaining peace, and importantly, women identify connections between peace building and containing the spread of the coronavirus.5 In other words, because women rely more closely on community and social networks, they are invested in protecting these assets with their labor. 1. Shirin M. Rai, Jacqui True, and Maria Tanyag, “From Depletion to Regeneration : Addressing Structural and Physical Violence in Post-conflict Economies ,” Social Politics 26, no. 4 (2019): 565. 2. Genevieve LeBaron and Adrienne Roberts, “Toward a Feminist Political Economy of Capitalism and Carcerality,” Signs 36, no. 1 (2010): 19–20. 3. Nancy Fraser, “Critique of Capitalism: What Should Socialism Mean in the 21st Century,” June 11, 2020, Institute for Critical Social Inquiry, New School, New York, YouTube Video, 1:21:90, https://www.criticalsocialinquiry.org /photosvideos. 4. Rebecca Hall, “Caring Labours as Decolonizing Resistance,” Studies in Social Justice 10, no. 2 (2016): 220. 5. Helene Cooper, “Liberia’s Women Warn Male Presidential Candidates: Keep the Peace,” New York Times, October 9, 2017, https://nyti.ms/2yTP6lg. 676 Lawson et al. Liberian women are extended a degree of cultural respect for motherhood , and this facilitates some support for women’s political participation in the society.6 Furthermore, they view their social reproductive work as regenerative with the potential to advance transitional justice and post-conflict recovery centered in a care-focused economy.7...

Contemporary science fiction and speculative fiction with utopian/dystopian aspects from South Asia and the Caribbean have rarely been studied in tandem. Furthermore, no scholarly work has analyzed such texts produced under conditions of contemporary capitalism in the light of social reproduction theory which considers social reproductive labor that rejuvenates labor power. I study Leila (2017) by the Indian writer Prayaag Akbar, Midnight Robber (2000) by the Jamaican-born Nalo Hopkinson, and Woman World (2018) by the diasporic Indian writer Aminder Dhaliwal to connect social reproductive labor and utopianism and argue that social reproductive labor rejuvenates the labor power of utopian agents in social reproductive spaces such as homes, schools, hospitals, gardens etc. resisting dystopian conditions, nurturing hope, and rejuvenating utopian thinking. I question how utopianism is related to social reproductive labor in postcolonial contexts of the Global South, and propose that 1) dystopian scenarios are brought about by control of social reproductive spaces and 2) progress/betterment is actualized with renewal and rejuvenation via social reproductive labor. I contend that relating twenty-first-century utopianism to social reproduction is a valuable and novel approach, especially in postcolonial contexts where conditions of labor have been determined by complex histories of colonialism, enslavement, and indentured labor.

Who benefits from the exploitation of women’s work, and how? Marxist feminists in the 1970s–1980s and recently theorists of Social Reproduction argued that women’s work is exploited twice, or “super-exploited,” by capital and patriarchy. Such “super-exploitation” is sustained by the process of “housewifization,” which legitimizes the extraction and accumulation of surplus value from the social reproductive work of women. The housewife ideology not only mystifies social reproductive work as natural — thereby legitimizing it as free — but also frames women’s productive work as marginal — thereby legitimizing it as cheaper and more precarious. Building on Maria Mies’ (1981) famous study of women lacemakers in India, where the devaluation of women’s work is shown to serve both capital and patriarchy, I analyze the experiences of Punjabi “housewives” in central Italy, exploring them through the lens of one family and specifically its youngest and eldest daughters, whom I interviewed during ethnographic fieldwork. I show how, despite the essential role played by these women in their family mobility project, the housewife ideology — together with other patriarchal constructs of honor and caste endogamy — obscures the value of their social reproductive and productive work and imposes a number of restrictions on their freedom. I find, further, that their super-exploitation is aggravated in the context of migration: the labor exploitation and welfare exclusion that they face in Italy due to the country’s exclusionary immigration regime and unregulated capitalist market complicate their chances to challenge the oppressive relations they are involved in.

Older Homeless Adults: Can We Do More?

A descriptive exploration of younger and older adults’ experiences of Integrative Medical Group Visits for Long COVID

This article makes three crucial, related arguments. First, most European analyses of immigration and social welfare fail to consider how these policies intersect to shape the social reproduction of populations, instead sticking to notions of welfare chauvinism, social citizenship, and deservingness. Second, welfare/immigration analyses are usually set at the national level, but subnational comparisons can challenge tidy welfare state regime categorizations, revealing both nuance and policy opportunities. Third, a focus on social reproduction regimes that includes welfare and immigration policies reveals how jurisdictions border the extraction of social reproductive labour, with impacts on who gets in and under which conditions, and on the distribution of paid and unpaid social reproductive work within immigrant and established families in Canada. Developing our feminist border analysis, we illustrate our approach through a comparative analysis of Quebec and Ontario to show how social reproductive borders extract care labour and from whom, under diverging policy regimes.

Since the 1970s, Marxist feminists have extensively discussed social reproduction to argue that women’s unwaged domestic labour is a form of exploitation deriving from capitalism. This article focuses on the socialist socio-historical context to explore the social reproduction performed by lower working-class women in Shanghai during the COVID-19 outbreaks. To probe the pandemic interruptions to social reproduction, a COVID-19 Diary-Writing Workshop was conducted in 2020 to collect diaries written by destitute and disadvantaged women (pinkun funü) living in the Workers’ New Villages. By delving into the women’s affective lives, the article shows that women not only contributed to community through their volunteerism in social reproductive labour but also sacrificed for their families in a time of crisis. Moreover, women endured mental stress as the main performers of social reproductive work, and communal services provided by neighbourhood committees helped relieve the stress of household chores and resolved tensions related to food shortage. Our findings confirm scholars’ longstanding argument that communal support policies can alleviate the gendered exploitative nature of social reproductive labour, and shed light on the roles of the remaining structures of socialist communal organization and infrastructure.

BackgroundOlder adults are not adopting personal health records (PHRs) at the same rates as other adult populations. Disparities in adoption rates are also reported in older adult subgroups. The variability...

Objective:In the context of primary care, cognitive screenings are brief, non-diagnostic tests that clinicians can administer in order to provide appropriate referrals to neuropsychologists. Annual cognitive screening for adults over age 65 (“older adults”) can help monitor cognitive functioning over time and ensure more patients with cognitive impairments receive neuropsychological assessment and care earlier. Unfortunately, time constraints and lack of training present major barriers to cognitive screening in primary care, and less than half of cognitive impairment cases are identified in these settings. A remote cognitive screening mobile app has the potential to save primary care clinics time, particularly for the majority of older adults who are cognitively healthy. Moreover, a screening app well-validated for remote clinical use can replace the inadequate or nonexistent screening practices currently employed by many primary care clinics. In order to achieve their potential, remote smartphone-enabled cognitive screening paradigms must be acceptable and feasible for both patients and clinical end users. With this goal in mind, we describe the collaborative, human-centered design process and proposed implementation of MyCog Mobile (MCM), a self-administered cognitive screening app based on well-validated NIH Toolbox measures.Participants and Methods:We conducted foundational interviews with primary care clinicians (N=5) and clinic administrators (N=3) and created user journey maps of their existing and proposed cognitive screening workflows. We then conducted individual semi-structured interviews with healthy older adults (N=5) as well as participated in a community stakeholder panel of older adults and caregivers (N=11). Based on the data collected, we developed high-fidelity prototypes of the MCM app which we iteratively tested and refined with the older adult interview participants. Older adults rated the usability of the prototypes on the Simplified System Usability Scale (S-SUS) and After Scenario Questionnaire (ASQ).Results:Clinicians and administrators were eager to use a well-validated remote screening app if it saved them time in their workflows and were fully integrated into their EHR. Clinicians prioritized easily interpretable score reports tied to automated best practice guidelines. Findings from interviews and user journey mapping further informed the details of the proposed implementation and core functionality of MCM. Older adult participants were motivated to complete a remote cognitive screener to ensure they were cognitively healthy, save time during their in-person visit, and for privacy and comfort reasons. Older adults also identified several challenges to remote smartphone screening which informed the user experience design of the MCM app. The average rating across prototype versions was 91 (SD 5.18) on the SSUS and 6.13 (SD 8.40), indicating above average usability.Conclusions:Through our iterative, humancentered design process, we were able to develop a viable remote cognitive screening app and proposed implementation for primary care settings optimized for multiple stakeholders. Next steps include validating MCM in clinical and healthy populations, collaboratively developing best practice alerts for primary care EHRs with neuropsychologists, and piloting the finalized app in a community clinic. We hope the finalized MCM app will promote broader screening practices within primary care and improve early assessment and diagnosis of cognitive impairment for older adults.

Predictors of health anxiety among older and young adults.

Older adults living alone in rural areas frequently experience health declines, social isolation, and limited access to services. To address these challenges, our medical academic university supported a quality improvement project for developing and evaluating the Visiting Neighbors program in two rural Appalachian counties. Our Visiting Neighbors program trained local volunteers to visit and guide rural older adults in healthy activities. These age-appropriate activities (Mingle, Manage, and Move- 3M's) were designed to improve the functional health of older adults. The program includes four in-home visits and four follow-up telephone calls across three months. The purpose of this paper was to describe the 3M's Visiting Neighbors protocol steps guiding the quality improvement procedures relating to program development, implementation, and evaluation. This Visiting Neighbors study used a single-group exploratory quality improvement design. This program was tested using quality improvement standards, including collecting participant questionnaires and visit observations. Older adults (> 65 years) living alone (N = 30) participants were female (79%) with a mean age of 82.96 (SD = 7.87) years. Volunteer visitor participants (N = 10) were older adult females. Two volunteer visitors implemented each visit, guided by the 3M's activities manual. All visits were verified as being consistently delivered (fidelity). Enrollment and retention data found the program was feasible to conduct. The older adult participants' total program helpfulness ratings (1 to 5) were high (M = 51.27, SD = 3.77). All volunteer visitor's program helpfulness ratings were also high (M = 51.78, SD = 3.73). The Visiting Neighbors program consistently engaged older Appalachian adults living alone in the 3M's activities. The feasibility and fidelity of the 3M's home visits were verified. The quality improvement processes included engaging the expert advisory committee and rural county stakeholders to ensure the quality of the program development, implementation, and evaluation.

DEPRESSIVE SYMPTOM SEVERITY AMONG FAMILY MEMBERS OF OLDER ADULTS WITH HETEROGENEOUS COGNITIVE VULNERABILITY

As we embed ever more computing technology in urban space, when do cities cross the line from smart enough to too smart? How should we limit the computing we embed in urban space so that it serves the people and not vice versa? This paper provides a conceptual synthesis building on recent work from critical media studies, urban studies, and feminist thought to analyze the proliferation of spatially embedded digital intermediaries in cities, which I call territorial platforms. It suggests that we can understand the limits of extractive logics of territorial platforms and generate effective political responses to them by centering social reproduction in our analyses. Social reproduction refers to the often taken-for-granted work required to sustain human life and society. Often informal and unwaged, social reproductive labor is overwhelmingly carried out by women in the domestic sphere, in institutional settings like daycare centers, educational institutions and hospitals, or in voluntary community initiatives. Centering social reproduction means attending to what cannot be “solved” or innovated away by means of technology. Even so, territorial platforms interface with social reproduction in a variety of important ways. Critical urban studies has highlighted the ways in which territorial platforms reorganize social reproduction by integrating it into market relations and extending commodification into daily life. This includes Airbnb and other “sharing economy” platforms that turn previously “unproductive” (reproductive) areas of life into source of surplus, but also gig work platforms that often serve to commodify social reproduction (e.g., food delivery or carework platforms). Critical media studies has documented how social platforms and “smart” technologies extract value from the everyday lives of urban dwellers. From this perspective, territorial platforms effectively function as digital circuits of dispossession putting more and more of life in the service of accumulation. If allowed to continue unchecked, this dispossession would render the city “smart” but ultimately uninhabitable. For this reason, social reproduction is set to become a focal point for struggles over the role of computing in urban space. Feminist thought in general, and Social Reproduction Theory in particular, offers tools both to understand and to foment such struggles.

Group physical activity programs provide opportunities for older adults to receive social support, which is known to be positively associated with physical activity behavior in this population, but further research is needed to understand how this happens. The purpose of this study was to determine the social support needs and challenges experienced by older adults participating in group physical activity programs and identify social support functions and behaviors that enabled their engagement. Using interpretive description methodology, 16 field observations of classes, eight focus group discussions, and interviews with two participants who were unable to attend focus groups were conducted with adults aged 55 and older attending programs across four recreation facilities. Analysis of the data suggested that (a) there is a need for fostering social relationships in programs, which are imperative for receiving social support. Older adults in the programs supported other participants by (b) initiating their engagement in (more) physical activity, (c) helping them sustain their engagement in physical activity, (d) assisting them with recognizing successful engagement in physical activity, and (e) providing comfort and reassurance during difficult times. Social support behaviors that target older adults’ emotional and tangible needs may be most important for promoting and sustaining physical activity. Support provided by other older adults enhanced participants’ motivation and abilities to overcome obstacles, as well as enabled them to pursue opportunities for growth in their unique physical activity journeys. Lay summary: Social support can promote physical activity in older adults, but how forms of support are provided must be considered. This qualitative study examined the social support needs and experiences of older adults participating in group physical activity programs to determine social support functions and behaviors that enabled their engagement. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE Group physical activity programs should aim to foster social relationships among older adult participants in order for them to receive social support that is sensitive and responsive to their needs. Instructors of group physical activity programs should encourage cultural awareness and acceptance among older adult participants for closer social relationships to be developed. Instructors of group physical activity programs should encourage social support behaviors among participants that target older adults’ emotional and tangible needs to sustain their engagement.

Healthcare systems are challenged by the rapidly increasing number of older adults requiring services to maintain at-home independence. Technology, such as ambient sensing, has been identified as one potential solution to address these issues. This study's aim is twofold: (1) to explore the general perception of older and younger adults about the transformative role technology can play in their health care as they age, and (2) the generation of health solutions in home care. This study explores data collected from an online survey involving 367 participants from North America and South Asia. Our analyses yielded that the older adult participants had a generally positive attitude toward employing technologies and that younger adults were less concerned about the use of ambient sensing. Notably, however, they all reported relatively deep concerns about the potential use of homecare service technologies. Our results showed heterogeneity of technology literacy among older adults. Both older and younger adults perceive ambient technology for assisted living as a promising solution to enable older adults' at-home independence. Regardless of age, potential users of these technologies showed concerns with possible breaches of individual privacy, personal data, and personal health information.