This article pushes forward research and thinking on “boundless work” in hierarchal gendered organizations within the context of late neoliberalism. Weaving the tools of feminist political economy with rhetorical analysis techniques, our analysis of gendered work in Ontario nursing homes reveals moralized hierarchies, contextually specific variations across organizations, and potential sites of resistance and change. It demonstrates the utility of understanding and exploring “boundless work” as an interpretive category that is actively under negotiation. This paper is part of the SPE special theme “Decent care work: politics, policy, and resistance.”

This article begins by briefly highlighting some of the roots of Canadian feminist political economy (FPE) before moving on to ways that FPE approaches can make visible—in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on longterm care/the longterm care relationship—the forces, relations, and conditions that shape the right to care. It is my feminist political economy approach, one that is still in development as I learn from and with others and one that might differ from those of others, because feminist political economy is a broad house. This paper is part of the SPE special theme “Decent care work: politics, policy, and resistance.”

This article explores the intricate relationships between state, capital, and labour within the context of imperial nation-building ­projects and their impact on Indigenous communities in Canada. Employing a Northern social reproduction framework, the analysis delves into the cooperative actions of the state and markets in “civilizing” Indigenous Peoples, replacing traditional subsistence practices with gendered domestic labour performed by girls and women. It concludes by highlighting how capitalism commodifies Indigenous women’s labour, disconnecting them from their communities and culture. This paper is part of the SPE special theme “Decent care work: politics, policy, and resistance.”

The COVID-19 pandemic was a disaster for small hoteliers in tourist destinations who lost income for more than two years. This study analyzes the impact of the postpandemic tourist boom in Phuket, Thailand, drawing on the literature on land grabbing and disaster capitalism. It contends that the pandemic served as a shock needed to restructure the sector along the lines of the “powers of exclusion”—legitimation, regulation, and market mechanisms—that resulted in the dispossession of small local hoteliers.

Support workers in aged care quite literally place their bodies at risk of violence at work. Workers can be assaulted, bitten, spat on, and verbally abused, in both residential and home care, by aged clients living with dementia and other mental health conditions. Despite this, a tacit acceptance of the structural violence inherent in the marketized system of aged care persists. This paper utilizes a labour process theory perspective to argue that the marketization of aged care produces a brutal corporeal labour regime in which the bodies of workers are utilized, mobilized, motivated, and reproduced. This paper is part of the SPE special theme “Decent care work: politics, policy, and resistance.”

This paper introduces the SPE special theme “Decent care work: politics, policy, and resistance.”

Over the past four decades, the scale and number of oil palm plantations in Colombia have risen and these plantations have become a pillar of the country’s agricultural sector. This article examines the territorial control function of plantations, especially in areas where the expansion of palm cultivation has been a simultaneously novel and accelerated phenomenon. The Colombian government has encouraged the growth of this crop through three often overlapping models: dispossession, productive alliances, and the establishment of Zones of Rural, Economic and Social Development Interest (ZIDRES). This paper is based on fieldwork data from María La Baja in the Department of Bolivar, and focuses on the consequences of the productive alliance model as a novel form of territorial disciplining and control.

This essay considers the relationship between exploration finance and the reproduction and maintenance of colonial land relations in Canada. Drawing on research examining the capitalization of exploration across Anishinaabe, Anishini, and Cree homelands in Ontario’s far north, I consider the significance of “flow-though” and royalty-financing techniques as essential to the sector’s liquidity. These techniques circumscribe Indigenous resistance in order to protect investor capital and contribute to a system of securities regulation that operationalizes certainty.

The Government of Canada’s long-awaited just transition legislation (termed the Sustainable Jobs Act) passed through the House of Commons recently. However, the future of this policy is contested, especially within Alberta’s oil and gas sector. Here, we identify four distinct discourses of just transition based on a textual analysis of public, corporate, and civil society rhetoric. We argue that the Sustainable Jobs Act attempts a strategic political balance by allying with labour and using discursive tactics to simultaneously appease more radical Left and Right perspectives. As a result, it does not substantively support meaningful climate action or climate justice, and leaves Canadian workers at risk of forthcoming global economic shifts.

Matt Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet has been fiercely debated in terms of its implications for the US climate movement, but it also offers important implications for how we think about the politics of social reproduction beyond US borders. This review draws out theoretical implications from Huber’s work that are especially relevant for understanding social movements, social reproduction, and the state in this ecological moment. This paper is part of the SPE Special Theme “Critical Engagements with ‘Climate Change as Class War.’”