Practices Of Social Reproduction Research Articles

Social Reproduction of Post‐Soviet Migrant Labour: Braiding the International Political Economy

AbstractIn this article, we analyse the social reproduction of post‐Soviet migrant labour. Our inquiry builds on artwork by Olga Jitlina and Anna Tereshkina and by Mahpora Kiromova dealing with the effects of migration on family relations in Central Asia and the South Caucasus. We have braided the artwork with strands of social reproduction theory to examine the transnational household as a set of relationships that enables post‐Soviet and global capitalism to draw value out of unwaged work and to reproduce the differentiated (i.e. gendered and racialised) labour force. Our focus is on the tropes of family, weddings, love, and violence. The analysis of these tropes draws attention to the intersecting effects of globalised capitalism, local structures of value, the state, and patriarchy in post‐Soviet political economy. Through them we detail the fundamental co‐constitution of production and social reproduction, but also show that practices of social reproduction can be reservoirs of resistance and potential change.

Becoming cosmopolitan women while negotiating structurally limited choices: The case of Korean migrant sex workers in Australia

International labor mobility holds the promise that one can become a cosmopolitan citizen of the world. But this interpretation of mobility rarely features in research and media focused on Asian women who travel and engage in sex work. In both arenas, the dominant narrative is that migrant sex workers are poor, the victims of sex trafficking, and pose a risk to public health. This narrative is laced with Orientalist overtones of the Asian sex worker as the alluringly exotic ‘other’, passive and particularly vulnerable, and in need of rescue. However, the interviews of 11 Korean women sex workers based in Sydney, Australia, challenge this narrative. These women engaged in a transnational quest to become cosmopolitan citizens of the world, albeit making logical choices from structurally limited options shaped by their multiple identities as women, sex workers, and Korean, and their relative precarious position in the Australian labor market. Their stories highlight how migration and work can be an agentic process of self-expression and self-actualization of identity. This identity has emerged against the backdrop of shifting meanings and practices of social reproduction in Korea, a country that has experienced a highly compressed transition from developing, to modern capitalist state. Theoretically, the article draws on post-colonial feminist theory to shed light into the conflicting views on migrant sex workers in existing research, by focusing on the women’s voices, which have been neglected or silenced.

The Neoliberal Politics of “Smart”: Electricity Consumption, Household Monitoring, and the Enterprise Form

This article investigates how digital technologies in the energy sector are enabling increased value extraction in the cycle of capital accumulation through surveillant processes of everyday energy consumption. We offer critical theory (Gramsci, Foucault) and critical political economy (Marx) as a guide for critical understanding of value creation in ICT through quotidian processes and practices of social reproduction. In this regard, the concept of the “prosumer” is extended beyond notions of voluntary participation in Web 2.0 to the political economy of energy use. Within this broad framework we investigate national and local level “smart grid” campaigns and projects. The “smartening” of the energy grid, we find, is both an ideological construct and a technological rationalization for facilitating capital accumulation through data collection, analysis, segmentation of consumers, and variable electricity pricing schemes to standardize social practices within and outside the home. We look at BC Hydro as one illustration of where such practices are being instituted.

Biopolitical Geographies of Student Life: Private Higher Education and Citizenship Life-Making in Singapore

Drawing on eleven months of fieldwork in Singapore, this article uses the case of young people studying at a private higher education institute to study the biopolitical geographies of student life. I focus on the analytic lens of biopolitical citizenship as one way to understand how biopower works in and through the material relations and practices of social reproduction. I critically examine how young people are engaging with and performing biopolitics in ways that attempt to (re)define what constitutes a “mainstream,” viable, classed, and gendered citizenship life. I also explore students' (“alternative”) biopolitical performances through their critical evaluations of state-led discourses, their ability to invent hope as a way of coping and living, and their online enactment of a form of modest activism. Additionally, this article offers an initial engagement with Kraftl's (2015) theorization of alternative biopolitical projects in educational spaces and introduces the concepts of “pulling” and “pushing” to frame the paradoxical manner in which young people engage with biopolitics.

Die Reproduktion der Gesellschaft und die Praktiken der Freiheit

How is modern society reproducing itself? This question is handed on from Marx via Althusser to Foucault. One important theoretical mean to solve the puzzle is the concept of ideology. But ideology is misconceived if understood as mere appearance of material processes. Marx' own method of grasping the order of appearances is phenomenological, i.e. he is destructive of the immediately given but contradictory order of appearances and tries to reconstruct an order at the same time intelligible and incorporating the diverse phenomena. This successive method entails the promise of a totally ordered whole of the appearances. Foucault understands the dangers of such a promise. Marxism tends to close the theoretical quest for the modes, conditions, and practices of social reproduction. Therefore Foucault propagates the anti-scientific methods of genealogy, which take real practices into account again. His objectives are revolutionary practices of freedom. To write their genealogy Foucault also wonld have been forced to encounter the reproduction of society as a whole.

Beauty Queen, Bulletin Board and Browser: Rescripting the refrigerator

An integral element of most British kitchens, refrigerators support daily practices of social reproduction, but tend to blend almost unnoticed into the background. Drawing in particular on feminist social theorists and historians of technology, my research pays critical attention to mundane objects, domestic practices and the stories that they tell. This paper pauses to take a closer look at a usually unobtrusive appliance in, on and around which much of kitchen life plays out. I examine processes of domesticating, gendering, appropriating and rescripting the refrigerator. I consider how associations with women's traditional responsibilities for feeding, nourishing and caring feminise the fridge, how ‘scripts’ for objects and technologies encourage users to behave in certain ways, but also how those scripts can be rewritten. Looking at the sometimes unexpected ways in which technologies evolve, I note that as well as being an instrument for preserving food, the fridge has become normalised as a notice board for household communication, creative self-expression and display. I then turn to the metaphorical rescripting of ‘the fridge door’ and its translation into virtual space to explore how the refrigerator has come to represent an accessible and participatory space for multiple voices and diverse knowledges. Reina de belleza, tablón de anuncios y navegador: re-escribiendo la nevera Las neveras, como elemento integral en la mayoría de cocinas británicas, sostienen las prácticas cotidianas de la reproducción social, pero tienden a mezclar casi desapercibido en el fondo. Inspirándose en teóricas sociales feministas e historiadores de la tecnología, mi investigación presta la atención crítica a los objetos mundanos, las prácticas domésticas y los cuentos que ellos revelan. Este papel se detiene brevemente para considerar en más detalle a un aparato generalmente discreto de lo que sucede a su alrededor la vida de la cocina. Examino los procesos de género, domesticar, apropiar y reescribir la nevera. Considero cómo las asociaciones de responsabilidades femeninas tradicionales—alimentar, nutrir y cuidar—feminizan la nevera, cómo ‘escrituras’ para objetos y tecnologías alientan a usuarios a portarse en ciertas maneras, pero también cómo esas escrituras se pueden reordenar. Mirando las maneras a veces inesperadas en las que las tecnologías evolucionan, noto que así como ser un instrumento para preservar alimentos, la nevera ha llegado a ser normalizada como un tablón de anuncios para la comunicación de la casa, expresión personal imaginativa y despliegue. Luego, vuelvo al reescribir metafórico de ‘la puerta de nevera’ y su traslación al espacio virtual para explorar cómo la nevera ha llegado a representar un espacio accesible y participativo para voces múltiples y conocimientos diversos.

Remaking labour imaginaries: social reproduction and the internationalising project of welfare reform

Abstract This paper examines an increasingly international, work-centred process of welfare restructuring through its effects on ideas and practices of social reproduction. The effects of intensified welfare restructuring on social reproduction are argued to be a neglected aspect of globalisation debates, connected to a posited ‘labour metaphysic’ within mainstream leftist politics. Analysis of relations between welfare restructuring and neoliberal globalisation suggests a crisis of support for practices of social reproduction, exemplified in US welfare-to-work programmes. The need for leftist politics to reconstruct ‘labour imaginaries’ in relation to issues of social reproduction is argued through an examination of welfare reform programmes in Texas. Welfare-to-workers are shown to live their class through painful and shameful ‘classifying practices’, which deny the class basis of their poverty, negate the value of their motherhood, and aim to construct individualised, psychologised and evangelised subjectivities for labour market participation. The struggle of programme participants for material and psychological survival is argued to be a class struggle, which presents a major challenge to the thinking and practice of leftist politics.

‘Nice maps, shame about the theory’? Thinking geographically about the economic

What can geography tell us about the economy other than drawing maps of it? The spatiality of economic activity points towards the practical and performative complexity of the economic as well as to the complexity of geography in its embedding of the economic. While the synthetic nature of geography – its raison d'être is the relationships between, rather than the separation of, processes and things – disrupts economy in profound ways, its treatment by nonpractitioners is weak and over-narrowly interpreted. At the same time, a tendency for geographers to sidestep certain economic imperatives undermines more culturally and socially inflected interpretations of economy. What is at issue here, however, is not simply an attempt to reconcile two disciplines or to reclaim either one of them but a need to embed the one relationally in the other in mutually formative ways. This involves a transcendence of disciplinary perspectives by stressing the complex practices of social reproduction operating at all scales from the ultralocal to the hyperglobal. It is this stress on practice and instance, rather than a determinative claim for place or space, that makes geography matter in the construction of understandings of the economy.

Headless ghosts and roving women: specters of modernity in Papua New Guinea

By juxtaposing a contemporary myth with an exegesis of Huli “passenger woman” (physically and sexually mobile women), I address the gendered nature of modernity. Huli women are expected to enact tradition, both through their consumption practices and through participation in the bridewealth system. Passenger women become modern through their repudiation of these roles. An analysis of women's experiences suggests that modern forms of identity can emerge in response to the shifting meanings and practices of social reproduction, [modernity, bridewealth, social reproduction, sexuality, myth]

Sow What You Know: The Struggle for Social Reproduction in Rural Sudan

Abstract The unity between production and social reproduction is under constant threat of dissolution. The practices by which it is maintained or threatened are the stuff of everyday life, and can be witnessed on the ground. A key practice of social reproduction is the socialization and education of children. This piece presents detailed findings on various practices of social reproduction—the production, exchange, and deployment of environmental knowledge—and points to the transformative potential inherent in the mundane practices of work, play, and learning. The village of Howa in Sudan has been incorporated within a state-sponsored agricultural development project and the content, mode of acquisition and utility of children's environmental knowledge has thereby changed dramatically. In addressing these, my larger research goal is to locate instances of rupture, resistance, or reformulation in the face of socioeconomic and cultural-ecological change imposed externally. The study employs ethnographic met...