ABSTRACT Dalit women’s experiences emerge from a system of Brahmanical patriarchy that confines them to inhumane tasks at low wages, while denying them the opportunity to reconstitute themselves. According to Social Reproduction Theory and the Depletion framework developed by Shirin Rai, this opens up the potential for a care crisis as Dalit women get depleted by the demands on them. One way to resist depletion is through self-care or the labour of reconstituting oneself. This is not just through sleeping or eating but also consuming media and socialising. Allocating time to self-care requires opportunities for leisure. Caste inequalities in leisure prevent Dalit women from reproducing themselves and worsen the care crisis. Our paper builds nationwide estimates of caste inequalities in leisure within women in India with microdata from the Time Use Survey of India, 2019 as a data source. We find that married Dalit women spend 34 minutes per day less than upper-caste women on leisure. As Dalit women get older, they continue to be burdened by paid and unpaid work. Senior Dalit women spend 56 minutes a day less than upper-caste women on leisure. Building a Simultaneous Equation Model to estimate the determinants of leisure and self-care along with paid and unpaid labour, we find that education and household expenditure allows women of all caste categories to spend more time on leisure. In particular, Dalit women from households at higher-income quartiles, gain significantly more leisure. We also apply the Oaxaca Blinder decomposition and the Quantile Regression Method as robustness checks.

This paper examines the utopian fantasies of technologies developed at the height of Silicon Valley’s culture of innovation around social good—or “good tech”—and situates their increasing purchase within the technology industry in the broader context of a global crisis of care. We explore how aspirations towards greater empathy, global connectivity, and diversity were captured by elite tech entrepreneurs in a strategy to bolster their moral power and raise capital in the name of disaffected and exhausted workers. Through an analysis of emergent AI-enabled accent modification technologies, which promise to relieve call center workers from accent-based discrimination by artificially modifying the sound of their voice, we locate the affective lures operating in their futuristic fantasies and marketing strategies. In a peculiar alliance where entrepreneurs, venture capital, and modes of labor-discipline conspire toward making globalization “feel good,” we trace the ideological conditions that allowed the exploitation of offshore workers to be recoded as the employment of diverse workers. Thus understood, good tech rhetorics, we argue, are productive discourses that function both as a mechanism of value accumulation and as a counterinsurgency tactic—they constitute concrete “structures of feeling” that sustain attachments to the social reproduction of structures of racial capitalism and the continuation of postindustrial, colonial dispossession.

ABSTRACT This case study analyses a participatory methodological approach, known as the “Agroecological logbooks”, adopted since 2013 by grassroots organizations that operate within the conceptual and empirical framework of Agroecology and that are dedicated to strengthening groups, collectives and networks of rural women farmers and plant collectors. We propose an in-depth analysis of the impacts of the implementation of the Agroecological logbook methodology within the northeastern semiarid region of Brazil between 2019 and 2020, focusing on the transformation of gender norms through the validation of social practices associated with the principle of “reciprocity”- giving, receiving and exchanging plants, foods, seeds and seedlings. Such practices are often “naturalized” as gestures of social reproduction, relegated to an “inferior” status, in contrast with the production of goods and services that directly involve monetary transactions within the sphere of formal marketplaces. In light of the perspective of feminist economics (CARRASCO, 2006, 2017), this paper proposes reframing such non-monetary transactions and relations as “care work”, as we reveal their benefits when it comes to fortifying food and nutritional security and biodiversity, as well as strengthening forms of collective organizing and networking on a local and regional scale.

ABSTRACT Digital mediation is the context in which we propose to look at the aspirational lives of young women in Asia’s neoliberal cities. However, this context emerges out of longer histories of social change through which gendered modernities have taken shape. Modernity within non-Western contexts, we propose, unfolds in uneven and distinctive ways, whether the society in question has been formally colonised or not. To understand contemporary transformations, we need to grasp the dynamics of what we could call the national-modern (a modernity with national or quasi-national features) as they shape our four cities. As female selves re-make themselves today through education, consumption and labour, they draw on much longer histories inter-referenced by our research. These are histories of how the discourses of nation and modernity are entwined with the re-shaping of gender and sexuality nineteenth and early twentieth century debates around culture, tradition and modernity crucially hinge on the “woman question” that this essay discusses in comparative perspective and brings into the present day via the formation of nation-states in the post-colonial world. And today, as older pathways of social reproduction are transformed through neoliberal restructuring, new ideas of selfhood and subjectivity generate states of uncertainty, risk and ambiguity that highlight the production of aspirational selves.

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways in which gender, motherhood, and ethnicity shape the lived experiences of South and Southeast Asian mothers in Hong Kong. Through in-depth interviews with 54 mothers, we examine, what we term, ‘dialectical social imaginaries’ to understand how these mothers imagine their social surroundings and navigate challenges in this multicultural city, where traditional and progressive gender expectations coexist alongside ethnic diversity and discrimination. ‘Dialectical social imaginaries’ capture how individuals envision living together and interacting with different cultures, highlighting the tensions between following established norms and striving for change. The findings identify three types of ‘dialectical social imaginaries’, which are dialectical in that they swing between conformance to gender norms and transformation, between silence and resistance, and between distancing and belonging. Analyzing the reproductive and creative dimensions of these social imaginaries reveals diverse and often opposing forces of gendered expectations and cultures, demonstrating how socio-cultural forces facilitate and/or restrict individuals’ experiences of migration. This study contributes new insights to gender and migration studies by providing an analysis of the dialectic between social reproduction and transformation, and that of self/other entanglements. It highlights the conceptual utility of ‘dialectical social imaginaries’ for future sociological understandings of gender, migration, and culture.

This paper examines the UK's 2025 Immigration White Paper as a critical site for understanding how immigration policy functions as an instrument of racial capitalism. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the theory of social reproduction, and intersectionality, it interrogates how the state's construction of the 'skilled migrant' operates as a racially coded category that privileges whiteness, anglocentric credentials, and neoliberal norms of value. Rather than treating the White Paper as a discrete policy episode, the analysis situates it within a longer genealogy of immigration governance that reproduces structural inequalities across higher education and graduate employment. By tracing how migrant 'worthiness' is encoded through racialised and classed proxies-such as language fluency, academic credentials, and salary thresholds-the paper contributes to wider sociological debates on bordering, credentialism, and state racial formation. It demonstrates that the British state's discourse of 'merit' and 'skill' is inseparable from exclusionary practices that undermine the promise of equal opportunity for racialised citizens and migrants alike. The paper concludes by advancing a forward-looking framework for understanding policy as both a site of intervention and a generator of symbolic and material hierarchies.

This article offers a critical analysis of explanations for school marginalization by contrasting Non-Critical Theories and Critical-Reproductive Theories, discussing their implications for educational success and failure in the contemporary Brazilian context. The study begins by problematizing the social role of the school amid structural inequalities, examining how discourses of social mobility, meritocracy, the competency-based model, and the uncritical use of technology reinforce a neo-technicist perspective that obscures class struggle. Methodologically, this is a qualitative bibliographic study based on the analysis of classical works and recent contributions from the Sociology of Education, organized into categories that address theoretical foundations, explanatory tensions, and implications for curriculum, inclusion, and assessment. The findings indicate that Critical-Reproductive Theories remain essential to understanding mechanisms of social reproduction, yet they are insufficient to explain resistance practices, pedagogical innovations, and inclusive experiences that generate emancipatory possibilities within the school environment. Evidence shows that approaches such as multiliteracies, critical use of digital technologies, Universal Design for Learning, and authentic assessment can challenge reproductive logics and expand pathways of participation and success for students from working-class backgrounds. The study concludes that the school must be understood as a contradictory space in which reproduction and emancipation coexist, demanding an educational theory that is critical, inclusive, and committed to social justice.

This article analyzes the complex intersections between social origin, cultural capital, and educational trajectories in Brazil, focusing on the factors that perpetuate educational inequalities. The research, of a bibliographic nature, uses a qualitative approach to examine how social and symbolic structures influence students' access, permanence, and success in the educational system. Based on the analysis of recent academic productions and official documents, the study explores the persistence of social reproduction mechanisms, even in the face of democratization policies. The results indicate that, in addition to economic conditions, inherited cultural capital and pedagogical practices continue to be decisive elements in shaping educational paths. The analysis shows that inequalities not only persist but are reconfigured, challenging the school to develop more equitable and inclusive pedagogical strategies. It is concluded that overcoming the barriers that cross the school gates requires a deep understanding of the social and symbolic factors that shape educational opportunities, as well as the implementation of public policies and teaching practices that promote equity and social justice in the school environment.

Race theory in education is locked into a mode of critique that accepts conventional categories of political economy and essentialises race and education as timeless. Attempts to build economic factors into CRT (Critical Race Theory) and recent attempts to combine CRT with theories of racialised social systems to create Racialised Social Systems (RSS) Theory do not enable a negative critique of capitalism. Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) and Marxist theories of racialisation do engage with a negative critique of capitalism but could further consider the contradictions of capitalist society. This requires an understanding of capitalism, class struggle and race that transcends naïve materialism and enables an understanding of education, race and capitalism as locked into permanent crisis. Using metatheoretical critique, a new metatheory, Racial Value Theory (RVT) is presented. This shows how methods of ‘racial organisation’, racial categorisations and racial theories in education become archaic. For educators, RVT shows the redundancy of forms of practice and praxis but also the possibilities for revolutionary education.

This study investigates the educational expectations of a middle-class family in Taiwan and how they align with their child’s English classroom performance. Using a qualitative case study approach, the researcher conducted English classroom observations and parents’ interviews over a two-year period, focusing on a primary school student’s English learning. The findings reveal a multifaceted educational approach that goes beyond mere academic achievement. Parents in this study actively invest in creating a structured, immersive language environment at home, demonstrating a clear transmission of cultural capital that aligns with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and Lareau’s strategy of concerted cultivation. Their expectations for their child’s learning transcend basic skills, emphasizing the pursuit of higher-order thinking, creativity, and thoughtful expression. Additionally, they place significant value on the child’s learning attitude and character, focusing on behaviors like diligence and respect. While the student’s performance largely reflected these high expectations—showing active participation and strong language skills—there were occasional gaps in meeting the parents’ demand for “perfection” and “deep thinking.” This highlights the complex interplay between parental expectations, individual student traits, and environmental factors. The study concludes that middle-class educational strategies not only reproduce cultural capital but also cultivate specific learning behaviors and attitudes, offering valuable insights into the social reproduction of educational advantages in a Taiwanese context.

ABSTRACT This article proposes integrating the concepts of energy depletion and recharging as key elements in the struggle over labour indeterminacy at Amazon. To this end, it draws on empirical data collected from two Amazon warehouses and analyses worker narratives related to energy management at work. The findings illustrate how, in digital warehousing, diverse worker bodies are treated as homogeneous, disposable, and replaceable due to their short-term energy capacity. This helps explain why such companies often organise for permanent turnover rather than ensuring sustainable energy management. Conceptually, centring energy extends existing debates on work surveillance and the labour process towards embodiment and social reproduction; empirically, it identifies energy governance as a distinct locus of the indeterminacy struggle. The article argues for transparency in algorithmic assessment, enforceable restorative time and ergonomic standards, and incentives aligned with sustainable, health-preserving work.

Parents are commonly incentivized to move to access better schools, but these moves are typically taken as one-time events. This study theorizes such education-led residential (im)mobilities as a long-term “course”—a continuous and rhythmic trajectory spanning the schooling period and beyond. Drawing on the literature on geographies of education, mobilities, and rhythmanalysis, we investigate how middle-class social reproduction is implicated in the rhythmic residential mobility and immobility trajectory spanning the schooling period, or schooling course, and how such trajectories intersect with linked lives, gendered/classed power geometries and urban (re)development. Based on forty-five in-depth interviews with varying stakeholders in Guangzhou, China, we show that successful cultural reproduction is achieved through a specific rhythmic residential pattern: moving to housing in a good school district before primary school and maintaining undisrupted residential immobility until junior high school ends. Residential immobility ensures stable learning environments and is strategically and proactively maintained. Women tend to sacrifice their careers to synchronize the everyday polyrhythmia within the household. Local people, often homeowners with rich local knowledge, are at ease and flexible in assembling the schooling course. The new locals and nonlocals, as “rhythmic aliens,” strategize housing-cum-schooling choices intensively but are susceptible to disruptions and inconsistencies. Educational restructuring renders the suburbs ideal for creating such school-driven residential eurhythm and balancing the manifold polyrhythms. Such education-led im/mobilities are essentially state-orchestrated to leverage suburban development. This study enriches the geographies of education by unpacking the rhythmic intricacies of residential im/mobilities throughout the schooling course and education’s roles in urban (re)development through rhythm (re)setting.

This article examines the restructuring of capitalist reproduction in neoliberal Turkey through two interlinked dynamics: the transformation of self-employment into pseudo-entrepreneurial outsourced labor and the increasing integration of wage earners into financial markets as a survival mechanism. Rather than democratizing opportunity, these processes represent new modalities of accumulation in which survival strategies are subsumed into capital. Drawing on post-2018 data, we argue that wage earners are increasingly positioned as both exploited labor and subordinate participants in rent-based regimes. We introduce “share-commodifying” to capture how stable wage relations are dismantled and reframed as entrepreneurial risk-bearing, and “compensation-driven financialization” to describe workers’ reliance on financial markets, not for wealth creation but to offset stagnant wages and insecurity. Together, these generate a “survival strategy trap”: adaptive responses to precarity that ultimately deepen market dependence and capitalist control, reorganizing social reproduction by turning coping strategies into vehicles of valorization.

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the plantation-migration nexus in a region of major corporate and state plantation investment and presence in North Sumatra since the late 19th century. We show that land was not a limiting factor in the earliest decades when large plantations in northeastern Sumatra were established; procuring labour was the major economic constraint and generated a great deal of forced and “voluntary” worker migration into the region. Today, plantations do not provide enough work to enable the subsistence and social reproduction of most families living in the vicinity. Women have experienced greater losses of work than men, and some of them-mostly unmarried-- have turned to migration to seek wage labour as factory workers in Malaysia. This case describes the specific interplays over time between the changes over time in the gender division of labour and a state/corporate plantation's primary crop and related policies and practices.

ABSTRACT In contemporary Indonesia, narratives linking oil palm and migration generally envisage enclaves of contract labourers from labour-exporting provinces seeking wage work on corporate plantations or in movements of people displaced by changes in land control or infrastructure development. The paper offers ‘stories from below’ from fieldwork in Lampung and in East Kalimantan, working through a plantation-transmigration-social reproduction framework informed by feminist political ecology that attends to layerings of history, social-ecological affordances, and gendered subjectivities. Emerging within these stories are responses entwined with different migration modalities, which exceed the simple ‘push and pull’ of labour through corporate labour recruitment or government-led transmigration settlement. Both cases are, in different respects, illustrative of life made possible through context-specific, relational, and spatially stretched strategies of social reproduction that bring about ‘diversity-in-the-making’ amidst plantation-transmigration lives and landscapes in sometimes unexpected ways.

Abstract This paper interrogates the social divide between teachers and their students from poor and socially marginalised groups in a government‐aided urban middle school. This divide stems from intersecting caste and class differences, influencing teacher beliefs about educability of marginalised students contributing to adverse schooling experiences and poor outcomes. Inequities in education provisioning in the contemporary urban and policy contexts provide the backdrop for the study to examine micro processes in a school where a shift has occurred in teachers' social positioning relative to their students. Using an interactionist approach, the paper interrogates how middle‐class teachers negotiate their relationships with students from the margins of the transforming urban landscape. Contrasting experiences of teachers with former students belonging to social groups similar to their own and current ones from marginalised groups yield important insights concerning their notions on moral discipline, educability and worth. Prevailing assumptions that education serves as the pathway for social mobility are challenged by emerging questions about the consequence of schooling, unsettling settled notions about the ‘civilising’ processes of schooling, curriculum and pedagogies. Dominant conceptions that position teachers solely as mediators of social reproduction prove inadequate in explaining their experiences in this school context. The paper proposes examination of teachers' roles as forms of social practice to better understand complexities and contradictions in teachers' narratives and roles and their evolving responses to their students ‘at risk’ of exiting school.

This article examines how minor noble houses in the Hispanic world sustained social status under economic constraint and changing institutional regimes. Using the House of Villafañe of Santiago del Molinillo (Kingdom of León) as a case study, it conceptualizes the Casa as a social, patrimonial, and symbolic formation rather than a strictly genealogical lineage. The study combines a long-duration perspective with microhistorical analysis and historical genealogy, drawing on notarial documentation, parish registers, population censuses, and litigation concerning hidalgo status in both Castilian and colonial settings. The findings show that the house’s continuity rested on adaptive strategies: the regulation of kinship, selective marriage alliances, flexible patrimonial arrangements, institutional participation, and the mobilization of symbolic resources such as lineage memory and public recognition of noble condition. The article further demonstrates that Atlantic mobility to colonial La Rioja and Cordova (Argentina) did not constitute a rupture, but extended established practices of social reproduction into new legal and social environments. The House of Villafañe emerges as a resilient collective actor that transformed structural constraints and geographic mobility into resources for long-term continuity, offering a productive scale for analyzing social reproduction and inequality in the Hispanic world.

This third progress report on financial geography focuses on the everyday lives of finance. Moving beyond firm- and state-centric analyses, research increasingly foregrounds how financialisation permeates households, care relations and daily practices through variegated financial subjectivities, debt-based survival strategies and digital intermediation. Drawing on feminist political economy and critical approaches, the report highlights intersections of finance with social reproduction, gendered and racialised inequalities and the rise of fintech as a transformative yet potentially exploitative force. It concludes by identifying gaps in research on age and on state-technology relations, calling for intersectional, multi-scalar perspectives on finance’s lived and affective dimensions.

ABSTRACT What does it mean to care for the dead? This article argues that the handling of dead bodies – washing, dressing, transporting, burying – is a form of reproductive labor that deserves recognition within both care ethics and social reproduction theory. Despite its social necessity, death care remains largely invisible in frameworks that link care to life, productivity, and reciprocity. Yet, like other forms of care work, death care is unequally distributed. This article identifies a ‘biocentric’ bias that renders posthumous care morally suspect and politically illegitimate. Exploring how death labor is caught between commodification and moralization, it argues that recognizing this labor as care challenges existing boundaries around who counts as a care providers, and whose needs are worth organizing around. Such recognition is necessary to question how death care is currently being distributed and organized.

ABSTRACT In this article we examine how rural‐to‐urban migrant factory workers in two of Vietnam's industrial zones actively construct livelihood stability and pursue future aspirations while dealing with structurally precarious work environments. We develop a multi‐scalar conceptual framework combining key ideas regarding livelihood trajectories, feminist social reproduction theory, and social networks and social capital, and draw on worker interviews in Bình Dương and Bắc Ninh Provinces as well as focus groups with officials and other key stakeholders. While workers' trajectories are shaped by shifting production demands, low wages, housing insecurity, and limited social protection, as well as familial obligations and life events, we find that they actively recalibrate their livelihood strategies and focus on gaining stability through informal income activities, support networks, and future‐oriented planning. Rather than viewing workers as passive subjects of exploitation, our study contributes to scholarship on precarious labour and migration by showing how economic survival, emotional well‐being, and aspirational agency are dynamically interwoven and negotiated over time. We also challenge dominant policy narratives within Vietnam that frame industrial employment as a straightforward path to improved livelihoods, while calling for more integrated policy approaches that recognize the entanglement of labour, housing, and care in sustaining Vietnam's industrial development.