This paper examines the implications of the UK government's introduction of a 20% Value Added Tax (VAT) on private school fees. The analysis is framed within the theoretical contexts of the commodification of education, Bourdieu's theory of social reproduction, and the concept of social mobility. The paper argues that while the policy is ostensibly aimed at reducing educational disparities, it is likely to exacerbate social inequalities. The increased cost of private education will likely make it inaccessible for many middle-income families, reinforcing the position of private schools as enclaves for the elite. This, in turn, will hinder social mobility and perpetuate the cycle of social reproduction, as access to the cultural and social capital offered by these institutions becomes even more restricted. The paper concludes that the VAT policy, without other mitigating measures, may unintentionally deepen the very social divides it seeks to address.

Abstract English–medium instruction (EMI) has become a highly contested topic in discussions on the language of instruction policies in the Global South, raising critical questions about whether it truly delivers on the promises made in policy rhetoric and public discourse. While EMI is often promoted as a pathway to social, educational, and economic success for all, its rapid expansion raises concerns about linguistic inequality, social stratification, and unequal educational access. Through a critical synthesis of recent EMI literature, this paper identifies some persistent misconceptions that underpin the promotion and expansion of EMI in the Global South. These include the presumed neutrality of English, the belief in its automatic pedagogical and economic benefits, and the assumption that EMI leads to equitable access and improved content learning. The paper highlights the ideological and material consequences of EMI, such as epistemic injustice, linguistic hierarchies and social reproduction. In doing so, it calls for a rethinking of EMI beyond instrumentalist and Anglocentric logics and urges the centering of linguistic diversity, multilingual pedagogies and critical policy orientations. The article concludes with implications for future EMI scholarship and practices, particularly in contexts marked by deep social, linguistic and educational inequalities.

ABSTRACT Gig platforms mediating domestic services related to social reproduction are increasingly acknowledged as urban infrastructures. While critical scholars have discussed the related working conditions, profitmaking, and problems resulting from digital mediation extensively, there is no broader debate about the reorganization of reproductive work due to platform‐mediated services. As a possible (techno‐)fix for the crises of social reproduction and care, platforms seemingly offer a convenient way to deal with domestic care work. The crises, though, are not discussed as a structural phenomenon, but are shifted to individual households. Applying a feminist perspective combining materialist and poststructural approaches, this paper understands urban platforms mediating food delivery (groceries and meals) as commodified domestic service labor and takes such platforms as point of departure to discuss the reorganization of social reproductive activities in the face of both people's precariousness and precarity. Challenging the straightforward distinction between “convenient clients” and “precarious platform workers”, we claim that food delivery platforms rest upon the human need for care (precariousness), which they transform into precarity for the ones carrying out platform‐mediated gigs. As a result, food delivery as commodified social reproductive labor manifests long‐lasting characteristics of such work in capitalism, for example feminization, racialization, and invisibility. Therefore, we claim that food delivery platforms, far from merely pertaining to the sphere of exchange or to labor exploitation, they are also immanent to the expropriation of SR, by shifting it to expropriable “others”. Following up on this claim, and acknowledging the scarcity of studies on the clients' side regarding food delivery in Continental Europe, we conclude by suggesting further research areas connecting food delivery platforms and the reorganization of social reproduction.

This article examines the intersection of militarization, violence, and labour discipline in Mexico’s export-oriented manufacturing sector. While the country is often portrayed as navigating a paradox, marked by high levels of violence on one hand and economic dynamism on the other, we argue that these phenomena are not contradictory but mutually constitutive. Drawing on labour regime and social reproduction theory and qualitative research in Celaya, Guanajuato, we explore how state and para-state violence, including the militarized so-called ‘war on drugs’, function as mechanisms of labour discipline and social control beyond the factory floor: violence reshapes spaces of social reproduction, enforcing dynamics of super-exploitation and suppressing collective labour action, particularly in strategic export-processing zones like Celaya. We contend that understanding labour discipline in contemporary Mexico requires an expanded analytic lens – one that connects the formal workplace to the coercive regulation of everyday life. By situating Celaya’s transformation into an automotive export hub within broader national dynamics, the article contributes to critical labour studies and highlights the role of militarization and violence in sustaining export-led accumulation in contexts of deepened precarity and social fragmentation, particularly in the Global South.

Over the last decade, an unprecedented wave of environmental mobilizations has swept across the Balkans. The energy transition, depopulation, and popular environmentalism have entwined environment and reproduction which, in turn, has triggered a major historical reckoning. In this introduction to a thematic cluster, we explore environmental reverberations as ways in which ecological distribution conflicts not only antagonize different social groups but also resonate across space and time. First, we observe how anti-mining struggles thematize the affinities of postsocialist and postcolonial pathways, and the way histories of different regions have been compartmentalized. Second, we pay attention to trajectories of modernization in the region, arguing that a focus on soil and nonhumans can decenter ethnonational readings of regional violence. Third, we explore how environmental struggles resonate across different social milieus, while remaining rooted in enduring forces of social reproduction. Last, we explore how the energy transition becomes entwined with depopulation, revealing a cross-generational dissensus on the value of rural land. By paying attention to the material, protracted effects of power as it resonates through the landscape, historical memory, and worries over social reproduction, we suggest that the environmental humanities can offer new readings of classical regional tropes, including that of Balkanism.

Outside formal supply chains, Bosnian gardens provide meaningful contributions to food security through calories and culturally understood “good” food. Much of this food is ultimately sold, gifted, bartered, or paid in kind in a rural economy where labor is skilled and people have some means to produce, but cash is rare. Amid state failures to provide work and safety nets, garden networks of exchange, debt, and caregiving revive and transform the remains of Yugoslav village sociality in the 2020s. Yet in cash-poor and labor-squeezed rural communities, maintaining the ecological diversity of these montane environments presents a paradox: while providing nourishing and socially desired foods, these gardens cannot offer a desirable future to families who abandon homes to outmigration and work abroad. Food self-provisioning in northern Bosnia lays bare the aftermath of social and economic violence for environmental stewardship and rural belonging: while providing an important source of food security and sustaining networks of labor and exchange, Bosnian gardens are also a reverberation of profound socioeconomic gaps and unmet aspirations for economic growth. Even as they provide the physical means for social reproduction through food that is both culturally and culinarily nourishing, these gardens also represent deep ambiguities about rural futures in a mountainous region with high biodiversity, uncertain formal economies, and a desire to maintain a sense of home despite outmigration. Recognizing these tensions across gender, generation, and class demands a vision of agricultural sustainability centered around farmer labor, knowledge, and valuation.

Special Issue ‘Social Reproduction and Biopolitics’: Introduction

Although both climate change and child marriage have received sustained policy and research attention, their intersection remains critically underexplored. This article examines how climate stress—arising from rapid-onset disasters and slow-onset processes such as drought and salinisation, and intensified by displacement and weak governance—reshapes marriage practices in South Asia, where climate vulnerability and gendered precarity converge with particular intensity. Drawing on ethnographic research in drought-affected western India and case studies from the Indo-Bangladesh border, southern India, and Afghanistan documented through the Climate Brides project, the paper traces how child marriage functions as an infrastructure of adaptation—a mechanism for redistributing labour, debt, and care under conditions of crisis. Across cases—from Gate-Cane weddings in Maharashtra to trafficking-linked unions in the Sundarbans, post-tsunami marriages in Tamil Nadu, and Toyana exchanges in Afghan displacement camps—early and forced marriage emerge not as cultural residues but as adaptive, if extractive, responses to livelihood erosion and the retreat of state support. Using feminist political ecology and social reproduction theory, the article calls for interdisciplinary, justice-oriented approaches that recognise child marriage as part of the gendered infrastructures of climate adaptation.

Unpaid care work places a disproportionate burden on women, preventing their full economic, social and political participation. Demand for care work increases in postwar contexts and has been shown to contribute to creating everyday peace during and after war. Drawing on feminist political economy theorizing of social reproduction, this paper argues that care serves a critical function in women’s postwar social movements, where the material conditions for life are eroded and women are expected to perform the majority of unpaid household care work, hindering their political participation. Two case studies from rural Sri Lanka illustrate how women use care to build feminist solidarity in the everyday lives of their social movements. Domestic unpaid care work depletes women when unsupported; the anti-microfinance Satyagrah a in Hingurakgoda (2020) and the land rights struggle in Panama (2010–) demonstrate that caring ways of resistance cultivate solidarities to maintain social movements by supporting or substituting for women’s unpaid labour in maintaining their households. This paper contributes to scholarship on political participation in postwar contexts by highlighting how caring ways enable women’s participation and mobilization in public protest movements. Women’s participation contributed to confronting the political economy of indebtedness and dispossession by demanding justice from the state.

In this paper, I analyze how an organization, Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA), was formed to challenge the increasingly militarized racialized police force in Los Angeles during neoliberal industrial reorganization, regional abandonment, and massive prison boom in the 1970s and 1980s. Studying CAPA allows for an analysis of the radical ideas and actions that came out of on-the-ground mobilization by the very communities being criminalized and policed. By applying a framework combining social reproduction, racial capitalism, and police geographies, I argue that analyzing CAPA provides critical insight into how the police and police violence are integral to reproducing and securing racialized spaces, capitalist power relations, and expanded accumulation. Through CAPA, I demonstrate how a grassroots formation developed an analysis around policing and capitalism. This analysis informed their antipolicing infrastructure centered around social reproduction to raise counterhegemony and advance a broader challenge against ongoing state violence and the social relations of production, which they saw as upholding race-classed oppression. Doing so demonstrates a prefigurative politics which can inform the current moment of challenging policing, whereby struggles around social reproduction challenge the everyday conditions of existence and provide leverage for building consciousness around and contesting sociospatial relations to transform society.

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship explores the links between food security and the life-making strategies of rural populations. This study extends the analysis to a centre of Southeast Asia's oil palm plantation complex. It examines the social reproduction processes that facilitate the generation of substantial profit margins alongside patterns of deep nutritional insecurity. Drawing on fieldwork in Sumatra and integrating perspectives from agrarian change, social reproduction, and food system analysis, this study unravels the interconnections between the plantation economy, gendered life-making practices, and poor nutritional outcomes. This research argues that the confluence of migratory patterns, relational dynamics governing land and labour in the oil palm economy, food system transformations, and the exploitation of low-income women's labour coalesces into a critical nexus of climate precarity and nutritional deficiency. Policies to tackle food and nutritional insecurity and stunting need to address the processes that deplete opportunities for life-making among low-income families in oil palm landscapes.

The ‘future of work’ in manufacturing or similarly positioned ‘productive’ sectors is an increasing public and academic concern. Debate tends to polarize between anxious and dystopic accounts that explore the threat of technological change to existing industries and celebratory, optimistic accounts that focus on the ambitious promises of possible futures. In response, a critical labour studies scholarship has argued that these narratives tend to be overly determined by conversations about technology and less focused on how technological transformation has historically and will continue to exacerbate, reinscribe, or reshape existing exclusions within labour markets and workplaces. These optimistic narratives also fail to address the non-technological drivers of the global restructuring of work and employment, in particular the way the current realities of work are rooted in (neo)colonial, racialized, and gendered histories and presents of exploitation, resource extraction, and social reproduction. Drawing on five empirical contributions from a variety of industrial contexts across the Global South and North, this special issue deepens our understanding of how ‘future of work’ discourses and practices, including efforts (and desires) to automate and innovate, impact and coexist with industries and labour relations that have hitherto been slow to automate, remain un-automated, or are resistant to technological change.

This response to the four review essays on The Labor of Reinvention reflects on the politics of producing knowledge about China and its implications for understanding global techno-capitalism at the current conjuncture of uncertainty, transformation, and geopolitical tension. Building on Arif Dirlik's “China Paradigm” and Stuart Hall's “conjunctural thinking,” I argue for an approach that attends to the articulation of global and local forces and the contradictions inherent in China's hybrid development. Responding to Yifan Cai, I elaborate on China's evolving state–business relations, tracing the emergence of a “Market in the Fragmented State” in contrast to US oligarchical models. With Gulinigaer Yishake's insights, I revisit the role of family and social reproduction in shaping women's entrepreneurial subjectivities, particularly among ethnic minorities, and link these to longstanding crises of reproduction in rural China. Extending the conversation beyond China, I engage Sandeep Mertia's comparative analysis of India and China to highlight both shared and divergent state–society configurations, infrastructural capacities, and dependencies on the Global North. I also take up Andrea Pollio's call to move beyond a China–US binary toward “Silicon Elsewheres,” foregrounding African and Southern agency in reconfiguring data economies. Finally, I outline my new book project, which traces the circulation of biomedical innovations across China, the US, and Indonesia, analyzing how policymakers and entrepreneurs navigate the tensions between innovation, equity, and self-reliance. The China Paradigm, I argue, continues to generate contradictions and inspire new configurations of techno-capitalism, unsettling global hierarchies while attracting critique, emulation, and resistance.

ABSTRACT This paper explores how migrant women in India negotiate their way through the racialized occupation, algorithmic control, and patriarchal household to survive and sustain in a digitized economy. Drawn from Marxist Feminist theory, it proposes to see women labour as continuum between home and workplace, blurring the rigid compartmentalization. This paper argues women use their embodied labour (racial aesthetic, emotions), community networks to bargain leisure (own space) and use it further for social production and reproduction. The study highlights how intimate subsidies (sacrifices and compensation) mask the structural exploitation of women's labour and how silent yet profound resilience can be built with the assistance of state and local communities.

ABSTRACT Many contemporary libraries are currently undergoing processes of transformation to better fit norms associated with the concept of social infrastructure. However, these changes are not being accepted passively by library publics. A growing emphasis on the social, ‘more-than-books’ services that libraries provide has galvanized opposition to these changes. This paper analyses shifting understandings of public library services in Aotearoa New Zealand, focusing on two central city libraries in Wellington and Christchurch. In these cities, public submission processes offered an opportunity for library users to express their visions for the future of their libraries. In particular, a key tension unfolding around these libraries centred on the place of children and practices of social reproduction in the library as a public space. This research argues that social infrastructures are highly contested, assembling entities that show the fragility of maintaining accessible public space and social services in the contemporary city.

The primary goal of this study is to determine the inheritance process and the changes that occur in passing on Bourdieu’s economic capital from the first to the third generation of camarero families from San Pablo, Laguna. The case study approach, based on Key Informant Interviews (KII) and Archival Analysis, was utilized to obtain data. The paper is divided into four sections: (1) featuring the assets owned based on the first generation’s economic capital; (2) featuring the assets owned based on the second generation’s economic capital; (3) featuring the assets owned based on the third generation’s economic capital; and (4) the transformation of economic capital in each generation. Throughout the study, Bourdieu’s concept of social reproduction was utilized to reveal the camareros’ experiences and issues, leading to a more indepth understanding of camareros and their contributions to Philippine society. Keywords: economic capital, Holy Week, transgenerational, camarero, bequeathing

In 2011 milk banks became key components of the public health establishment in South Africa, when the country committed to promoting exclusive breastfeeding to fight infant morbidity and mortality. In this article I present a conjunctural analysis of how donor human milk banks are social reproductive infrastructures that facilitate the flow of milk at a space-time of racial capitalist infectious disease and neoliberal care crises. I ask: How do multiscalar governing logics, discourses, and technologies articulate to make this donor economy a conjunctural form of distributed social and biological reproduction? How have various interlocking economic, ecological, and reproductive crises underpinned the emergence of milk banking infrastructures? And, methodologically, how can conjunctural analysis fold in necessary attention to the embodied, biological, biomedical, and religious factors that shape social reproductive politics in a given space-time? I argue that this social reproductive infrastructure is molded through the articulation of numerous discourses and processual logics that dialectically entwine the global and local, including socioecological and embodied crisis, biomedicalization, networks of kin and care, and secularization. In so doing I build out a conjunctural analytic attentive to social reproduction under racial capitalism that privileges the body, ecologies, kinship, and religious-cultural norms.

Swarming, or colony reproduction, in honey bees (Apis mellifera) is an indicator of colony-level fitness. The drivers of swarming remain elusive at both the colony and individual bee level. Floral abundance, rapid colony growth, and congestion are colony correlates and partial triggers of swarming but are not singularly causal. The nutritional and physiological state of individual bees within colonies preparing to swarm has been understudied. We hypothesized that vitellogenin (Vg), a phospholipoglycoprotein that influences the honey bee age-based division of labor in individual bees, might also mediate the cascade of physiological and behavioral processes that lead to reproductive swarming. Over two years, we compared vitellogenin(Vg) gene expression levels in age-marked worker bees sampled at various intervals before a swarm (pre-swarming colonies) to samples of same-aged bees collected from non-swarming colonies at the same time intervals. Vg levels were significantly higher in 10- and 14-day old bees from pre-swarming colonies three days prior and within 24 h of swarm issuance. Vg levels normally decrease in 10-14d old bees that are transitioning to the forager behavioral state. We provide a hypothesis for how Vg levels in individual bees might influence the colony-level regulatory processes that lead to swarming. This work may show for the first time, the link between a highly conserved protein associated with individual reproduction across oviparous animal taxa and its function as a mechanism of social reproduction in honeybees colonies.

Building on recent interventions in platform work scholarship that centre social reproduction and draw attention to informal economies in the Global South, this paper advances a ‘working lives’ framework to account for the entanglements of production/reproduction, informality and precarity, and gender norms in the shaping of platform work. Based on interviews with women engaged in delivery work through digital platforms in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Delhi, India, the paper shows that women enter platform delivery work compelled by adverse socio-economic conditions and work-life histories of informality. Women organise their participation in platform delivery work, making use of its location flexibility, for and around the needs of the household. Further, they operationalise this flexibility to navigate gendered constraints, such as, curtailed radius of work to ensure safety and continued responsibility for housework and childcare. The paper, empirically novel in accounting for narratives of women in the Global South, offers the analytical framework of ‘working lives’, combining long-term and place-based perspectives with everyday perspectives, with attention to social norms, for research on platform work globally.

This article sketches out a general theory on the relationship between capitalist crisis, far-right politics, and social reproduction. Such an engagement is made through anchoring at the heart of the analysis the experiences of ‘surplus populations’: those rendered outside the wage economy and conceptualized here more broadly as existing on the margins of society. I argue that a sufficient understanding of the contemporary emergence of the far right requires making sense of, first, historical changes to social reproduction wrought by financialized capitalism and, second, the role played by surplus populations and relations of racialization, gender, and exclusionary politics. Hungarian illiberalism is used as a case study for exploring these dynamics, with a focus on the experiences of Hungary’s largest minority group, the Roma. The research contributes to Marxist theory by parsing out the significance of social reproduction and surplus populations in shaping the intersections of capitalist crisis and far-right politics.