Social Reproduction Research Articles

SOCIAL RISKS: FACTORS AND CONSEQUENCES

The article is aimed at revealing the social risks that arise in society, encompass all aspects of life, and go beyond the oversight of social institutions that ensure safety in society. The authors argue that social risks in Ukraine have certain country-specific features, and that they have emerged and become widespread due to problems accumulated during a long transformational period. In the face of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, the level of uncertainty has increased, and problems in the socio-economic sphere of the country have worsened. Put together, these factors led to changes in the lives of a large part of the population and increased the intensity of the manifestation of social risks. An analysis of the current situation in Ukraine shows that risks in the labor, demographic, and educational sectors, as well as risks related to the availability and quality of medical services, are of particular concern. The features of the manifestation of contemporary risks are the deterioration of the demographic situation, the decrease in the possibilities of reproduction of human capital, the disruption of balances in the labor market, the decline in the well-being of the population, the deterioration of the financial condition of social benefit funds and the heavy load on them. Social risks increase the probability of negative changes, the danger of the dysfunction of social institutions, the inhibition of social reproduction processes, the transmission of social norms and values, production processes, and are likely to lead to social instability and tension. The dynamism, instability, and unpredictability of socio-economic changes and their irreversibility give way to the emergence of new social risks. Accordingly, focusing on priorities and specific ways to minimize social risks is one of the most pressing and urgent tasks of our time, the solution of which requires the development and application of effective mechanisms that will ensure an adequate response to social risks in the system of ensuring the economic security of the state.

Perawatan yang Beracun: Kerja Perawatan Perkebunan dan Reproduksi Sosial dalam Perkebunan Monokultur Sawit

The expansion of oil palm plantation has drawn scholarship attention. On one hand, studies have examined how oil palm plantation development serves an important instrument for employment creation, poverty alleviation and rural development. On the other, there is plenty of research that shows adverse impacts of such expansion on socio-ecological conditions. This includes the recruitment of women plantation workers into maintenance work with flexible labour relations. Meanwhile, literature on oil palm plantations in Indonesia has not paid significant attention on care work. Employing feminist political economy perspective, this article attempts to understand care work in monoculture oil palm plantations, particularly in relations to maintenance work on plantation. Through the concept of social reproduction, care work is understood in a broader terms as a way to draw the entanglement between production and reproduction in monoculture oil palm plantations. This article argues that women workers participation into maintenance work on plantations show the articulation of social relations based on patriarchal system with palm oil competition in the global market. From the perspective of the women workers, participation in the maintenance work is viewed as a livelihood strategy. The strategy that involves works with risk of regular exposure to toxic chemicals is understood as toxic care.

Menyokong Tenaga Kerja: Fenomena Waithood dan Kerja Perawatan Tak Berupah dalam Perspektif Reproduksi Sosial

The construction of unpaid care work as the responsibility of women has contributed to the emergence of the postponing marriage phenomenon (waithood) among youth, especially women. On the other hand, care work is an integral part of the reproductive workforce, related to productive work. Furthermore, care work also contributes to reproducing the workforce in serving the interests of capital accumulation. The mechanization of women’s roles in creating a workforce surplus makes women work excessively and hinders economic access. It argues that the financial pressures and the burden of work indirectly lead to the delayed marriage phenomenon. This financial pressure and the burden of care work indirectly contribute to the postponement of marriage. This study adopts a perspective of Social Reproduction Theory by utilizing qualitative research methods and a literature study approach. This study analyzes the relationship between capitalism, care work, and the recent phenomenon of waithood. The results indicate that women have been supporting the workforce through their care work, and this occurs systemically as a consequence of the capitalist system, which has led to the postponement of women’s marriages.

WAYS TO IMPROVE THE MECHANISM OF PROPERTY INSURANCE IN THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN

The article is devoted to the essence of insurance and the mechanism of realization of property insurance at the present stage of economic development in the Republic of Uzbekistan. Insurance is an important element of the functioning of the financial system of the state, capable of ensuring the continuity of social reproduction, depending on the negative consequences of natural disasters, accidents, natural and man-made disasters and other unforeseen events that cause high risks of property loss, as well as to guarantee social protection of the population. to stabilize the process of investing in the economy. Today, property insurance in Uzbekistan is an insurance industry in which the object of insurance relations are property interests and property in various forms (for example, buildings, structures, equipment, and so on). The property insurance market in our country is developing quite rapidly, and if there are no serious turning points in society in the future, then after a while insurance may become one of the main factors protecting the interests of citizens and legal entities owning any property.

Social stratifying Kazakhstan: A Bourdieusian social reproduction analysis of higher education internationalisation

This study addresses educational disparities faced by socioeconomically disadvantaged students, particularly in accessing international higher education in the post-Soviet region, focusing on Kazakhstan. While studies of social class formation in developing countries are inconclusive, the literature overwhelmingly shows that high socioeconomic groups dominate access to international education. In this qualitative study, we conducted semi-structured interviews and open-ended questionnaires with 98 undergraduate and graduate students who accessed English language degrees at home and abroad. We used Bourdieu’s conceptual tool of embodied, objectified, and institutionalised cultural capital to demonstrate how (1) educational resources in the home country, (2) English language proficiency, and (3) access to international English higher education function as pillars of social class reproduction. We argue that the process is skewed in favour of students from privileged classes and that the pursuit of meritocratic policies only reinforces elites’ capital accumulation and promotes social stratification.

Social reproduction of violence and fear

Este escrito se centra en un acercamiento a la comprensión de algunas de las maneras en que se amplifica el miedo social, desde la idea de amenaza y restricción de las libertades de algunos cuerpos, en discursos noticiosos. La investigación cuya parte de los resultados de la primera fase, presentamos en este escrito, buscó indagar por las representaciones sociales que la prensa colombiana construye en relación con las violencias homicidas hacia los líderes sociales en 2018. Partimos de comprender que en la estructura de los corpus abordados, la ausencia de actores, la idea del fantasma y la explicación orgánica del fenómeno violento homicida, potencian la construcción de significaciones que guardan relación con la construcción cultural y social del miedo y que es reproducida en diversos discursos sociales, también, lo cual da cuenta de la insuficiente comprensión del fenómeno violento hacia las luchas sociales en Colombia, encarnadas en sus líderes asesinados.

Revisiting Enduring Labour Questions and Social Reproduction Dynamics in Rural Zimbabwe’s Post Land Reform Context: Implications on Citizen Welfare and Wellbeing

Enduring agrarian labour questions and social reproduction dynamics in former settler colonies like Zimbabwe have always been a subject of much scholarly interest. Two decades after Zimbabwe’s controversial fast track land reform programme (FTLRP), the agrarian labour questions and social reproduction dynamics are receiving renewed attention. This is partly attributable to an uneasy political transition, neo-liberal economic trajectories, and the perceived reversals of the policies of the Robert Mugabe administration. With these changes occurring, questions are arising on how this is implicating on agrarian labour and social reproduction in the resettlement areas created by the FTLRP. In a context of trying to understand the outcomes of land and agrarian reform framed within the transformative social policy conceptual framework, this article explores emergent agrarian labour and social reproduction dynamics in the two rural districts of Goromonzi and Zvimba in rural Zimbabwe. Using an interpretive research paradigm and a mixed methods research approach, the study elicited responses from 200 small to medium scale farmers who are beneficiaries of the FTLRP. Arguing from the position that land and agrarian reforms are an overlooked vector of social policy, the article investigated the extent to which the FTLRP has facilitated the creation of employment opportunities, enhanced the productive and reproductive capacities of land reform beneficiaries, enabled wealth distribution and improved rural livelihoods. The article shows that despite the emergent capitalist trajectories and the continued super exploitation of labour reminiscent of the settler colonial era, empirical field-based evidence suggests that redistributive land reform has contributed to socio-economic transformation and enhanced citizens welfare and wellbeing. This is shown as having been evident in the realm of agrarian labour and social reproduction.

Strategies of Social Reproduction: Medical Students from Germany in Central and Eastern Europe from a Centre–Periphery Perspective

Higher education degrees from European Union countries are automatically recognised in other Member States. However, legal recognition does not necessarily translate into symbolic recognition in the profession. This dynamic can be observed in the field of medicine in Germany, where German graduates often face symbolic devaluation when they graduate in certain other countries and return to work in Germany. At the same time, the group of foreign medical students is socially exclusive, and admission to a medical programme in Germany is difficult and unsuccessful for many applicants. Based on the theory of symbolic power and capital and a centre–periphery perspective, this paper reconstructs the means and ways by which privileged students from the centre, Germany, seek social reproduction by studying medicine abroad in the semi-periphery, Hungary, Latvia and Romania. The results show that moving to the semi-periphery is only chosen when other alternatives in the centre are not feasible. Certain symbolic disadvantages of studying abroad were identified, and countermeasures were developed to ensure symbolic legitimacy upon return. The results also show that the semi-periphery is not homogeneous in its symbolic ambivalence from a centre–periphery perspective.

“For us women, flavor is king”: Gender, saf sap and flavor work in urban Senegal

ABSTRACT Over the past decade home cooking in the Senegalese city of Dakar has come to be dominated by culinary practices of saf sap: the incorporation of new commodities and flavor enhancers and the invention of new cooking techniques that intensify the taste of everyday dishes. Producing a well flavored meal is a crucial part of women’s domestic work, but cooks are increasingly critiqued in Dakar, accused of traducing culinary heritage, challenging the authority of elders, and spreading metabolic disease. Drawing on ethnographic research in Senegalese households and qualitative interviews and focus groups with women who prepare food, I introduce the analytical category of “flavor work” to show how the everyday making of taste in a West African city is embedded in historical and contemporary forms of household social reproduction. Controversy over the taste of home cooking reveals how women’s flavor work serves a double reproductive purpose. Flavor work creates culturally coherent and intelligible meals, but it also forms part of broader subsistence strategies: techniques for navigating scarcity and rupture.

Artisanal and small-scale mining through a “labour regime” lens: Consolidating a research agenda on labour exploitation

This article examines the way the notion of labour regime in artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) research can contribute to new ways of conceptualising this sector's challenges. It starts by reviewing how the phenomenal expansion of ASM over the last decades has been problematised, and highlights the need to better understand what drives artisanal miners to operate under extremely precarious work conditions, and the role they play in shaping the conditions of the sector they evolve in. ASM labour has generally been approached in research from two main lines of debates, namely livelihoods and agrarian change, and as embedded in global commodity frontiers and networks. The former perspective played an important role in highlighting the diversity of forms of production, and the heterogeneity of labour comprising ASM. This body of work showed that these emerge from strategies adopted mainly by smallholders facing subsistence challenges who diversify their source of income by either branching out into mining or combining it with agricultural activities. The second line of enquiry approaches ASM as emerging from the complex interactions of actors and factors across scales in global commodity frontiers and competing territorialisation projects. Both perspectives highlight the importance of better conceptualising value extraction and ASM labour exploitation dynamics, and the article draws on recent work on “labour regimes” to suggest ways to move in this direction. At this juncture, we emphasise three areas of work that we suggest are worth pushing forth, namely the role of social reproduction dynamics underlying ASM work, the intersecting production of social difference and ASM labour control across supply chains, and the role of ASM resistance, collective mobilisation and agency. Through these, we hope to advance future research on exploitation dynamics in ASM labour regimes, in ways that may also have policy relevance, as labour has rarely been the latter's focus.

Wage Differentials Among Reverse Migrants: Analyzing the Social Reproduction of Inequalities During the Post-COVID Recovery

Income inequalities that have traditionally been high in India, witnessed a widening of the wedge as the pandemic struck. Interestingly, this wedge widened further as the recovery began, those in high income groups reverted to their original income levels while those in low income groups were left struggling at decreased wages. This paper is an attempt to examine if the post pandemic economic recovery mirrored the existing pattern of inequalities amongst various social groups. The study is based on a case study of a small town in the Raebareli district of Uttar Pradesh, and the data is collected from a primary survey of the migrants who had returned back to their home town in the aftermath of pandemic. Hypothesis tested is that the rate of recovery from pandemic-induced income loss is consistent among similarly skilled workers, regardless of their social group affiliation.The results indicate that the loss of income is not uniform across categories, and that it is more severe in case of vulnerable groups. We argue that if there is no affirmative action, the inequalities will keep reproducing themselves and become more severe after every shock that the economy faces.

Night labour, social reproduction and political struggle in the ‘Working Day’ chapter of Marx's Capital

This essay offers a new reading of Marx's chapter on ‘the working day’ in Capital Volume One by exploring the textual theme of night-time work. Even as Marx emphasises how the lengthening workday enables the super-exploitation of producers’ wage labour, his depictions of nocturnal experiences highlight more forcefully the destruction of workers’ reproductive resources, capacities and relationships. Night comes to represent the contracted time, condensed space, petrified relational bonds and thwarted desires for human reproduction in a free, fulsome sense that includes reinvigorating oneself, caring for others and enjoying experiences apart from work or care. Night's role as a privileged signifier and catalyst of these changes comes through in key passages about women, children and vampires, and in theoretically meaningful variances between Marx's German paraphrasing of English sources and those original texts, which replace Marx's phrases in English translations of Capital. Contemplating Marx's ambivalent reflections on legal-political action to limit workday hours, I argue for making struggles over social reproduction in a capacious sense central to working-class politics today. I demonstrate the power of this Marxian analytic by considering the compression of social-reproductive time among today's microworkers, who fuel the digital economy by performing platform-based ‘tasks’ at all hours for very low wages.

Capitalist modernity and gendered subalternity in contemporary Muslim fiction: Saudi Women in Raja Alem’s Fatma: A Novel of Arabia (2002)

ABSTRACT Contemporary Muslim women’s writing can help to shed light on how the ostensibly incommensurate relationship between the conditions of women’s lives and gendered forms of social reproduction in modern Muslim societies are intimately connected with the uneven development of capitalist modernity, especially in oil-rich states such as Saudi Arabia. This paper traces the ways in which gendered forms of social reproduction and patriarchal oppression are mediated but also contested in the form of a text from modern Saudi Arabia: Raja Alem’s Fatma A Novel of Arabia. It considers how this novel combines elements of magic, fantasy, and realism to foreground how the oppression of Muslim women and their relegation to a position of gendered subalternity is a crucial determinant in the combined and uneven development of petro-capitalist modernity in the modern Muslim world. By drawing on Sufism in a modern narrative of so-called magical realism, the novel, I argue, contests gender roles in contemporary capitalist modernity by offering a view that stems from the Islamic tradition but does not align with patriarchy and capitalist ideology; on the other hand, it registers the coexistence of the religious and the magical within the modern world.

Infrastructural clashes: Induced scarcity and governing refugees through depletion

This paper deals with the repeated infrastructural breakdowns in Greek refugee camps. It introduces the concept of “infrastructural clashes” to highlight the apparent clash between, on the one hand, high-tech control systems and, on the other, the failures and scarcity of basic infrastructures in camps - such as electricity, running water and food. It argues that infrastructural clashes are not side-effects but, rather, constitutive components of modes of governing by debilitating refugees. The article starts by developing the concept of infrastructural clashes, grounding it in the literature on camp geographies and migration infrastructures. It moves on by exploring the nexus between infrastructural clashes and politics of induced scarcity in Greece, illustrating how this depletes refugees and extracts value from their vitality. It contends that they enhance carcerality beyond detention. The last section engages with refugees’ mobilisations against induced scarcity: their claims foreground that infrastructural clashes enhance protracted dependency. The depletion strengthened through infrastructural clashes shows that refugees are not only obstructed in their mobility but also in their attempt to re-build their lives and to engage in autonomous social reproduction activities.

Beyond Protection, toward Respect: Struggle for Environmental Justice in the Kendeng Mountains

The cement industry is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than international air traffic, it takes up massive amounts of water and energy in the production process and creates highly destructive stone pit mines. The case we are presenting here stands for a complex transnational struggle for environmental justice involving the indigenous Sedelur Sikep community and a subsidiary of the German HeidelbergCement AG linking the Javanese lime stone landscapes of the Kendeng mountains with nodes of decision-making in Jakarta and Germany. The Kendeng mountains on the island of Java are important sites of social and cultural reproduction for the Sedelur Sikep, providing important ecosystem services. The community rejects the market economy and in particular the trading of products they have not produced themselves. Their practices have contributed to the conservation of this biodiversity rich landscapes for centuries. The plans of the HeidelbergCement AG to construct a cement factory raises concerns among the Sedelur Sikep. The group worries that the factory and the stone pit mine alter the hydrological cycle affecting their wet-rice fields and ultimately their lifestyles. Despite protests by Sedelur Sikep and allied conservation and human-rights organizations, the subsidiary of Heidelberg Cement AG hold son to its plans, referring to a completed environmental impact assessment and related permits.Building on the concepts of environmental justice and epistemic justice, we investigate how the Sedelur Sikep, together with conservation and human-rights organizations have (so far) successfully prevented the construction of the cement factory by challenging the procedural aspects of the permit process, stressing their role as indigenous communities and by challenging dominant forms of knowledge production used in environmental impact assessments. We show how successful resistance is organized employing the mainstream nature conservation narrative. We also show that the employment of different knowledge system is part of a strategy, while the groups own understanding of respecting and living with the mountain goes beyond this mainstream narrative.

From the racialization of finance to the financing of anti-racism: Tracing the US financial industry’s investments in closing the racial wealth gap

This paper examines profit-seeking investments that US financial industry actors have made in the name of racial justice since the summer of 2020. This trend, which builds on the proposition of “sustainable” finance that private profits and social benefits can coexist, is known in the industry as racial justice investing. To understand how the industry frames racial justice as an object of financial intervention, I draw from theories of social reproduction, racial capitalism, and social finance to analyze the historical and contemporary processes through which racial injustice is conceived in economic terms as a “gap” between the wealth of white and racialized households. Then, I analyze the political economy of these investments, focusing on how solutions to the wealth gap are oriented around extending credit and economic inclusion to racialized households and business owners. Ultimately I illustrate how the financial industry’s investments in closing the racial wealth gap largely sidestep questions of power and, paradoxically, justice that animate many contemporary racial justice movements.

BUDUĆNOST RADA ILI BUDUĆNOST BEZ RADA: RAZMIŠLJANJA OD MARKSA DO DANAS

This text attempts to present and critically analyze two prevailing Neo-Marxist schools of thought on the future of work, that derive from Marx’s ambivalent attitude toward work and the role of technology in society. Contemporary thinking on the future of work is split between its humanization and overcoming alienation in a ca-pitalist society on one side, and anti-work and post-work theoretical perspectives that propose its abolition through automation and technological innovations introduced by capitalism on the other. A two-way evolution of the Marxist thought on the future of work will be presented in relation to the growing usage of digital technologies and the development of artificial intelligence, while the disagreement between the two schools of thought won’t be seen as a setback, but the focus will be shifted towards their joint contribution to reexamining the concept of work in social theory and political prac-tice. The question about the future of work will also be analyzed through the lens of gender, in order to draw attention to the position of the social reproduction work and the risk of it being perceived as a highly ethical and authentic form of work that does not require reorganization. An anthropological perspective that emphasizes the link between human communities and work, not in order to project the future society, but to examine the transformation of the concept of work in relation to social, economic, and political frames, that is, at the intersection of neoliberalism and the development of new technologies in the contemporary context, will also be taken into consideration. By analyzing the future of work through different paradigms, we are called to open a new chapter in social theory that will serve as inspiration for future political demands that would lead the society out of the capitalist system.

Migration, Informality, and Unequal Exchange in the Context of the Mexico–US Regional Integration Process

This paper analyzes the complex relationship between migration and informality in the context of the Mexico–US asymmetric and subordinated regional integration process under neoliberalism. It argues that one of the main drivers of contemporary Mexican migration is the uneven distribution of the informal sector—and more precisely, the industrial reserve army of labor—among both countries. In this regard, Mexico operates as a strategic zone of reserve and social reproduction of workforce to satisfy the growing labor demand in the United States through migration. This reveals that the reproduction of the reserve labor army is essentially transnational in nature. The main link between migration and informality from below is through remittances: they serve as a fundamental component for family reproduction and for the procreation of a transnational core labor force that exerts pressure on wages on both sides of the border. Within the framework of the dynamics of informality from above, a growing flow of skilled and highly skilled Mexican migration to the United States has been unleashed, accompanied by aggressive government policies to attract talent in synchronization with the strengthening of innovation and knowledge-intensive activities in that country. We conclude that a critical aspect of informality from above, which reinforces informality from below, is the dismantling and disarticulation of Mexico’s productive apparatus in order to rearticulate it to the United States economy through the installation of export-oriented platforms that operate under an enclave logic, with imported components and under tax exemption regimes.

Work and social reproduction in rural India: Lessons from time‐use data

AbstractEfforts to decentre/decolonize our understanding of capitalist development in the Global South call for more complex and differentiated categories of work that acknowledge the significance of both non‐waged and reproductive labour. These categories would allow us to more clearly ‘see’ the varying intersections of gender, class and caste within this world of work. Even as the literature on work in the Global South acknowledges the importance of forms of non‐waged work, there is still more work to be done to sufficiently incorporate the labour of social reproduction. In this paper, which emerges from an effort to apply a feminist social reproduction lens in the field, we propose understanding work through four conceptual dyads: waged productive labour, non‐waged productive labour, waged reproductive labour and non‐waged reproductive labour. Through an in‐depth description of three specific cases from a time‐use survey we conducted in rural Punjab, India, we argue not only that all four dyads are required to encompass the world of work but also that this more expansive conceptualization can help us produce richer analyses of the intersections of class, caste and gender.

The Housing Struggle of Working-Class Migrant Women in Spain Through a Double Horizon of Political Temporality

ABSTRACT Impoverished and working-class migrant women have been the hardest hit and most exploited people during both the real estate-financial accumulation cycle and the aftermath of the 2008 crisis in Spain. Since 2009, these women have also been the key actors in outstanding civil disobedience to the neoliberal financial rule through their engagement in housing activism. How has this happened, and with what effects? Our research responds to these questions by focusing on the collective and contextualized strategies of extended struggles for social reproduction. This analytical framework integrates intersectional social structures, spatio-temporal dimensions of social reproduction, and the historical context of real-estate financialisation. Additionally, we argue that the notion of a “double horizon of political temporality” helps explain how the housing struggle evolved and identifies which social and political outcomes were produced. We suggest that this case reveals the mechanisms and impacts of similar grassroots movements challenging the current financialised dynamics of capitalism.