Social Reproduction Research Articles

Processes of Autonomy of Craftsmen Women Who Produce Ceramics in the Rural Context of Noreste Mexiquense

Objective: This study aims to recognize the situation of gender inequality of the artisan women of Santa María Canchesdá, Temascalcingo in the northeast of the State of Mexico. Theoretical Framework: Based on analysis categories of gender, territory and crafts. Method: In this study, the qualitative case study approach with a gender perspective was used, using field research techniques such as participant observation and in-depth semi-structured interviews. Results and Discussion: The results show that the participation of women in the ceramic making process is central to the local economy, but also, rural women artisans with their work have initiated processes of autonomy that would be repositioning them against the men of the community. Implications of the Research: It seeks to identify the real participation that women have in the social reproduction of their artisan homes and the expansion of the activity in the community. Originality/Value: Expand the literature on women potters, regarding the productive and reproductive work they carry out, through empirical evidence of their daily work both in pottery and ceramist workshops and at home, especially in indigenous localities.

Distinction in higher education: educational strategies of upper milieu students in Germany

This article aims to address the research question of which educational strategies are employed by upper milieus to establish or maintain the ‘structure of distances’ in the field of higher education in late modernity. Inspired by Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction and conflict, the study examined 95 qualitative interviews conducted with master’s students in Germany. In contrast to the extensive research on elite education, this study specifically focuses on the status reproduction of upper milieus in a country with a limited tradition of elite universities. The study incorporated three academic disciplines – management/business administration, medicine, and musicology – to account for the different capital compositions within the upper milieus. In this article, we discuss four exemplary strategies of distinction that appear to be particularly relevant for the upper milieus, comparing them with interviews conducted with students from middle and lower milieus. Finally, we relate the findings to current sociological diagnoses of social change in late modernity.

Access to Labour and “Differential Inclusion” for Young Venezuelan Migrants in Ecuador

Young migrants and refugees provide important inputs concerning production and social reproduction mechanisms (care work) that reproduce unequal but highly profitable patterns of accumulation around the world. The expansion of globalisation and neoliberalism has deepened such social dynamics, leading to a “multiplication of labour.” The diversification and heterogenization of migrant labour within neoliberal frameworks raise ethical and human rights concerns, including issues related to fair wages, working conditions, and access to social protections. After a neoliberal era in Latin America, the emergence of post‐development politics in the region led to increased efforts to address the needs of these populations. This article seeks to contribute to debates about “differential inclusion” in South–South migration and access to labour and social protection by analysing a specific case study of young Venezuelans, a recently growing phenomenon that has a great impact on the region. Ecuador is noteworthy because it hosts one of the largest populations of Venezuelan migrants and refugees and has adopted a human rights perspective in conjunction with public investments in social policy, health, and education. Despite efforts to legalize the work status of Venezuelan migrants, a more restrictive policy began to be implemented in 2019 that limited their access to formal labour and social protection. Within these complex dynamics of differential inclusion, instead of seeing these young migrants and refugees as victims, we analyse their resilience strategies of accessing social provisions while coping with informality and irregular status, as well as conditions of multiplication of labour. Using four real‐life stories as examples taken from a larger ethnographic study, we illustrate how dynamics of differential inclusion intersect with the gender, age, and legal status of young Venezuelans in Ecuador. The case studies are complemented with structural explanations from 6,000 household surveys collected between 2017 and 2020.

Söndrade kroppar, invasiv bemanning och prekära anställningar. Intersektionella perspektiv på försörjning, lönearbete och social reproduktion

While wage labor has been celebrated as a means of women’s emancipation within Swedish gender equality policy, unequal workplaces, the prevalence of sexual harassment, precarious working conditions, and work-related health issues indicate that wage labor also entails serious problems for many women. This article examines how unstable working conditions and work organizations built on precarious labor and flexible staffing strategies impact women’s well-being. Through feminist intersectional perspectives on social reproduction, the analysis sheds light on the risks posed by current work models to workers’ health, work capacity and liveability. The article is based on survey responses among retail workers. Their responses show that working life in retail is characterized not only by precarious employment conditions but also by invasive staffing strategies. The consequences are precarious livelihoods, stress, and limited possibilities to leisure time and social relationships. The lack of opportunities to recover highlights how workers’ bodies bear the brunt of companies’ pursuit of precarization. Building on theories of social reproduction and an analysis of working conditions in retail, we call for a deeper examination of the role of wage labor in feminist strategies.

Construction of the Tahfidzul Quran Islamic Boarding School Curriculum through Social Reproduction

This research discusses the construction of the Tahfidzul Quran Islamic Boarding School curriculum through social reproduction. The research methodology used in this study is qualitative descriptive research. By using the concept of Habitus as a structure of social reproduction, this study concludes that the curriculum at Ubay Bin Ka'ab Islamic Boarding School is constructed by reproducing ideologies, theological and moral beliefs, lifestyles adopted by lodge caregivers in particular and Tablighi congregational institutions in general. Although the curriculum focuses on memorizing the Quran, this pesantren teaches its students various religious knowledge and practices they need to participate in society as preachers. In addition, the curriculum also adjusts national education policies.

‘They abscond’: migration and coloniality in the contemporary conjuncture in Europe*

ABSTRACT Over the past decade, the public sphere in Europe has become increasingly ‘culturalised’. Ideas about European heritage and culture have been used as a way to exclude people, notably migrants. My intention is to understand how at this time the cultural, political and economic are articulated together in Europe. I do so by examining the trope of ‘migrants absconding’ which is a prominent concern of the European Commission, as reflected in legal innovations and in media and far-right generated moral panics. By focusing on the social, political and legal relations around ‘migrants absconding’, I read from the ground up value regimes that animate and organize the European social formation at this conjuncture. This social formation is made up of articulations along political, economic and cultural grounds, which allow for incorporating the themes of populist far right groups into the very core of the European Commission. This fosters and legitimizes value regimes bent on culturally cheapening migrants as incompatible, deviant or dangerous outsiders with a very limited right to social and political participation, much less an independent social reproduction. This then allows for their labour power to be also cheapened, super exploited and disposable. This type of value regime centring on culturally cheapening people deemed outsiders, controlling their social reproduction, and making them available as cheap labour was also a key feature of the colonial social formations of the mid 19th to mid 20th centuries, where concerns about ‘natives’ absconding tended to also be prominent. That there is something colonial about the contemporary conjuncture may be seen in the cultural-political-economic articulations dominant in Europe and their cultural and economic cheapening strategies. To abscond is to leave value regimes. Absconding is transgressive, it is to deliberately step out of place, and to attempt to pursue an independent social reproduction.

Groundwater overdraft is water dispossession

The Coachella Valley sits at the geographic periphery of Los Angeles. Despite its physical and political marginality, the Coachella Valley is a key site of agricultural production in Southern California. Access to water is essential for ensuring the region's centrality in economic and social reproduction. Today, access to water for industrial production is primarily achieved through ongoing water dispossession. Using archival and policy documents, I analyze how United States settlers leveraged multiple mechanisms for water dispossession to expand the region's growth. Literature on water dispossession focuses on forms (water rights, grabbing, allocation, diversion, or contamination) that advance either settler colonialism or capitalism. This article demonstrates how successful white settlement in the Coachella Valley could only happen through Indigenous water dispossession. I identify an understudied form of water dispossession: groundwater overdraft. I illustrate that groundwater overdraft is not just a characteristic of early U.S. settler colonialism in the Coachella Valley; it is ongoing. In addition, the economic and environmental drawbacks to overdraft are resolved by expanding water dispossession. Analyzing groundwater overdraft as water dispossession, questions this premise. Illuminating the structural processes at play in water dispossession exposes the need to address dispossession, rather than simply overdraft, through both policy and cultural changes.

How Therborn's Theory of Ideology Enhances Bourdieus's Theory of Fields

AbstractPierre Bourdieu's theory of subjectivity is perhaps the most elaborate within the broad constructivist tradition, and Göran Therborn's is perhaps the most elaborate within the Marxist tradition. These traditions emphasize opposite components and tend to produce different explanations on micro‐cognitive levels. But this article demonstrates a striking complementarity and ventures elements of synthesis. The two theorists are contrasted on four broad areas of social science: consciousness versus unconsciousness, identity formation, class, and discourse. Bourdieu emphasizes unconscious dispositions generally unamenable to individual control, whereas Therborn emphasizes formation of conscious beliefs. By bracketing the unconscious processes that Bourdieu captures, Therborn omits key mechanisms of social reproduction. Yet the mechanisms he does capture fit almost seamlessly into Bourdieuian theory on the mutual constitution of individual‐level subjectivity and societal‐level reproduction. Each theorist supplies what the other is missing for a theory of subjectivity with greater explanatory power than either offers alone.

The distribution of the cost of Cuban social reproduction in 2016: the relative contributions of domestic and diasporic households, the private sector and the state

ABSTRACT Drawing on feminist political economy and social reproduction theory, we propose an accounting framework for understanding the distributional role of household production, employment, remittances and government social transfers in the social reproduction of the Cuban people. We apply this quantitative framework to available data and produce estimates for 2016. Our findings demonstrate that households – both domestic and diasporic – were the largest contributors to social reproduction in Cuba. Our empirical exercise reveals how the actual distributional arrangements underlying Cuban social reproduction differ from the official commitments and goals of the Cuban Revolution. The relative contributions in 2016 signal several potentially unsustainable self-reinforcing dynamics that undermine efforts to achieve gender and racial equality on the Island.

Intensifying translocal precarity: The impact of COVID‐19 on smallholder farmers' commodity production and social reproduction in Cambodia

Intensifying translocal precarity: The impact of COVID‐19 on smallholder farmers' commodity production and social reproduction in Cambodia

Deafness, Kinship, and Formal Possibility in Bollywood

This article focuses on two films in popular Hindi cinema (Bollywood) – Koshish and Barfi! – that put Deaf protagonists at the center of romantic comedies. It moves beyond typical studies of disability as a device of characterization and locates meaning instead in under-analyzed elements of filmic production. These include sound production, plot structure, and their unique entanglement in Bollywood through the picturized song-sequence. Songs pose a special challenge for stories about Deaf protagonists, one which Koshish treats as a problem requiring "accommodation," and Barfi addresses as an opportunity for "Deaf gain." At a deeper level, Bollywood "provincializes" some key assumptions within the primarily Eurocentric field of disability studies and its frequent association with another Eurocentric field, queer theory. While crip theory follows queer theory's opposition to the "reproductive" time of conjugality, this stance flattens differences between the two communities, and depends on a misunderstanding of what "reproduction" entails. Bollywood romantic comedies, by contrast, create a space to rethink disabled kinmaking. Here the films are reversed: Koshish, though older, offers a more radical negotiation of social reproduction, while Barfi! is somewhat more conventional in its imagined future for disabled families.

Corrigendum to Social reproduction theory and critical state theory after the COVID-19 syndemic

Corrigendum to Social reproduction theory and critical state theory after the COVID-19 syndemic

Contesting the service model of ‘care’ in disabling capitalism: a Disability Politics perspective

Mainstream feminist perspectives on social reproduction often portray non-disabled women as active providers of a service (care) to those assumed to be its passive, agency-less recipients. In response, this article accounts for social reproduction as a key factor in the reproduction of disabling capitalist social relations and argues for an understanding of social reproduction that no longer obscures the contributions of those considered to be ‘cared for’. Alternatives to what is termed here ‘the service model of care’ can be established through mobilising and organising for In(ter)dependent Living through an anti-productivist politics whose social relations prefigure alternatives against and beyond disabling capitalism.

Stuck between a Rock and a Hard Place: An Investigation into a Youth-Serving Community-Based Organization, Philanthropy, and Urban Public Schools

Abstract In the wake of the federal government’s retrenchment from urban America in the 1970s and 1980s and the resulting rise in inequality, youth-serving, out-of-school time (OST) nonprofits took on a greater role in supporting urban public schools and students. Since then, many educational OST nonprofits have become enriching spaces for youth outside of traditional K–12 classrooms. Yet, their reliance on private philanthropic donations to function often complicates their goals. This article uses a critical, participatory, qualitative case study method to describe the experience of a youth-serving community-based education nonprofit organization in a Northeast city in the United States. In order to understand this nonprofit’s role in the urban schooling community context, this article analyzes its aims and interrogates its barriers to success, using two theoretical perspectives: social reproduction and community cultural wealth. Qualitative analysis revealed that the organization is unmoored—unable to completely meet its own goals centered on community cultural wealth, because of limiting traditional conceptions of capital that reinforce and maintain unfair racialized power dynamics.

Furthering racial liberalism in UK higher education: The populist construction of the 'free speech crisis'.

In this article we analyse the constructed 'free speech crisis' associated with higher education (HE) in the United Kingdom (UK). We examine the media discourses from 2012 to 2022 which led to the establishment of a sense of crisis around speech in universities and, ultimately, to the Freedom of Speech Act in May 2023. We undertake a critical discourse analysis focused on the constructions of universities and university students in two major right-wing broadsheet newspapers, The Times and The Telegraph, and in the right-wing magazine The Spectator. We conceptualise the 'free speech crisis' as a discursive formation which is part of broader political efforts of conservative elites to maintain hegemony in Britain. Drawing on populism theory and race critical analyses, we argue that the 'free speech crisis' is an expression of racial liberalism and a placeholder for a deeper white anxiety over the social reproduction of elites in university spaces, and thus over (cultural) hegemony in the public sphere. We understand the desire to regulate 'free' speech in HE as an effort to prevent the emergence of an elite and (counter)hegemony different to the status quo. We make contributions to two emergent and interrelating bodies of literature: firstly, the study of populism in (post)Brexit Britain, and secondly, the study of culture wars, including iterations of the 'free speech crisis' and 'the war on woke'.

Defending water and life: domestic ecologies and social reproduction in Buenaventura

During the last four decades, communities in the city of Buenaventura, Colombia’s main seaport, have mobilized in order to access public water services. Privatization, poor infrastructural maintenance, and intermittence have made access to water a matter of concern. In this context, the Committee for the Defense of Water and Life came into being in 2014, as an urban grassroots organization, making calls on the city’s population to mobilize for their right to clean water. In this article, however, we argue that the acts of defending water are not limited to the realm of collective action and overt activism against national and local governmental decisions. Rather, defending water in places such as Buenaventura is also an everyday gendered practice where water is secured and protected against other beings such as microbes and/or mosquitoes. Drawing on collaborative work, we document how women protect water in less visible scenarios such as the home. These women engage in a repertoire of domestic activities and techniques in order to obtain, store and keep water clean, as stored (and therefore stagnant) waters are never only water but are also home to large and threatening communities of organisms such as microbes and mosquitoes on their water stages. We bring political ecology indoors to reflect on how gendered domestic spaces become a dynamic and crucial ecological and political arena for the defense of water and life.

A return of dominant paradigm in China: making Alibaba a development solution for rural China and the globe

ABSTRACT In 2011, Alibaba launched the Taobao Villages initiative, which enables rural e-commerce and connects rural sellers with urban buyers, highlighting the role of e-commerce platforms in reducing rural poverty. This approach was later integrated into national rural development policies. As the Digital Silk Road initiative progresses and Alibaba expands globally, Taobao Villages’ development experience is being promoted worldwide. Using Taobao Villages as a case study, this paper integrates the agrarian question in Marxian political economy with critical development communication studies. It explores why rural areas’ underdevelopment is perceived as a problem solvable by digital platforms, why this development approach emerged in post-socialist China, and its potential impacts. This paper argues that the Taobao Village exemplifies a dominant paradigm of development communication, produced by Alibaba, development experts, and government officials through shared knowledge practices. It examines the texts, intellectual frameworks, and diffusion processes involved in this knowledge production by employing critical discourse analysis. The study highlights how Taobao Villages reinforce the notion that informatization facilitates marketization, thus perpetuating and adapting three mainstream rural development ideas in post-socialist China. The underlying issue of rural China’s underdevelopment, the privatization and capitalization of rural social reproduction driven by China’s neoliberal globalization, sets the stage for another wave of digital labor exploitation. Furthermore, the widespread neoliberal ideology that advocates using e-commerce to foster social development creates internal challenges and generates external pressures within China.

Locked In: Reindustrialisation and the Production of Multiple Marginalities in an Old Mining Town of Hungary

AbstractThis paper aims to unfold how peripheral reindustrialisation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) produced multiple marginalities in local spaces. Relying on a cultural political economic (CPE) approach, we analyse how the imaginary of reindustrialisation encompassed the discourses on development and the strategies and practices of powerful agents of economic restructuring in an old mining town of Hungary, which entailed new dimensions and depths of poverty. By discussing the changing labour, housing, and environmental conditions of the local poor, we relate structural changes to the changing conditions of social reproduction and local history, and highlight how the new economic trajectory produced marginalised spaces within a dynamic region. In this way, we also extend CPE‐guided research more to the realms of social reproduction and ethnic social relations to get a more fine‐grained understanding of inequalities rooted in peripheral industrialisation and scrutinise prevailing narratives of economic development in CEE.

Care, agency, and social reproduction in the H-2A context: A case study from Ohio

This paper uses the qualitative results of a survey of 285 H-2A workers in Ohio to explore questions of care, social reproduction, and agency within agricultural guestwork. Drawing on frameworks developed in labor and feminist geography, it examines how H-2A workers create community and develop skills of social reproduction during their time in the United States. Countering the common narratives of H-2A worker as victims or stoic, long suffering laborers, the research draws attention to the relational and emotional lives of the men who do this work. By highlighting affective and social dimensions of the guestworker experience, it argues for an approach to questions of agricultural labor that emphasizes the agency, range of experiences, and humanity of the people who participate in the H-2A program.

UNVEILING URBAN DISPOSSESSIONS THROUGH A FEMINIST LENS: Social Reproduction, Gentrification and Authoritarian Neoliberal Urbanism

AbstractThis essay presents a feminist intervention by incorporating feminist theory and ethnography into the examination of gentrification and displacement within authoritarian neoliberal urbanism. It explores the link between gentrification and the systemic crisis of social reproduction and discusses the contribution of feminist ethnography to our understanding of gendered dispossessions during state‐led gentrification and displacement. The essay concludes that integrating a social reproduction lens and employing feminist ethnography not only enhances our understanding of gendered dispossessions but also reveals the potential for empowerment in marginalized communities. Making visible the material and affective injustices and daily struggles to pursue social reproduction amidst the dismantling of marginalized lives by state‐led gentrification contributes to feminist praxis. Illustrative examples from a longitudinal case study on the nexus of gender and gentrification in Tarlabaşı, Istanbul, are used to support these arguments.