About Us
Reproduction & Inequality
Globally, our economic health is often measured by GDP, market trends, and employment rates. But the formal economy is sustained by the diverse and everyday labours of making and caring for life. These paid and unpaid labours of life making, or social reproduction, operate at multiple scales, from households and communities to the national and transnational. We all engage in social reproduction, and we all rely upon it; however, under capitalism, social reproduction is structured by deep inequalities.
Who tends to social reproduction and how? How does the labour of making life differ in different contexts? And what can we learn about resistance and alternative processes of lifemaking by cantering the labours of social reproduction in the Global South? In recent years, while there has been a resurgence of scholarship examining the tensions between production and reproduction amid the deepening crises and contradictions of global capitalism, much of this work has implicitly drawn on – and essentialised – ‘minority world’ experiences across the Global North.
Our Work
Our work seeks to pluralise Social Reproduction Approaches (SRA) by eschewing any singular ‘theory’ of reproduction and foregrounding the experiences of life-making across a diversity of Global South contexts, where the majority of the world live and labour. By working across disciplinary boundaries and interrogating the hierarchical relationship between the Global South/Global North, we aspire to draw on existing debates on social reproduction – pluralising their theoretical premises and extending their empirical reach – to build a progressive global agenda able to address the challenges to life-making processes that we are facing worldwide.
This global reframing through pluralising SRA, we hope, will also enable us to re-imagine policy initiatives at multiple scales, from local communities to international organisations. For while we are driven by the need to expose the very real harms that operate via the exploitation and ignorance of social reproductive work, we simultaneously approach social reproduction as a site of creative resistance that can inform future imaginings that privilege life in all its forms.
