Social Reproduction

Abstract

Social reproduction is a geographically and historically differentiated process encompassing the production of a stratified labor force and the cultural forms and practices that create and maintain its differences while making them common sense. It involves both the sensuous labor of everyday life and the structured practices that unfold in dialectical relation to production. These material social practices take place across geographic and temporal scales, encompassing daily and generational relations that are as much intimate as global in their effects and charge. Social reproduction also involves the reproduction of the material grounds and conditions of production, including the conservation of environmental resources and the concerns of environmental justice. The work of social reproduction is racialized, gendered, and class specific and is accomplished within a contested and shifting amalgam that includes the family, household, state, workplace, and institutions of civil society.

Re-wilding Parkdale? Environmental gentrification, settler colonialism, and the reconfiguration of nature in 21st century Toronto

“…Research into struggles over urban natures and their place in the valorization of the built environment can benefit from the kinds of questions that animate the revivified contemporary interest in social reproduction (i.e. Andrucki et al, 2017;Bhattacharya, 2017;Ferguson et al, 2016;Katz, 2017;Parish and Montsion, 2018;Ruddick et al, 2018). Initially developed by Marxist Feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, social reproduction seeks to understand the specificity of women's oppression under capitalism, and to contest the marginalization of women and domestic labour in studies of political economy.…”

Financializing Healthcare and Infrastructures of Social Reproduction: How to Bankrupt a Hospital and be Unprepared for a Pandemic

“…We also refer to ISR as the set of facilities (hospitals, schools, elderly care homes, childcare units) that exceed domestic boundaries and provide fundamental support and care services that lighten the burden of social reproduction by taking care of the “fleshy, messy stuff of everyday life” (Norton and Katz, 2017, p. 1).…”

The historiography of social reproduction and reproductive labor

“…This contradiction furnishes a critical axis around which the political struggle can be waged (Bhattacharya, 2017c; Fraser, 2016; Weeks, 2011). As geographers Jack Norton and Cindi Katz (2016) argue, the “form and content of social reproduction, as much as the means of its provision, are forged through struggle, making it a contradictory realm of both the continuation of capitalist social relations and the possibility of their transformation” (p. 2). Struggles over the way care is allocated and accessed can catalyze counterhegemonic political transformation.…”