Boundary Crossings: A seminar on the transnational travels of social reproduction
This is a brief dossier featuring panelists from the Sociological Review Foundation-sponsored seminar on social reproduction hosted by Tatiana Sanchez-Parra and Hemangini Gupta at the University of Edinburgh. We had attendees from universities across the UK and the seminar invited academic provocations (short theoretical interventions) and multimodal explorations (drawing from art, curatorial practice, collaborative methods, and artistic infrastructures) on social reproduction.
Social reproduction has been on our minds urgently since COVID made clear the disparate conditions under which life can be reproduced. It made visible the gendered and racialized labor required to sustain essential work that keeps us alive and the invisibilized labor that replenishes us. It brought forth new writing on trans care that showed, as Hil Malatino does in Trans Care, what care labor and ethics look like if begin not from the family but from “the intricately interconnected spaces and places where trans and queer care labor occurs: the street, the club, the bar, the clinic, the community center, the classroom, the nonprofit, and sometimes, yes, the home—but a home that is often a site of rejection, shunning abuse, and discomfort.” So we can think about social reproduction through care networks and mutual aid. But also maybe we can think about the differences between care and social reproduction and how those debates converge and diverge.
Again, today, social reproduction is on our minds as we ask what it means in the context of an ongoing genocide in Palestine that has decimated hospitals and educational institutions and targeted an entire people. We offer that we can begin by thinking about social reproduction very broadly in Cindi Katz’s sense, as “the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life. It is also a set of structured practices that unfold in dialectical relation with production, with which it is mutually constitutive and in tension. Social reproduction encompasses daily and long term reproduction, both of the means of production and the labor power to make them work.
At its most basic, it hinges upon the biological reproduction of the labor force, both generationally and on a daily basis, through the acquisition and distribution of the means of existence, including food, shelter, clothing, and health care”. Of course this sort of working definition opens up so many questions: at what sites does social reproduction take place? Who does its work? What affective environments does it need? How does it unfold outside the heternormative family form? How is racialized and gendered, how does it depend on feminized and precariatized life and labor? How does it entangle with local and global ecologies?
We divided the workshop day into smaller panels, a film screening, and a visit to a new installation with time for a 20-minute Q and A at the end of each small session.
A brief note from our funders: This event has received support from the Sociological Review Foundation via its 2024 Seminar Series grants programme. This funding initiative allocates £10,000 each year for scholarly seminars on subjects connected to the themes of inequalities and social reproduction; new solidarities and new economic thinking; and methodologies. The Sociological Review Foundation is a registered charity whose purpose is to advance the public understanding of sociology. It offers a space to question taken for granted understandings of the social world, and a platform for thinking about alternative possibilities. In addition to publishing The Sociological Review, the UK’s oldest peer-reviewed sociology journal and its twice-yearly monographs series, the Foundation supports early career scholars through training and bursaries, runs the annual Seminar Series programme, funds a postdoctoral Fellowship, hosts in-person and online events, and publishes sociological insights aimed at broad global audiences via podcasts and an open-access digital Magazine.