Program
Labour History and Critical Theory II: Social Reproduction
October 23, 2022 from 11:15am EDT to 12:45pm EDT
Location: Room Y224
Chair: Joan Sangster
Meg Luxton “Social Reproduction as Work” and respondents Simon Black, Brock University and Kendra Strauss, Simon Fraser University [Online].
Abstract:
In renewed and growing critiques of capitalism, the concept, social reproduction, is being reworked by academics and activists to stimulate and advance transformative political change. Yet, understanding social reproduction as a form of “work” has sometimes slipped away, leaving behind important anti-racist feminist insights. Engaging with recent contributions from scholars in the U.S., U.K, and Canada, we argue that social reproduction is most useful as a concept and not as a theory and is best understood as “work”. Locating social reproduction in the theoretical framework offered by feminist political economy, we point out ambiguities and contradictions that have produced conceptual confusion across different spheres of theorizing. We conclude that social reproduction, when understood as work, reveals its centrality to processes of capital accumulation and its contradictions to it, supporting efforts to build the mass movements and solidarity necessary for effective anti-capitalist politics.
Speakers / Panelists
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Labour History and Critical Theory II: Social Reproduction
October 23, 2022 from 11:15am EDT to 12:45pm EDT
Meg Luxton
Meg Luxton
Meg Luxton
Meg Luxton is a professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. Her research has contributed to theorizing feminist political economy, social 40 reproduction and how to conceptualize the relations among gender, class, racialization, ethnicity and other systemic inequalities. Exploring both historical and contemporary divisions of labour and their implications for the socioeconomic situations of people across class, race/ethnicity and region, her research examines how "ordinary people" in Canada have sustained themselves, their households, families and communities. Her many articles have exposed the work involved in unpaid domestic labour and shown its relationship to the larger economy. Her articles and edited books have also examined the history of Canadian feminism. Her authored and co-authored/co-edited books include More Than a Labour of Love, Getting By At Home and On The Job and Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-liberalism.