Social Reproduction, Care Work, and Development
Course Description
Graduate elective course.
Who cares? And how and where do they do it, under what conditions, and for what purposes? While concepts like 鈥渨ork鈥 and 鈥渆conomy鈥 are usually associated with production or services oriented towards profit generation, a huge proportion of unpaid and paid labour worldwide is oriented towards social reproduction and care. In this seminar, we make these labours the centre of our analysis of global development. Social reproduction refers to the paid and unpaid labour that maintains and reproduces people and communities on a daily and intergenerational basis. We will ask how social reproduction is structured by local and transnational political economies, and how it shapes these economies, in turn. We will trace contemporary transnational flows of reproductive labour (for
example, migrant care workers) and bodily capacities (for example, transnational surrogacy), and how they are shaping social reproduction locally and globally. We will also ask what future economies that privilege care might look like, examining the role of care in confronting racial capitalism, supporting Indigenous resurgence, and the 鈥淛ust Transitions鈥/ 鈥淏uild Back Better鈥 movements.
Available only to MA and PhD students.