Please be invited to the guest lecture by Dr. Alessandra Mezzadri, Department of Development Studies SOAS, University of London.

Social Reproduction for the Global Political Economy of Work 

This presentation explores the crucial contribution of feminist political economy analyses to the study of the Global Political Economy of Work. In particular, it maps the important intellectual and political contributions that approaches centred on the concept of 'social reproduction' can offer to the study of labour globally. The presentation argues that a social reproduction approach contributes to the Global Political Economy of Work in at least three ways. First, it stretches the boundaries of the labour process beyond the walls of the space of work and shows its embeddedness in wider life processes. Secondly, it enables an analysis of reproductive and care labour and sectors centred on their meaning and functional role in global capitalism. Thirdly, it allows a novel approach to labour struggles and organising, which also include reproductive demands and centre the community and life-spaces as central to labour politics. These three lines of contribution are particularly relevant to understand labour and/or agrarian relations and regimes in the Global South, as well as novel processes of platformisation of work in the Global North. Crucially, a social reproduction analysis of labour and work can also reach out to analyses centred on racial capitalism and stress processes of racialisation of work across varied domains, including during COVID-19 times. 

​Read the handbook chapter here​