Search

This research explores the conditions of parents in precarious employment in Italy (European Union) with an emphasis on (but not confined to) mothers from non-European Union countries of origin. The aim is to construct a critical understanding of the material conditions of workers and parents in precarious employment and their everyday struggles to achieve employment and income security, when this income security can be achieved only through the sale of labour-power in gendered and racialised labour markets. Their everyday lives are marked by their conditions of bearers of labour-power and crucially these precarious social conditions produce a pressure which tends to reduce precarious workers' lives to 'bare life'. Bare life is connected to the 'bare minimum' that these participants get in terms of income. This study aims to give a new interpretation to the concept of bare minimum through which precarious parents must arrange their lives. Gendered and racialising processes take place through the struggles around this 'minimum'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School-based vocational education and training (VET) systems are undergoing important changes with a view to strengthening their work-based learning component and, overall, their relationships with the local production environment. This paper looks at the introduction of dual VET in the Basque Country within the Spanish and European contexts. Based on an analysis of existing official information and literature as well as qualitative research carried out by the authors, the distinctive characteristics of the Basque system are documented and studied. It is shown that there has been a continuity in the ideas and relationships which have configured its trajectory from the early 1980s onwards, and that new instruments and elements of the system have been developed in the region even before those elements were fully formalised at national level in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns about the poor outcomes from school-based vocational education, which is heavily concentrated in schools serving disadvantaged communities, has led the State Government of Victoria, Australia, to implement major reforms, including abolishing the Victoria Certificate of Applied Learning. Instead, from 2023, learning in vocational education will be recognised as a vocational major within Victorian Certificate of Education (which is used to regulate admission of school leavers into higher education). This article draws on the new localism and field theory literatures to position the reforms as an attempt improve the provision of school-based vocational education through localising delivery of SBVE to meet demand for skill in the local labour market. Improving the matching process is seen to lead to a range of positive outcomes for students. The paper provides an assessment of the likely impact of the reforms, with a focus on the building trades, and argues that while aspects of the reforms may help some students, they are unlikely deliver the changes needed to create productive pathways to quality work for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite an extensive body of literature that has examined the role of museums in cultural reproduction and public education, most of the current discussion is western-centred. Whilst explorations of museum education in developing countries often focus on the institution, the agency perspective regarding how different social groups negotiate access to museum resources is relatively understudied. Aiming to address these lacunae, this paper presents a qualitative case study of a major museum in Hangzhou, China, focusing on how people from distinct social groups, with different orientations to cultural consumption, developed multiple strategies for cultural participation in museums. Their practices arguably reinforced and justified a dispositioned judgment of taste and class identities that mirror the social transition of contemporary China. Conceptually addressing Bourdieu's theories of 'cultural capital' and 'taste', this study explores the dialectics between culture and power and demonstrates the complexity of cultural reproduction in a state-funded museum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces Rayat, a woman garment worker in Bangladesh. It traces how the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated precariousness in the garment value chain and deepened the fragility of Rayat and other garment workers on the frontline. In the article, Rayat explains how her work, household and livelihood changed in response to COVID-19. Her story highlights the importance of contextual influences, distinct industry dynamics and temporal factors, within both workplace and domestic spheres. In complex ways, these dynamics shaped how workers were positioned in the value chain, exploited in the labour process and constrained in their agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper, the role of a citizen, a public official, and an observer in the reproduction of bribery as a social norm are each analyzed. To make the analysis of this cellular-social form of corruption, three variables are incorporated: the agent's perception of how widespread the corruption is, the agent's available resources with which to act, and the role of moral values. Later, some scenarios of normalization and denormalization of corruption are explored, making different assumptions regarding the analysis and assignment of agents to different roles in the interactions. What was found is that power relations among corrupt and non-corrupt agents are key for understanding the social reproduction of bribery, where inequality might facilitate the social reproduction of corruption. The role of the observer of the interaction of bribe-givers, bribe-takers, and bribe-resisting agents was also found to potentially tip the balance in the direction of normalization or denormalization of bribery. Hence, giving the observer tools to intervene in these interactions becomes essential to combat corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a historical examination of the origins and persistence of social segregation within the Chilean educational system, tracing its inception to the nineteenth century. The analysis explores the geographical disparities that characterised the early education system, particularly the divide between rural and urban areas and the resultant inequitable access to primary education. The study further evaluates government interventions, such as the enactment of the Law for Compulsory Education in 1920, and their efficacy in addressing educational disparities. Additionally, the failure of the welfare state in Latin America is scrutinised to contextualise the enduring socio-economic inequalities underpinning the Chilean educational landscape. From the initial segregation based on geographic location to the present-day segregation primarily influenced by socio-economic status, the paper elucidates the historical trajectory of educational inequality in Chile. By delving into these historical developments, the study aims to enrich the understanding of the complex interplay between social inequality and education within the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Italy as a case study, this paper extends the debate on refugees’ differential inclusion in the European labour market by considering their spaces for living and social reproduction. Departing from the notion of ‘labour regime’ and the definition of a Dormitory Labour Regime, the paper argues that we are assisting in the emergence of a Camp Labour Regime – a situation in which the form of accommodation (i.e. refugee reception facilities) plays a pivotal role in the organisation of production, representing a nodal point to foster labour concentration, wage reduction and labour intensification, thereby ‘fashioning’ refugee labour as both cheap and flexible, although at the same time constituting spaces of opportunity for refugee workers. Therefore, the paper illustrates the role played by the three main actors – the state, the companies and the refugees themselves – in coproducing and partaking in this emerging Camp Labour Regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Symposium aims to replenish geographical thinking in relation to the depletion that is entailed through social reproduction labour, and the wider, structural depletion of social reproduction that is continuing apace in capitalist times. In this introduction, we trace the existing contours of how depletion through social reproduction has come to be conceptualised. Thereafter, we focus on four areas of development that the four spatially oriented papers of the Symposium probe at: first, on the links between harm and depletion; second, on depletion both through and of social reproduction; third, on the methods that are harnessed to examine depletion; and fourth, on the possibility and limits of appreciation and repair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Replenishing Geographical Thinking on Depletion through and of Social Reproduction” contributes to the growing interdisciplinary debates on depletion. It does so through analyses of the everyday rhythms of life by investigating the relationship between production and reproduction to understand the labour that goes into the maintenance of life and experiences of depletion, as well as strategies to measure and reverse it. I reflect on the different papers and suggest that this excellent Symposium is an important contribution to the study of depletion and opens up avenues for further explorations of the concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-Roma racism remains a persistent concern in numerous European countries. Despite sustained efforts by both the European Union and national governments over the past two decades to promote Roma inclusion, the effectiveness of these integration policies has largely been perceived as inadequate. This has been evident in the widespread exclusion experienced by Roma communities. Focusing on the Czech Republic, this article moves from examining state policies to the actions of civil society. In this context, the article explores the role played by Czech civil society organizations (CSOs) in both challenging and perpetuating racialized Roma exclusion. Building on Bourdieu’s concept of social habitus, this article expands it to a racialized social habitus framework. Through online interviews with CSOs and ethnographic fieldwork in four Czech cities, it explores the complex interplay between integration policies, civil society, and the racialized exclusion of the Czech Roma. The article illuminates how these organizations simultaneously contest and reinforce racialized perceptions of the Roma, thereby enriching scholarly dialogue on the complex dynamics of race and racism within civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academics influence not only knowledge production but also selection to the labour market and policy development. They have power. Despite the sociological attention paid to class in higher education, few studies have examined the way in which class interferes with the careers of those navigating from being students to becoming scholars. Building on Bourdieu's theory of social reproduction, this study examines how class influences different groups' experiences of becoming academics. Based on 60 interviews with Norwegian scholars in their early to mid‐careers, the analysis identifies the kind of classed resources that are in play in the unequal access to academic positions. Beyond more classical resources, such as financial, cultural, and psychological certainty, the interviewees point to the significance of an early familiarity with the rules of the game and strategic navigation of the academic system. We use these findings to discuss and nuance Pierre Bourdieu's perspectives on the role of incorporated, practical consciousness and disinterestedness in class reproduction in the academic world. This theoretical contribution facilitates the combined analysis of the implicit and the explicit ways that dominant classes preserve their position in the hierarchy, which the study demonstrates as key to social reproduction in academic careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a longitudinal study, organized around national surveys and institution-based case studies, of ‘enrichment’ in post-16 colleges across England and Wales. These institutions transect general and vocational education pathways, whose curricula are organized respectively around subject disciplines and employment skills. Drawing on social justice perspectives and understandings of curriculum theory and cultural reproduction, the study initially analysed enrichment practices positioned as additional to subject-based curricula. However, extending thematic analysis through cross-case comparison, the study uncovered an additional, complementary role of enrichment: in some specialist/general education settings, teacher-led, practice-based extensions of subject curricula, complemented by agentic networking opportunities, facilitated middle-class higher education transitions; vocational enrichment, responding instead to ‘learner support’ imperatives and socializing young people into employment routines, sustained the normative transitions to work that characterize vocational pathways. These distinctive complementary logics mirror the inequalities of epistemic access identified by curriculum theory, suggesting that these extend beyond formal curricula. On the other hand, some marginal practices, including broader, more critical preparation for adulthood and work, suggest possibilities to advance social justice, transgressing the academic/vocational divide. Whilst unequal societies persistently sustain this divide, activities outside formal curricula may support more agentic and socially just transitions to adulthood and working life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid expansion of precarious employment carries risks of exacerbating the gender wage gap in China. This article finds an inverse relationship between flexibility and security in the labor market, disproportionately affecting women workers. Drawing from the Marxist-feminist theory of social reproduction, the study conceptualizes China’s social reproduction regime as developmentalist, characterized by ongoing tension between economic development and social reproduction. Promoting precarious work, which reflects the operational logic of the developmentalist social reproduction regime, is essentially transferring social reproduction cost from capital to labor. This cost is predominantly shouldered by precarious workers, particularly women, resulting in a widened gender wage gap. Using the China Labor-force Dynamic Survey, the study finds empirical support for the theorization that the gender wage gap among precarious workers is significantly larger than among non-precarious workers. The article proposes policies addressing the gap by shifting the cost of social reproduction from labor back to capital.HIGHLIGHTSGender wage gap is wider among precarious workers in China.Marxist-feminist theories help us to better understand GWG in precarious work.Women in precarious work face income loss risks and heavier domestic responsibilities.Developmentalist social reproduction regime seeks to balance growth and reproduction.The cost of social reproduction should be shifted back to capital.Gender wage gap is wider among precarious workers in China.Marxist-feminist theories help us to better understand GWG in precarious work.Women in precarious work face income loss risks and heavier domestic responsibilities.Developmentalist social reproduction regime seeks to balance growth and reproduction.The cost of social reproduction should be shifted back to capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws from long-term research on Indian tea plantations. It argues that if the plantation is to be at all useful analytically, then enslaved people, indentured laborers, and workers who find themselves otherwise stuck on those land tenure formations called plantations need to come to the analytical forefront. One means of centering labor in these discussions is to attend to acts and processes of social reproduction. Certainly, the plantation is a space of production, but the plantation would not persist as such a space without acts of childrearing, feeding, eating, care, and maintenance. Attention to these acts centers workers' perceptions of time, space, accumulation, and the plantation itself. Even in the context of monocultural expansion, plantation workers live not just in service to single crops but through diverse forms of provisioning. Social reproduction and nonmarket exchange, then, are not a redemptive outside to plantation production, but integral to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text discusses two books, "Badges Without Borders" by Stuart Schrader and "Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage" by Jarrod Shanahan, which explore the history of policing and incarceration in the United States. Schrader's book focuses on the global impact of American policing during the Cold War, while Shanahan's book delves into the role of jails in New York City's political and social order. Both authors highlight the interconnectedness of policing, prisons, and social reproduction, shedding light on the complex relationship between state violence and the maintenance of societal structures. The books provide valuable insights into the historical development of policing and its implications for understanding contemporary issues related to law enforcement and social order. [Extracted from the article]

Following the work of Tamatea and Pramitasari in the Bali Coding Class (2018), we ask if liberal empowerment can sit alongside Bourdieu's social reproduction theory in framing a non-formal education coding class for rural Balinese youth. While a review of critical theory informed literature suggests not, we appropriate the work of Mills to read data obtained from coding class students, teachers, and industry representatives to suggest otherwise. Focusing upon four 'problematics' identified in the 'critical' literature, we argue that Mills' non-ideal deracialised liberalism provide the conceptual space for working with liberal empowerment and social reproduction theory contiguously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses young people's school-to-work transitions. The analysis draws on data from a Swedish ongoing qualitative longitudinal project spanning over 10 years. In this article, we focus on eight young people who grew up and still live in a small rural inland town in North Sweden where the regional labor market is going through a process of rapid reindustrialization after decades of industrial decline and welfare state retrenchment. The aim of the study is to explore the young rural 'stayers' transitions in a region characterized by strong economic growth, yet with long-standing challenges in terms of social reproduction, focusing on what kind of work they end up with and their speed of establishment on the labor market. At the time of the latest interview all but one of the 8 participants in this study had employment in local or regional industries, however, how fast they had managed to establish themselves on the labor market varied between them. Further, their staying on locally depended largely on regional mobility. We discuss their transitions in relation to the ongoing re-industrialization process in North Sweden but also what implications young stayers' school-to-work transitions might have in relation to the wider social reproduction in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s, Marxist feminists have extensively discussed social reproduction to argue that women's unwaged domestic labour is a form of exploitation deriving from capitalism. This article focuses on the socialist socio-historical context to explore the social reproduction performed by lower working-class women in Shanghai during the COVID-19 outbreaks. To probe the pandemic interruptions to social reproduction, a COVID-19 Diary-Writing Workshop was conducted in 2020 to collect diaries written by destitute and disadvantaged women (pinkun funü) living in the Workers' New Villages. By delving into the women's affective lives, the article shows that women not only contributed to community through their volunteerism in social reproductive labour but also sacrificed for their families in a time of crisis. Moreover, women endured mental stress as the main performers of social reproductive work, and communal services provided by neighbourhood committees helped relieve the stress of household chores and resolved tensions related to food shortage. Our findings confirm scholars' longstanding argument that communal support policies can alleviate the gendered exploitative nature of social reproductive labour, and shed light on the roles of the remaining structures of socialist communal organization and infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has provoked what seems to be an unprecedented rupture of life as we knew it. This article draws out key insights into the ways solidarity infrastructures were organized in Athens, Greece, during the general lockdown imposed in the country between March and May 2020. Immediately upon the imposition of the restrictions, people devised ways to provide support to those vulnerable, through a combination of local, decentralized and online solidarity movements. In order to make sense of collective action during a period when collective coexistence was banned, we read solidarity movements through the lens of social reproduction as infrastructure, aiming to unearth the visible and invisible materials, ideas, people and technologies that make up for what sustains social movements more broadly. The article draws on ethnographic research in Athens – including participant observation of solidarity movements, along with 82 questionnaire responses. Our findings suggest that emergent solidarity infrastructures build upon and expand solidarity movements forged during previous crises periods, while further contributing new ways of understanding collective action. Accordingly, solidarity movements of the current period adopted prior and novel forms of organizing, which involved groups and individuals already assuming vulnerable positions, as well as those whose vulnerability emerged during the pandemic. While aligning with health emergency measures, this solidarity infrastructure encompassed care, affect and interdependence and challenged the government's crisis-management agendas. Eventually, thinking solidarity movements as infrastructure unsettles the divisions often encountered in relevant studies between solidarity and protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women play a key role in organized urban poor resistance in Manila. While social reproduction has led to exploitation and suffering, it concomitantly situates women at the front and center of urban resistance and the re-imagination of urban futures. The turbulent everyday geographies of informal settlements which subaltern women inhabit, not only blur the tendencies to separate production from reproduction, but also provide the conditions from which urban struggles are forged. Women have risen to assert the urban poor's right to the city and access to better services and sustainable livelihoods. Contrary to gendered perceptions of urban poor activists as being primarily male, women are instrumental in the struggle for urban social justice. Drawing from engagements with urban poor women leaders in Manila, we examine the gendered spaces of the urban struggle by foregrounding the everyday spaces that urban poor women inhabit. We explicate the spaces of interaction between social reproduction and resistance and focus on three aspects in building and nurturing the urban poor movement: (1) networking and membership expansion, (2) daytime mobilization, and (3) community building. We argue that while spaces of social reproduction are sites of oppression and suffering for many urban poor women, the proximity to these spaces enables them to become immersed in the struggles and issues that plague their communities and to collectively take action towards creating a sustainable urban future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impoverished and working-class migrant women have been the hardest hit and most exploited people during both the real estate-financial accumulation cycle and the aftermath of the 2008 crisis in Spain. Since 2009, these women have also been the key actors in outstanding civil disobedience to the neoliberal financial rule through their engagement in housing activism. How has this happened, and with what effects? Our research responds to these questions by focusing on the collective and contextualized strategies of extended struggles for social reproduction. This analytical framework integrates intersectional social structures, spatio-temporal dimensions of social reproduction, and the historical context of real-estate financialisation. Additionally, we argue that the notion of a "double horizon of political temporality" helps explain how the housing struggle evolved and identifies which social and political outcomes were produced. We suggest that this case reveals the mechanisms and impacts of similar grassroots movements challenging the current financialised dynamics of capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal capitalism creates a "crisis of care" in which social reproduction —though necessary for society—is undermined by stripping away support for caregivers, who are disproportionately women. "Social reproduction" refers to the reproduction and maintenance of the labor force via childbirth, child rearing, and caregiving for loved ones more generally. This interpretive phenomenological study examines how a crisis of care manifests for women in the workplace. Drawing upon in-depth, semistructured interviews with Chicago-based women who work as community organizers, our findings demonstrate that sexism in the workplace, coupled with the gendering of care work, creates unique difficulties for these women. By integrating the work of feminist critical theorists who argue that neoliberal logics produce gendered impacts, particularly due to processes they call responsibilization and retraditionalization, our findings help explain why and how gender subordination and gendered divisions of labor persist, even in organizations with a professed commitment to social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent declarations of the end of neoliberalism in the United Kingdom, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, are underpinned by diffuse and unstructured understandings of the neoliberal state. We argue that state intervention is both necessary and unavoidable under neoliberalism. This article shows that the 'market-based' reforms and the 'rollback of the state' that overtly characterise neoliberalism are heavily reliant upon public policy and entail an ongoing role for state intervention both over time and across economic sectors. Using sectoral case studies of housing and water from within the United Kingdom, we demonstrate, through a tight analytical framing of both financialisation and commodification, the variegated though crucial role of the neoliberal state in restructuring provision to facilitate financialised accumulation and their transformations in response to the contradictions, dysfunctions and limitations of neoliberalised social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper progresses research on resistance in the context of financialisation by drawing on various social reproduction legacies. I explore how social reproduction theory offers conceptual and methodological tools that can deepen research on de‐financialisation and resistance against predatory finance. Expanding upon relational approaches to social reproduction, this paper frames "the financialisation of social reproduction" as the dialectics between the reproduction of financialised capitalism and the regeneration of life. This supports a perspective on resistance through the identification and analysis of the interplay between the objective and subjective limits to the financial extraction from life. I examine how methodologies like "counter‐topographies" can demystify financialisation while supporting the cultivation of alternative geographies of finance. Through "financial counter‐topographies", I explore how global reproductive entanglements contradictorily fragment working‐class interests across space while creating conditions to envision and cultivate de‐alienated financial landscapes. This approach seeks possibilities for collective action and international collaborations beyond financialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to unfold how peripheral reindustrialisation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) produced multiple marginalities in local spaces. Relying on a cultural political economic (CPE) approach, we analyse how the imaginary of reindustrialisation encompassed the discourses on development and the strategies and practices of powerful agents of economic restructuring in an old mining town of Hungary, which entailed new dimensions and depths of poverty. By discussing the changing labour, housing, and environmental conditions of the local poor, we relate structural changes to the changing conditions of social reproduction and local history, and highlight how the new economic trajectory produced marginalised spaces within a dynamic region. In this way, we also extend CPE‐guided research more to the realms of social reproduction and ethnic social relations to get a more fine‐grained understanding of inequalities rooted in peripheral industrialisation and scrutinise prevailing narratives of economic development in CEE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how social reproductive work—particularly childcare and material provision—is experienced by and distributed between fathers and mothers during onward migration. Onward migration is typically defined as the process whereby people leave their homeland, settle in a second country, and then migrate to a third country. Gendered in nature, social reproductive work refers to the activities involved in maintaining people daily and intergenerationally. Several studies explore how families' social reproductive arrangements are disrupted, reconfigured or maintained following migration. Less is known about the organisation of social reproductive labour in families who migrated multiple times. This paper draws from fieldwork with 32 Colombian mothers and 18 Colombian fathers who onward migrated from Spain to London after the 2008 crisis. Fathers typically onward migrated first to fulfil their breadwinning role, while mothers would stay in Spain to look after their children, following later. These arrangements were not necessarily maintained at the onward destination. To cope with downward mobility and precarity in London, some fathers became more involved in social reproductive work viewed as feminine (e.g., childcare), while mothers began outsourcing social reproductive tasks to better meet their families' needs and to seize the opportunities London offers. This paper suggests that onward migrant families renegotiate their social reproductive arrangements to address the socioeconomic challenges and opportunities its members encounter in the onward destination and proposes an understanding of social reproduction as relational and fluid across space and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely acknowledged that the dangerously low birth rate threatens China's future socio-economic stability. The existing literature typically regards China's population crisis as a natural development trend, attributes it to family planning policies, or associates it with particular social, economic, and cultural conditions. Drawing from the social reproduction theory of feminist political economy, we develop a more encompassing analytical framework for China's population crisis. We contend that the overarching context of China's population crisis is the institutional transition from a balanced socialist social reproduction regime to an unsustainable developmentalist one. China's employment structure is crucial to the structure of its social reproduction regime. Specifically, the formal economic sector facilitates a more accessible distribution of social reproduction cost for working-class families that maintains their willingness and ability to have children. Using provincial-level panel data from 1990 to 2021 and the General Method of Moments regression technique, we find positive, significant, and robust correlations between China's formal sector employment and birth rate. These findings suggest that effective policies addressing China's population crisis should focus on expanding the formal sector employment, expanding the social welfare system, and regulating the informal sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last several years, several reforms have been implemented in Sweden, specifically targeting women and children in what the state has named as “vulnerable areas”. The reforms have been presented as feminist measures that will secure the integration of “foreign-born women” and reduce everything from criminality to poverty. This article explores the public debate on the relationship between families and crime, the reform of the supplement to family with more than one child and family planning. The article discusses how racialized mothers and their children are defined as a threat to the nation, its welfare and its national security. Inspired by feminist research on the relationship between social reproduction and the carceral state, I argue that analysis of the current political conjuncture in Sweden needs to take into consideration how policing in the streets and at the nation’s borders is entangled with policing in the sphere of social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractPageantry has historically rewarded women who pursue normative standards of beauty. With neoliberal feminism focusing on women’s empowerment, United States pageantry is marketed to women as a space that awards well-rounded competitors with scholarships and other monetary rewards. Using the frameworks of neoliberalism and embodied capital, we investigate how pageant participants conceptualize confidence in the pageant context. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews with pageant stakeholders, we conclude that participants perceive confidence as a resource gained from competing on the pageant stage and a trait that is necessary for competing in pageants. Confidence is embodied capital obtained through self-investment that helps women construct and maintain the ideal pageant femininity. However, confidence is mostly available to middle-class and wealthy women, resulting in reproduction of the class and gender systems. These findings also reveal that pageantry instills and rewards neoliberal principles and postfeminist sensibility, specifically the notion that women’s social mobility in the U.S. is connected to individual effort and investment through capitalism. As such, the values of pageantry overlook systemic barriers to achievement for marginalized women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effect of industrialization on the feminization of the labor focusing on a Tibetan embroidery industry in China. The industry is pivotal in addressing poverty, employing women, safeguarding ethnic culture, and stimulating local economic growth. Through the lens of social reproduction in feminist political economy, an analytical framework was developed to discuss the findings. The results reveal that while the embroidery industry is gendered and serves as a vital source of income for women, it inadvertently overlooks the inherent paradoxes in unpaid labor of social production. State subsidies push forward the industry, but the unpaid and hidden labor rooted within household and community spheres, coupled with the industry's nascent stage, pulls back growth. These push‐pull dynamics underlie a homebound trap where most embroidery artisans are confined to low‐paid, home‐based piecework in an informal labor market. The study outlines implications to navigate a way out of this trap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural Sociology has failed to incorporate Settler‐colonialism and Indigenous theory in studying rural social relations. This presents a serious gap in the discipline's conceptualization of land as the foundation of social reproduction. Indigenous theory provides rich insights about humans' relations among themselves and with the more‐than‐human that inform our understanding of Settler colonialism as a driver of social formation, and human–environmental interactions more generally. This paper, written by four Indigenous environmental social scientists and one Settler rural sociologist, invites the discipline to engage Indigeneity and Settler colonialism in methodologically, theoretically, and ethically appropriate ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary science fiction and speculative fiction with utopian/dystopian aspects from South Asia and the Caribbean have rarely been studied in tandem. Furthermore, no scholarly work has analyzed such texts produced under conditions of contemporary capitalism in the light of social reproduction theory which considers social reproductive labor that rejuvenates labor power. I study Leila (2017) by the Indian writer Prayaag Akbar, Midnight Robber (2000) by the Jamaican-born Nalo Hopkinson, and Woman World (2018) by the diasporic Indian writer Aminder Dhaliwal to connect social reproductive labor and utopianism and argue that social reproductive labor rejuvenates the labor power of utopian agents in social reproductive spaces such as homes, schools, hospitals, gardens etc. resisting dystopian conditions, nurturing hope, and rejuvenating utopian thinking. I question how utopianism is related to social reproductive labor in postcolonial contexts of the Global South, and propose that 1) dystopian scenarios are brought about by control of social reproductive spaces and 2) progress/betterment is actualized with renewal and rejuvenation via social reproductive labor. I contend that relating twenty-first-century utopianism to social reproduction is a valuable and novel approach, especially in postcolonial contexts where conditions of labor have been determined by complex histories of colonialism, enslavement, and indentured labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractJamie Doucette’s The Postdevelopmental State: Dilemmas of Economic Democratization in Contemporary South Korea is an outstanding account of democratic politics and the “post-development state” in South Korea. It takes up several issues that have broader relevance to those working on issues of capitalist and democratic crisis, including inequality, the failure of transformative progressive projects, and a deepening political crisis. The review essay argues that the crisis of the post-developmental state is the contradiction between capital accumulation and social reproduction that leads to growing unrest and an emerging form of authoritarian statism. This is at the heart of the democratic crisis in Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses labour and social reproduction conditions in Bolivian immigrant garment industry sweatshops in São Paulo, Brazil. The analysis contributes to an understanding of the ways in which precarious labour is articulated with a simultaneous precarization of social reproduction. Working conditions in Bolivian immigrant sweatshops include 14-hour or longer workdays, piece-work, low wages and unsafe working environments. Based on the life stories of three Bolivian women migrants in São Paulo, I spotlight the gender-based arrangements of paid work and reproduction upon which the sweatshops are predicated and further detail the reproductive conditions within these sweatshops, which tend to be uncomfortable, unsafe and unhealthy for workers as well as owners. These arrangements blur the dividing lines between the home and the workplace, as well as the distinctions between paid labour and social reproduction. Through this empirical work, I argue that social reproduction can make labour more precarious in contexts such as this one. I further contend that the crisis of social reproduction in peripheric countries extends beyond the retreat of the welfare state, rather constituting a generalized precarization of reproductive conditions that both supports and is supported by extremely precarized labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present review provides a compilation of the published data on the ecology and social behavior of tamarisk gerbils. Both field studies and direct observations under semi-natural conditions provide evidence that the tamarisk gerbil is a nocturnal herbivorous rodent that lives in highly seasonal habitats and displays seasonal fluctuations in reproduction and spatial organization. A typical feature of the tamarisk gerbils' spatial organization is higher mobility of males during the breeding season (as compared with the nonbreeding period) and formation of temporary aggregations of males competing for access to receptive females; the composition of these aggregations was variable and depended on the reproductive condition of the females. Females tend to occupy exclusive home ranges irrespective of their reproductive condition. The mating system of the species can be defined as scramble competition polygyny with some features of polygynandry and promiscuity. The tamarisk gerbil has distinct features of a solitary species and its social structure is primarily based on aggressive interactions or mutual avoidance of conspecifics resulting in a dominance hierarchy among males and site-dependent dominance among females during the breeding season. By the end of the breeding season, males become less mobile and occupy nearly exclusive home ranges, consistent with solitary living. The main features of the spatial and social organization of this species, which distinguish it from other solitary rodents, are the higher mobility of males and the formation of temporary multimale–multifemale aggregations during the breeding season. Overall, the data presented expand our understanding of socioecology of gerbils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the current study is to examine malleable school practices and norms that contribute to inequitable school learning environments based on student background. Using multilevel structural equation modeling (SEM) with the U.S. sample of PISA 2015, this study examines the extent to which student-level access to inquiry-based science learning opportunities and academic press mediates the relationship between intersectional student background and scientific literacy outcomes, as well as the influence of school-level context, tracking, and academic climate variables on student learning opportunities, perceptions of academic press, and science outcomes. After accounting for variance explained at the school level, OTL was not a significant mediator of the relationship between student intersectional background or gender and scientific literacy outcomes. However, academic press was a significant mediator at the student level, and was a significant negative predictor of science achievement. At the school level, while tracking was not a significant predictor of mean school science achievement, tracking was a predictor of mean school academic press and OTL inquiry-based science. There were significant differences in school academic climate based on school context, and school-level perceptions of academic climate were significant predictors of science achievement, findings that can inform education policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the neoliberal vision for free-market capitalism, discourses validating meritocratic competition reproduce homo œconomicus, narrowly self-interested human capital seeking to maximise its economic utility. Against this background, juku, Japan's network of for-profit, deregulated shadow education institutions, eases educational transitions for enterprising citizens seeking advantage within the nation's highly competitive exam and graduate recruitment systems. However, while 'rational' investments in juku aid neoliberal biographical projects (youth→adolescence→adulthood), they do so through panoptic systems of tension and accommodation, with pivots to individualistic self-interest producing docile entrepreneurs of the self. More damagingly, 'agentive' and 'rational' decisions to engage with juku anchor to transmissible cultural patrimony, creating opportunities to blame those who, through no fault of their own, lack the financial means to self-commodify within Japan's enterprise society. The association between economic output and entrepreneurial selfhood shapes notions of 'worth' in increasingly neoliberal terms. Thus, only by relating juku investment to its social origin may we appreciate the corrosive impact of economic liberalisation on Japan's learning ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses reproductive labour in everyday utopias. Everyday utopias refer to spaces and practices that experiment with alternative forms of life and create new social imaginaries. Drawing on ethnographic research in three everyday utopias in Finland, the article argues that labour plays a key role in transformative politics by prefiguring socially and ecologically sustainable forms of life not conducive to capitalist logic. The article brings together feminist social reproduction theory and utopian studies to shed light on different forms of reproductive labour in everyday utopias. It identifies four forms of labour: manual, affective, mnemonic and experimental. In particular, experimental labour foregrounds the importance of everyday utopias as sites of political imagination in which novel forms of life are actively developed and tried out. The article concludes by suggesting that everyday utopias subvert conventional understandings and practices of labour and social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the impact of social reproduction patterns on borrowing experiences in everyday life, linking two lines of research within feminist and critical International Political Economy (IPE) literature of the everyday, one on social reproduction and debt, and the other on financial subjectivities. Drawing on interviews with women from indebted households in Istanbul, Turkey, it specifically explores how this impact is reflected in the meanings attached to borrowing and the perceptions of what it entails to be a debtor, thereby generating gendered implications. This article reveals that borrowing from family and friends, once seen as an expression of trust and solidarity, is now associated with financial dependence and humiliation, while borrowing from banks is perceived as a means to achieve self-reliance and self-responsibility. However, these meanings contradict women's self-identifications as debtors, which are framed in moral terms surrounding the structural necessity of incurring credit-debt for social reproduction. This paper contributes to political economy scholarship by addressing how the everyday lives of the indebted are linked to the broader global financial system, mediated by the specific conditions of a Global South context (Turkey) characterized by subordinate financialization, the political use of credit expansion, and a neoliberal/conservative gender regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the global wave of privatization of local public services, re-municipalization has emerged as a viable policy alternative, broadly understood as the return to public management. The paper examines its transformative potential by analysing what 'public' means in practice with a particular focus on governance and decision-making. To do so, the paper investigates the re-municipalization of urban water services in Naples (Italy) and Paris (France) by utilizing qualitative methods. Through a critical political economy approach, informed by social reproduction theory and political ecology, I argue that re-municipalization should be seen as a process that different social forces continuously try to shape. The findings not only contribute to the specific literature on water services, but also to that on re-municipalization, within the debate about public versus private provision. More broadly, the research enhances the understanding of water through the lenses of critical political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on feminist political economy and social reproduction theory, we propose an accounting framework for understanding the distributional role of household production, employment, remittances and government social transfers in the social reproduction of the Cuban people. We apply this quantitative framework to available data and produce estimates for 2016. Our findings demonstrate that households – both domestic and diasporic – were the largest contributors to social reproduction in Cuba. Our empirical exercise reveals how the actual distributional arrangements underlying Cuban social reproduction differ from the official commitments and goals of the Cuban Revolution. The relative contributions in 2016 signal several potentially unsustainable self-reinforcing dynamics that undermine efforts to achieve gender and racial equality on the Island. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions about women's safety have gained importance in both India and Pakistan, as gendered and sexual violence in public spaces has risen. This motivates questions about the presence and mobility of women in public spaces in South Asia and their determinants. In this paper, we extend feminist scholarship on space and time, social reproduction, classical patriarchy, and the everyday by unpacking the concept of mobility into two new categories: instrumental and substantive mobility. We use these categories to dig deeper into spatial and temporal patterns of women's mobility at the national level. Our regression models and tempograms based on nationally representative time-use surveys show that women's presence in public spaces remains abysmally low in both countries. It increases only temporarily with travel for paid/unpaid labor and education in instrumental ways. However, any mobility that breaks the temporal rhythm of the everyday or norms governing space and time is rarely observed. Our analysis also shows that these mobilities are also affected by social contexts such as marriage, class, and caste, among others. Also, despite popular perceptions, we find no substantial differences in the mobility patterns for women in the two countries. This paper makes a case for reassessing interactions between neoliberal economic regimes and classical patriarchy and how "power geometries" of space, time, and social reproduction impact women's mobilities in South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we focus on gender and class to investigate worktime domestic labour. Methodologically, we extend a novel, comparative critical realist method in which occupation-based and gendered positions in productive and reproductive labour are foregrounded. By building theoretical connections between labour process conditions and collective rule-following practices, we illustrate how inequalities are inscribed organisationally. Our analysis provides a more critical contextualisation of technological affordances to develop the literature on how technology is implicated in the reproduction of social inequality. Moreover, our analysis identifies multi-level causal processes, which combine to explain the presence and actualisation of worktime domestic labour or its absence, which is due, principally, to fear of sanction. For realist researchers interested in diversity-based challenges, absences are important because they can point towards specific discriminatory mechanisms. Our investigation thus revealed a surprising level of class-related in-work inequality within the gendered dynamics of domestic work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tourism Tribune / Lvyou Xuekan is the property of Tourism Institute of Beijing Union University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Administrative decisions mediate whether the millions who turn to the state for social services annually can access the assistance they need. We introduce the concept of intersectional burdens—which describes how a person’s social location (including race, class, gender, age, and ability) shapes their access and use of state benefits and programs—to account for the ways mutually reinforcing systems structure experiences with the state and to better understand how inequalities are experienced, reproduced, and resisted. We illustrate the intersectional nature of associated costs by drawing on a random stratified sample of sixty-one Black, Latinx, and White women’s experiences from the American Voices Project. We find that individuals who seek public safety net assistance do not experience administrative burdens in the same way or to the same degree and that social location substantively affects how people navigate administrative burdens in public income assistance processes, health-care systems, and housing experiences.

The essay discusses the feminist critiques of the relationship between the digital code and masculine domination proposed by Sadie Plant in Zeroes and Ones (1997) and by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein in Data Feminism (2020). These critiques are situated within the historical and political turning point of the affirmation of the neoliberal programme, when identity politics and the capitalist valorization of differences reconfigure modern political universalism. To account for this transition and the function of algorithms as social operators, three different interpretations of the problem of the code – constitutionalist, historical and sociological – are then examined, with the aim of testing the feminist critiques articulated by Plant, D'Ignazio and Klein against the algorithmic processes of social reproduction of identities.

The introduction to the monographic section Politics of the Algorithm: Technologies, Powers, Theories, examines the nexus between technology and politics from the way in which the former, and algorithm-driven technologies in particular, has irreversibly invested the institutional and social coordinates within which the modern political canon has been constituted, activating a historical threshold in which the forms of social relations of domination change, the possibilities of their contestation by men and women who are placed in different positions in societal relations are determined, and the semantics of power is redefined overall. The "politics of the algorithm" concerns how social relations are embedded in technology and, consequently, are reproduced, legitimized and institutionalized by technology. Its study should therefore be placed within the framework of constitutional history, which, at the point of connection between social and conceptual history, opens up the field of a conceptual history of technology.

There have been plenty of interpretations regarding the meaning and function of sacrifice within the discipline of anthropology. Going beyond sacrifice as a ritual and exploring a wide range of its manifestations and functions as contemporary cultural practices, discourses, and underlying logics, we reveal its role in the social organization of social care provision within the framework of neoliberal capitalism. Our analysis supports the theory that sacrifice can have the function of social control, and of preserving hierarchies. The forgoing of a minority of migrant domestic workers to provide intensive social care becomes the (no) solution to the ongoing care crisis. It thus becomes the way to hide structural violence and dilute responsibilities for society, which benefits from the servile conditions under which the labour is performed. The ethnographic material (observations, informal conversations, and interviews) that is part of our analysis originated from fieldwork in Castellón de la Plana, Spain (2018/19). This analysis, however, goes beyond that case, being valid for reflecting on the position of care for elderly and dependent people in our societies, care in general, the current global trend in social care provision, and the new social reproduction regime in which sacrificial logics play an increasing role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]