Alessandra Mezzadri, GLUNetwork Interview (8/10/2022)

Contemporary social reproduction debates are primarily focused upon the “crisis of care” in high income countries. Less attention has been paid to social reproduction in post-colonial and post-socialist contexts both theoretically and empirically. The “Social Reproduction from Majority World Perspectives” panel highlights how work is experienced as the blurring of the productive and the reproductive for the vast majority of workers in the global economy. From sweatshop workers in India and women factory workers of iPhones in China to migrant domestic workers in Lebanon, this panel will address the links between exploitation and social reproduction from a global and intersectional lens.

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Panelists:

Alessandra Mezzadri, Reader, Department of Development Studies, SOAS, a leading scholar on social reproduction in the majority world, and the author of The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation, and Garments Made in India (CUP, 2017).

Yige Dong, Assistant Professor in Sociology and Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, who will share work from her book-in-progress which examines the century-long transformation of women’s work and caring labor in China as the country has transitioned from a communist revolutionary state to a capitalist authoritarian regime.

Gabriella Nassif, doctoral candidate in Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, examines how racism and economic crisis combine to subject migrant domestic workers to extraordinary harm and precarity in Lebanon, and their strategies of resistance and survival.

Moderator: Marion Werner, Associate Professor of Geography, University at Buffalo.