Papers by Alessandra Mezzadri
Palgrave Macmillan eBooks, Mar 20, 2015
Dialogues in Human Geography
This conversation brings together feminist scholars from various backgrounds and epistemological ... more This conversation brings together feminist scholars from various backgrounds and epistemological traditions around a central topic in feminist debates that is today more relevant than ever, social reproduction. It begins by examining social reproduction as a concept and its entanglements with the dynamics of global capitalism from human geography and feminist international political economy perspectives. We ask, what does the lens of social reproduction bring to light? We discuss how social reproduction is a fundamentally political concept that bridges classic labour struggles with demands around housing, service provision and the reproduction of life in general. As a concept, it makes visible the systems of life that support the labour process, both daily and intergenerationally, in sites of production along global supply chains, from the garment industry, to mining and agriculture. Nevertheless, there is a need to consider how gendered dichotomies of productive and reproductive th...
Organization
This article portrays the COVID-19 pandemic as a planetary crisis of capitalist life and analyses... more This article portrays the COVID-19 pandemic as a planetary crisis of capitalist life and analyses it through the feminist political economy lens of social reproduction. Celebrating the plurality and distinctiveness of social reproduction theorisations, the article deploys three approaches to map the contours of the present conjuncture; namely Social Reproduction Theory, Early Social Reproduction Analyses and Raced Social Reproduction approaches. These provide key complementary insights over the planetary crisis and reorganisation of life, work and death triggered by the pandemic. Through the compounded insights of social reproduction theorisations, the article argues that the pandemic does not represent a crisis of neoliberalism. Rather, it represents its outcome, and deepening of its logics, an argument which is substantiated by exploring the impact of COVID-19 on the reproductive architecture of neoliberal capitalism; on the world of work; and on racialised processes manufacturing...
Anthem Press, Feb 5, 2021
Labour Regimes and Global Production, 2022
Development and Change
This article proposes a reading of the COVID-19 crisis through a social reproduction lens, with a... more This article proposes a reading of the COVID-19 crisis through a social reproduction lens, with a focus on the restructuring of reproductive sectors, the world of work and the generation of differentiated surplus populations, and considers the implications of this reading for global development debates on inequality and informal labour. Learning from the pandemic and the social reproduction of the surplus populations it generated, the analysis argues that debates on inequality should be re-centred on its existential nature and its embeddedness in social oppression, and that labour relations should be considered as key reproducers of inequality. It also argues that informal labour should be increasingly understood as playing the reproductive role of 'global housework' in contemporary capitalism.
Radical Philosophy Group (United Kingdom), Apr 27, 2019
Radical feminist analyses have always placed considerable emphasis on the crucial role played by ... more Radical feminist analyses have always placed considerable emphasis on the crucial role played by social reproduction for the development of capitalism. Early social reproduction analyses-primarily premised on housework but also more broadly concerned with wagelessness-developed a robust critique of Marxian views that identified processes of value-generation only with the productive sphere, and de facto deployed 'productive' and 'paid' labour as synonyms. 1 Some more recent approaches, by contrast, propose social reproduction as a 'theory' (SRT), and deploy the concept in order to focus on RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.04 / Spring 2019
Journal of South Asian Development, Sep 25, 2022
Anthem Press, Feb 5, 2021
Agenda Publishing, Jan 27, 2022
WIDER Working Paper, 2021
This study has been prepared within the UNU-WIDER project Transforming informal work and liveliho... more This study has been prepared within the UNU-WIDER project Transforming informal work and livelihoods.
Macmillan Education, Apr 14, 2020
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Papers by Alessandra Mezzadri