Short Abstract:

We invite participants to discuss how the concept of social reproduction can challenge the processes of uncommoning and create connections between social struggles pertaining to different geographical contexts and institutional regimes.

Long Abstract:

Social reproduction is a concept rooted in historical materialism. Departing from the site of the family, it is also used to investigate need struggles in the field of care work, education and migration. We conceived this roundtable by looking at our respective work on factory workers' access to welfare benefits in China and Vietnam and student mobilization against sexual violence in Montreal universities (Canada). Through ethnography, we not only enter the social reproduction site of industrial workers but also witness the challenges women share in the academic community to overcome the power structure of knowledge production. Revisioning the commons therefore requires breaking the boundary between the private and the public, the bodily and the scientific, the national and the global as well as the economic and the social. This roundtable seeks to unpack the notion of social reproduction by examining the linkages between the macro (institutions, policies, theories etc.) and the micro (every life and experiences) and seemingly disparate areas of social investigation. We propose to start by looking at experiences with care, support, and solidarity and probe how the notion of social reproduction could provide emancipatory alternatives to the existing unequal and hegemonic order.