Short Abstract

This panel looks for ethnographic presentations that reflect a Popular Economy perspective. Do breaches and conflicts in popular economies help us understand political polarization or, to the contrary, can our findings on socioeconomic life be a contribution to a less polarized and unequal world?

Long Abstract

The research field of Popular Economies invites us to leave aside theoretical oppositions such as formal/informal economy, production/reproduction, community/market. Since its initial use in Latin American social sciences, the term has meant questioning the attributes of the ‘informal economy’ and the supposed single path to economic modernity. Popular economies are neither marginal nor ‘disordered’ economies, but constituted by practices, social networks, infrastructures and institutions that combine production, distribution and consumption of goods and services essential to “the social reproduction of large majorities” (Cielo, Gago and Tassi 2023: 17; Müller 2024).

The Marxist feminist tradition have emphasized the productive value of care and household work, everyday tasks that not only facilitate the reproduction of labor, but also the reproduction of life in a broader sense. In the daily lives of traders and vendors, for example, interpersonal care and work to earn a living intersect, coexisting in both domestic and public spaces. Moreover, social reproduction in popular economies is fully intertwined with productive labor, reconfiguring social struggles and processes of subjectivation (Castronovo 2019), enabling critical debates on contemporary capitalist transformations and racial, gender and class hierarchies.

This panel invites presentations combining ethnographic insights with reflections on the epistemological and political consequences of a Popular Economy framework. Do economic breaches and conflicts in popular economies help us understand political polarization or, to the contrary, can an understanding of socioeconomic life on the ground be a contribution to a less polarized and unequal world?

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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