Alessandra Mezzadri

Alessandra Mezzadri is a Feminist and Development Political Economist of labour and social reproduction based at SOAS, London.

She is the author of The Sweatshop Regime (CUP, 2017.2021), lead-author of The Social Life of Industrial Disputes (ILO, 2023), editor of Marx in the Field (Anthem, 2021, 2023), and co-editor of a new Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work (Edward Elgar, 2023). She has written extensively on global labour, social reproduction, value, and exploitation; and Marxian-Feminist methodologies. She is currently working at a manuscript exploring Feminist Cartographies of Social Reproduction and Global Development as Social Factory.

Theorising social reproduction to decolonize approaches to Global Development

> 10 h 30
Durée : 30 minutes
Échanges avec la salle : 15 minutes

In this presentation, I will reflect critically on Black and Decolonial feminist critiques to Early Social Reproduction approaches (ESRA) and Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), with the objective of mapping points of dialogue and interplay that may move us towards a common feminist horizon. First, I will sketch some of the continuities between ESRA and analyses focused on racial capitalism and/or on the racialisation of reproduction, in relation to understandings of primitive accumulation and value-generation, extraction and exploitation (Federici, 2004 and G. Bhattacharyya, 2018; Fortunati, 1981 and Morgan, 2007). Secondly, I will reflect on the linkages between SRT and intersectional feminism centering class. Based on the above, and in line with Premilla Nadasen (2023), I will argue that to be inclusive of gendered experiences worldwide, analyses of social reproduction must centre the home as well as the colony as the structuring forces of regimes of social reproduction. Overall, through ‘pluralising social reproduction approaches’ we can develop a theoretical and political agenda aimed at decolonising productivist approaches to global capitalism and development process.