Description
A bourgeoning body of Feminist International Political Economy scholarship has emerged to document the ways in which the Covid-19 crisis erupted in a context where crises of social reproduction and process of what Rai et al. (2014) refer to as ‘depletion’, were already unfolding in similar yet variegated ways across the globe. These multiple crises of social reproduction are rooted in and reproduce relations of gender, race, class, sexuality, citizenship, coloniality and more. Optimists have pointed out that in recent years, crises of public health, the environment, energy, displacement, housing/homelessness, the cost of living, etc., have increasingly been the focus of public debate, drawing attention to dynamics that feminists have long documented. Yet, they continue to be fuelled by the forces of globalization, neoliberalism, financialization, and militarism, which have heightened the contradiction between the extended power of capital and sustainable, progressive, forms of social reproduction for the majority of the world’s population (Bakker and Gill 2003; Braedley and Luxton 2010; Dowling 2021). The papers on this panel examine different aspects of the ongoing crises of social reproduction that are unfolding in different parts of the world, the ways in which they unfold on gendered and racialised terrain, and how they are negotiated and resisted at different sites and scales, from the level of global governance to the level of the everyday.
