Re-envisioning Social Reproduction: Political and Policy Avenues of Change

Existential planetary threats, from environmental emergency to global health outbreaks and rising inequality and conflict, are drawing different feminist agendas closer together. As interconnections between global, national, local, and institutional dimensions of feminist political interventions intensify, global feminist solidarity emerges as a shared coalitional strategy for recovering feminist emancipatory agendas but also basic conditions for life on Earth. Feminist calls to radically re-examine social reproduction, as the main axis of societal organization, emerges as a transnationally recognized agenda of mutually assured survival. To nurture a conversation on emerging feminist solidarities amidst planetary threats, Shirin M. Rai and Gloria Novović are convening a special issue, hosted by the International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFJP). As a part of this initiative, Novović and Rai will be joined by Veronica Gago and Lyn Ossome for a public discussion about the political and practical implications of feminist radical theories of social reproduction. The speakers will invite the audience to join them in a collective reflection about the possible avenues of political and policy shifts we need to recover the material conditions that make reproduction of human and non-human life possible. 

Meet our speakers and Chair

Prof Shirin M. Rai is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies SOAS, University of London.  She is a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the Founding Director of Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development (WICID)at the University of Warwick. Professor Rai is an interdisciplinary scholar and has written extensively on issues of gender, governance and development and politics and performance. In particular, she has been working on issues of gendered care and work and the costs of this carework, and on developing a framework of politics and performance across the social sciences/humanities boundaries. 

Dr Lyn Ossome is Associate Professor and Director of Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), Makerere University, and has also taught at Wits University and Yale University as a Visiting Presidential Professor. She holds a doctorate in Political Studies from Wits University, with specializations in the fields of feminist political economy and feminist political theory and research interest in gendered labour, land and agrarian questions, the modern state, and the political economy of gendered violence. Her books include Gender, Ethnicity and Violence in Kenya’s Transitions to Democracy: States of Violence (2018) and the co-edited volume Labour Questions in the Global South (2021).  

Dr Gloria Novović is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Gender Studies. She holds a PhD in Political Science and International Development from the University of Guelph (Canada). Working at the intersections of critical policy studies and decolonial feminist thought, Dr Novović studies multilateral initiatives to redesign the architecture of international cooperation and the seemingly technical policy mechanisms that mediate them. Currently, she is writing a book manuscript on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Agenda 2030) and advancing a long-term research project on planetary feminist solidarity.