Special Issue: Migration, Social Reproduction and Capitalism

This proposal explores the relationship between migration, social reproduction, and the reproduction of capitalism. Its aim is to address how the dynamics of contemporary regimes of accumulation generate migration both as a response and solution to crises in social reproduction for people in their everyday lives. To do this, contributors problematize the entanglements between the displacement of women and men and the shifting forces of accumulation that condition their relocation across territorial boundaries and insertion into differentiated labour markets. By addressing how migrants sustain life amidst the destabilising forces of capitalist restructuring and shifting regimes of citizenship, papers explore the multifaceted ways in which the social reproduction of people is entwined with the reproduction of capitalism. The question of how processes of social reproduction articulate with the forces of capitalist accumulation has animated scholarship in the social sciences at least since the 1960's when materialist feminists in anthropology contributed to debates in political economy by challenging its orthodoxies. More recently, the feminization of migration, its massification under the imperatives of economic restructuring, and scholarly deliberations on the nature of surplus labour have revived interest in theorizing social reproduction. The papers in this SI aim to reinvigorate analyses of social reproduction within the political and economic forces of late capitalism by considering how the "essential" labour of migrants in economically crucial workspaces sustains life AND the economy. Such spaces include not only farms and factories, but also streets, shops, schools, hotels, hospitals, and homes as places where crises, most recently manifested in the COVID-19 pandemic, have amplified the relationship between migrant labour and the socio-economies of capitalism. To capture these multiple forms of social reproductive labour, authors focus on the lives, livelihoods, and transnational relations of migrants in diverse ethnographic contexts with a view to proposing expansive conceptual and methodological approaches in the exploration of the dialectic between the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of people.