Premilla Nadasen, Co-Director of the Transnational Black Feminisms Working Group, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College, will be leading to events this April related to the theme of Care.
April 5-6, 2024: Care, Racial Capitalism, and Social Reproduction, led by Premilla Nadasen (BCRW C0-Director and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History), brings together scholars, organizers, and artists to consider the intersections of social reproduction, racial capitalism, care, the state, and liberatory social change. Social reproduction signifies the labor necessary to maintain and reproduce human life and the labor force. It provides a lens to consider the social relations through which life is made, sustained, and might be transformed. Drawing on the long history of organizing and theorizing forged by feminist activists, low-wage women of color organizers, and scholars who have pushed us to expand our political analysis to include the dimensions of paid and unpaid domestic, emotional, and reproductive labor, this project considers the following questions: What is social reproduction and why does it matter? How does social reproduction broaden the scope of what counts as work and who counts as a worker? How does racial capitalism help us analyze and understand the value of social reproduction? How is the changing landscape of social reproduction reflective of political and economic shifts? And how is capitalism remaking itself in relation to social reproduction? Building on the work of feminist scholars and activists and the Black Radical Tradition, we also consider how social reproduction can and has been a site of organizing: What are the possibilities and limits of care for labor organizing, disability justice, and abolitionist organizing? How do we understand care in relation to social transformation and the state? Learn more about this event on the BCRW page here.
April 18, 2024: Care: the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Premilla Nadasen (Barnard College) will be joined by Dorothy Roberts (University of Pennsylvania) to discuss her new book, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2023), a powerful critique of capitalist care relations and the economic profit extracted from care. Care traces the rise of the care economy, from its roots in slavery, where there was no clear division between production and social reproduction, to the present care crisis, experienced acutely by more and more Americans. Today’s care economy, Nadasen shows, is an institutionalized, hierarchical system in which some people’s pain translates into other people’s profit. Yet this is also a story of resistance. Low-wage workers, immigrants, and women of color in movements from Wages for Housework and Welfare Rights to the Movement for Black Lives have continued to fight for and practice collective care. These groups help us envision how, given the challenges before us, we can create a caring world as part of a radical future. Learn more about this event on the BCRW page here.