You are warmly invited to the following event, taking place on campus:

"Refuse, Limit, Redirect: Care Workers’ Struggles for Value and the Feminist Critic of Social Reproduction"
Dr Maud Perrier (University of Bristol)

Abstract:

The classed and racialized divisions that characterize poorly paid reproductive labour continue to pose an ethical and political challenge to 21st-century feminism, that have only been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and continued cuts to welfare funded care. This paper is concerned with how feminist scholars, who are embedded in these divisions, can produce ethical and critical research with care workers. Social reproduction has given us a rich conceptual framework to confront the ‘care crisis’ including recognition/redistribution (Fraser, 2006), dispossession/accumulation (Braedley and Luxton, 2021), enclosures (Rosen, 2024) and depletion (Rai, 2024) to name a few. However, the question of how care workers individually and collectively overturn their construction as lacking value, -as a disposable and exploitable workforce- deserves more attention. Drawing on research with care worker organizers’-including migrant nannies, domestic workers and early years educators - over the last 6 years (Perrier, 2022), I track three ‘empowerment’ techniques my participants’ cultivate: rejecting the caring self, boundary drawing with wealthier ‘feminists’ and employers, and redirecting care towards themselves and their communities. I discuss these techniques as struggles to accrue value with two aims in mind. Firstly, to elaborate how social reproduction theory can centre workers’ praxis and qualitative research, and secondly what the role of the feminist critic should be in witnessing these struggles.

Speaker Bio:

Maud Perrier is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Gender and the Faculty Co-Lead for Gender Research. Her research is concerned with paid and unpaid care work, collective care in social movements, class and mothering using a social reproduction lens. She is the co-author of Refiguring the Postmaternal: Feminist Responses to the Forgetting of the Maternal (with M. Fannin 2018) and author of Childcare Struggles: Maternal Workers and Social Reproduction (2022). She has done research in collaboration with grassroots women’s organizations including the Single Parents Network, The Postpandemic Childcare Coalition and most recently the Nanny Solidarity Network. She sits on the editorial Board of Sociological Review and Feminist Theory. She is the co-founder (with Sara Farris and Ania Plomien) of the Social Reproduction Study Group at the British Sociological Association.

This face to face seminar is free and open to all, but advance registration is required.

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This event is organised by the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender. If you wish to receive information about CSWG events, please subscribe to our mailing list.