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Feminist theories of social reproduction are theories of the gendered nature of power and domination. This seems axiomatic, and the recent upsurge of interest in social reproduction in human geography (Casolo and Doshi, 2013; Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2016; Hopkins, 2015; Jackson and Neely, 2015; Kofman, 2012; Pimlott-Wilson, 2015; Rioux, 2015) in part relates to the continuing urgency of the need to understand the relationship between social difference and the exercise of power in the contemporary space economy. The elision of reproductive relations and the gendered norms that undergird them from accounts of economic and political crisis, despite decades of feminist research and activism, continues almost unabated. This elision reveals as much as it obscures, shining a light on the politics of knowledge production inside and outside of the academy and bolstering the sense among proponents of the upsurge of feminist theory and social reproduction – myself included – that ‘theory as usual’ is not an option. The conjunctural crisis affecting political economic and ecological foundations of contemporary societies does not sit above the epiphenomena of social relations and related social infrastructures, although there is little to acknowledge their fundamental interrelationship in many accounts of crisis. At the same time, however, the landscape of what we might broadly characterize as ‘feminist theory’ is highly variegated, with ongoing tensions among those who identify with post-structuralist, radical and political economic traditions. Nancy Fraser has famously characterized these tensions as struggles over redistribution versus recognition, where the latter is identified with (oft-conflated) post-structuralism and identity politics. JK Gibson-Graham, on the other hand, has associated Marxian political economic approaches (including the concept of social reproduction) with capital-centrism and deep-seated androcentrism. Feminism is itself a house divided. These divisions are perhaps inevitable on a terrain as broad and uneven as feminism. Nor is a unified, monolithic feminism necessarily desirable. The conceptualization of power is itself a key site of differentiation within feminist theory and research. Fraser, a feminist theorist and political philosopher of the Critical Theory school, has received relatively little attention in human geography – far less than one of her main sparring partners and interlocutors, Judith Butler. But, as I argue in this chapter, her body of work is a rich, if not unproblematic, resource not only for feminist geographers but for all of us who are, or should be, interested in how power, inequality and justice are interrelated with reproduction of and through difference.
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Trafficking, forced labour and related phenomena have been documented time and again in recent years by advocacy groups, the media and government agencies. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that there are 20.9 million people in some form of forced labour worldwide. The estimate is broken down regionally and sectorally: 11.7 million of these are thought to be in the Asia and Pacific region; and 18.7 million are believed to be in the private economy, among whom 14.2 million are involved in economic activities not related to sexual exploitation. Debt bondage appears to be the most common mechanism of forced labour (cf. ILO 2005; 2012; Andrees and Belser 2009). The prevalence of labour relations characterized by various forms of unfreedom raises critical questions about how the phenomenon fits into the contemporary economy, and therefore about how to address the issue(s) in ways that advance the interests of all exploited workers. --Chapter abstract at Durham Research Online
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Considers the current regulatory environment for temporary employment workers in Quebec. Concludes that the legislative failure to regulate has resulted in abusive practices that undermine labour law.
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Compares the legal regimes of British Columbia and Manitoba for employment agencies that recruit women from the Philippines to work as caregivers in Canadian homes. Concludes that the Manitoba regulatory framework is much more effective in protecting caregivers from the abusive practices of these agencies.
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This chapter examines the concept of precariousness in work in relation to income and labour market polarization. Although there is growing interest in the separate but related notion of precarity in human geography, economic and labour geographers have engaged less with the literature on precarious work and the decline of the standard employment relation. This chapter provides a brief overview of how precarious employment is understood, before turning to focus on two particular dimensions: the role of labour market intermediaries, and the challenges of regulation in an era of flexible work.