Time: 2.00pm - 6.00pm
Venue: PR, JG0001, Penrhyn Road campus, Penrhyn Road, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 2EE
Price: free
Speaker(s): Jo Littler (City, University of London), Alessandra Mezzadri (School of Oriental and Asian Studies, University of London), Peter Osborne (CRMEP)
CALL FOR PAPERS
Please send 300-word abstracts and short bio (max. 100 words) to: crmepgradconference2024@gmail.com by 15 March 2024
In recent years, the crisis of contemporary capitalism has increasingly been articulated in terms of threats and challenges posed to the reproduction of life — as an ecological or environmental crisis on the one hand and as a crisis of social, physical and emotional reproduction, or a ‘crisis of care', on the other. Simultaneously, we have seen rising social and political struggles over living conditions, natural resources, land, and urban spaces, as well as struggles around immigration and care work. These have accompanied calls to ‘reclaim the commons', to practice an ‘ethics of care', or to establish communal forms of living. In this context, three conceptual signifiers have gained special importance in critical thought: care, commons, reproduction.
In Marxist theory, there has been a turn away from a narrow focus on production towards the category of reproduction. Social reproduction theorists have conceptualised the ‘crisis of care' as a broader crisis of social reproduction involving neoliberal austerity measures on the one hand, and the exploitation of the workforce and the extraction of natural resources in the Global South on the other. In other strains of feminist theory, the notion of care has been used as the point of departure for developing alternative ethical-political theories based on interrelatedness and interconnectedness. An ‘ethics of care' has become central to environmental thinking articulated in terms of communal material interests and the recognition of a shared precarity and vulnerability. Simultaneously, the notion of the commons has emerged as a point of convergence and divergence amongst anarchists, Marxists, environmentalists and ecofeminists, where it is used to build a variety of often conflicting political visions.
Recognizing that the concepts of care, commons and reproduction point to very different philosophical problematics and approaches, the 2024 iteration of the CRMEP Graduate Conference intends to explore the philosophical terrain that emerges when they intersect. How have these concepts been engaged in recent Marxist, feminist, and environmental thinking? What are the potential possibilities and limits of thinking them together and how does establishing relations between them transform each of them?
We invite papers from a broad spectrum of disciplines engaging with but not limited to the above questions.
