WHEN: Friday, 14 June 2024, 12pm-1.30pm BST / 4.30pm-6.00pm IST

WHERE: Online (MS Teams)

Seminar speaker:

Shirin M. Rai is Distinguished Research Professor, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. Before joining SOAS, she was Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Warwick, where she was the Founder Director of Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development (WICID).

Rai’s research interests lie in performance and politics, gender and politics and feminist international political economy. Her latest book, Depletion: the costs of care and the struggles to reverse it will be published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. She is also the lead co-editor (with Milija Gluhovic, Silvija Jestrovic and Michael Saward) of the Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance (2022).

Abstract:

In Depletion, Shirin M. Rai examines the human costs of caring and how these are reproduced across the boundaries of class, race, gender, and generation. Including case studies from different parts of the world and building on various methodologies, Rai looks at the costs of care work, or “social reproduction” in several forms. She examines the costs of commuting to work and for care, the value of unpaid work performed by women of different classes, the costs of caring performed by children, and the costs to communities when local economies and ecologies are challenged by corporate interests.

Importantly, Rai argues that depletion must be recognized in order for it to be reversed— the struggles to reverse depletion are struggles for a good life, generative of new imaginings of how caring and care work, both draining and joyful, can be reorganized for a better future for all.

The Laws of Social Reproduction project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (under grant agreement No. 772946).

For more information about the project, please email Prabha.kotiswaran@kcl.ac.uk.