Unpaid Work, Precarity, and Everyday Resistance: Understanding Migrant Women's Struggles through Social Reproduction and Feminist Political Ecology Arslan Asghar, PhD Student, Department of Political and Social Studies, University of Salerno, Italy Abstract:
This presentation will explain my ongoing research work about how migrant women experience unpaid care work, housing insecurity, economic hardships and how they resist these difficult conditions. The research is guided by Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) and Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) to better understand the connections between labor, inequality, and the environment in women's everyday lives. Social Reproduction Theory helps explain how unpaid work, such as caregiving and housework, is essential for society but often ignored or undervalued. This burden falls mostly on women, especially migrant women, who are expected to care for others while also earning an income in difficult job markets. These economic struggles with poor living conditions, such as inadequate housing and limited access to resources can be better understood by Feminist Political Ecology. By linking the lived experiences of migrant women, both these frameworks can help to show how gender, race, class, and environmental factors intersect to shape migrant women's experiences of precarity. At the same time, the research is proposed to highlight how these women create support networks, share resources, and practice forms of everyday resistance to challenge the systems that marginalize them.
---
Capitalism's Ground Zero: Feminism as a Critical Lens on Labor Chiara Luce Breccia, Ph.D. student in Philosophy, University of Pisa Abstract: Where do we draw the boundaries of what we call work? This presentation explores an ongoing research project that seeks to answer these questions from a feminist standpoint. Through a historical-critical approach, it focuses on how Marxist feminism has challenged the traditional boundaries of these categories by rethinking care as reproductive labor, that is, labor that produces value. Drawing on the works of Fortunati, Federici, and Dalla Costa, the research investigates how the naturalization of women's role in care has historically rendered invisible a form of labor essential to the reproduction of the capitalist system. Key concepts such as production/reproduction, the housewife as worker, love labor, and domestic labor as productive labor are examined as part of the "ground zero of capitalism" (Federici, 2004). In this sense, the household emerges as the first site of hidden production. However, the investigation extends beyond it, following Alisa Del Re's call to rethink social reproduction "beyond domestic boundaries" (Del Re, 1979). The ground zero of capitalism is not confined to the home but extends into contemporary labor transformations shaped by feminization, precarity, and global care chains. The research focuses on two main axes: on the one hand, the extraction of economic value from activities not formally recognized as labor; and on the other, the persistence of care as a naturalized obligation imposed on feminized and racialized bodies.
Date
- May 16, 2025