Academic, activist, public and policy interest in care and social reproduction has increased over the last few years, albeit with varied substantive areas of intervention and an uneven sense of urgency.

Whether focusing on the labour conditions of care workers, exploring the relationship between production and social reproduction, examining the racializing processes of global economic-political transformations, analysing complex affects entailed in care, revealing care crises and pursuing visions of care-centred societies, these contributions have established a firm foothold across disciplines and in interdisciplinary settings. This proliferation of care and social reproduction research and the significant conceptual, methodological and empirical advancements, offer an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the relationship between care and social reproduction and consider the value of scholarship on care and social reproduction to sociology and sociologists.

In this event launching the Care and Social Reproduction study group, a new network set up under the umbrella of the British Sociological Association (BSA), we will engage with scholars working on care and social reproduction from within and outside sociology. Panel speakers will explore the relationship between care and social reproduction in their field of research, how their research contributes to the understanding of contemporary social crises (including the crisis of care and the crisis of social reproduction), and how their research can inform social theory and the work of sociologists.

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Organisers and opening remarks

Sara R Farris is Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a sociologist with expertise in migration, gender and the political economy of care and social reproduction. Her research is particularly concerned to address: the role that migrant and racialised workers play within economies of care and social reproduction; the financialisation and corporatisation of care and the racialisation of sexism. She is well known internationally for her research on “femonationalism”, or the mobilisation of feminist themes by nationalist parties within anti-immigration campaigns. She is the author of In the name of women's rights. The rise of femonationalism (2017) and co-editor of the Sage Handbook of Marxism (2021). She is currently working on a manuscript on Gender and Capitalism (Verso 2026) and on a project on the Coloniality of Care and Social Reproduction. 

Maud Perrier is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Gender and the Faculty Co-Lead for Gender Research at the University of Bristol. 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.

Ania Plomien is Associate Professor in Gender and Social Science and Deputy Head of Department (Research) in the LSE Department of Gender Studies, and Deputy Director of the Research Programme on Gender Justice and the Wellbeing Economy. Her feminist political economy research centres on the problem of neoliberalisation of the state and the crisis of social reproduction in Europe, in particular via market-reach into care, food and housing provisioning and the associated gendered harms. She is the co-author of Gender, Migration and Domestic Work: Masculinities, Male Labour and Fathering in the UK and USA (2013) and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory (2014). 

Speakers

Gargi Bhattacharyya is Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre, Institute of Advanced Studies at UCL. Gargi writes and teaches on issues of inequality, social justice and state practices. Gargi hosts the Left Book Club series ‘Who’s afraid of anticapitalism?’ and is a founding editor of the political book series, Fireworks, published by Pluto Press. Gargi is the author of The Futures of Racial Capitalism (2024). 

Umut Erel is Professor in Sociology at the Open University. Her research focuses on migrant families and citizenship, exploring how migrant women’s mothering practices can be conceptualized as citizenship practices. The focus is on questions of belonging and participation for the mothers and their children. She is the author of Migrant Women Transforming Citizenship (2009) and co-editor (with L. Ryan and  A. D’Angelo) of Placing Capitals: Migration, Networks, Identities. She is the Principal Investigator of an AHRC project 'Participatory Arts based Methods for Civic Engagement In Migrant Support Organizations' , building on previous work with migrant families using participatory theatre and walking methodologies.

Alessandra Mezzadri is Reader in Global Development and Political Economy at SOAS, London. She is a Feminist and Development Political Economist of labour and social reproduction. She is Reader in Global Development and Political Economy at SOAS, London. She is the author of The Sweatshop Regime (2021), lead-author of The Social Life of Industrial Disputes (2023), editor of Marx in the Field (2023), and co-editor of a new Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work (2023). She has written extensively on global labour issues and debates; social reproduction, value, and exploitation; and Marxian-Feminist methodologies. She is currently working at a manuscript on Feminist Cartographies of Social Reproduction and Global Development as Social Factory.

Rachel Rosen is Professor of Sociology in UCL's Social Research Institute. Her research, teaching, and public engagement is located at the intersections of sociology of childhood and materialist feminist thought, with a focus on unequal childhoods, social reproduction, and migration in neoliberal border regimes. Her work explores stratification and bordering of the conditions in which life is made, and made meaningful, and in turn how children and their families in precarious migrancy sustain, weather, evade, care, and engage in solidaristic action. Rachel is co-editor of Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes? (2018), Reimagining Childhood Studies (2019), Childhood, parenting culture, and adult-child relations in global perspectives (2020), and Crisis for Whom? Critical global perspectives on childhood, care, and migration (2023), and co-author of Bordering Social Reproduction: Migrant mothers and children making lives in the shadows (2025).

Sara Stevano is a development and feminist political economist. She is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at SOAS University of London, after holding teaching and research positions at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and King’s College London. Her areas of study are the political economy of work, food and nutrition, inequalities and social reproduction. Her work focuses on Africa, with primary research experience in Mozambique and Ghana. Sara is committed to expanding the boundaries of economic research and teaching through interdisciplinary approaches, qualitative methods and micro-macro bridges.