Mobilising women's labour for social provision - workshop
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
Currently a variety of social policy initiatives designed to target the poorest and mitigate some of the effects of liberalised markets depend extensively upon women's unpaid or underpaid labour, ranging from the Mid-Day Meal scheme in India to South Africa's Community Work Programme to Peru's Conditional Cash Transfer Scheme Juntos. While there has been significant critical research on the experiences of women participants in anti-poverty programmes (notably micro-credit schemes and CCTs) the question of women's roles as (unpaid or underpaid) workers implementing these programmes has remained under-researched until recently. This workshop will bring together for the first time researchers who are directly examining the experiences of women working within such programmes in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, and will consider the potential insights to be gained from a comparative approach, reflecting on questions arising from this research including:
- What are the contradictions generated when social policies aimed at addressing poverty and marginalisation produce new forms of gendered precarious labour? What are the implications of this for the characterization of such schemes as part of 'post-neoliberal development'?
- How do these policies extend or counter the invisibility of the work of social reproduction? How far do they depend on the production of gendered maternal subjects ? How do women whose labour is mobilized by these policies participate in or resist these subjectifications? How are constructions of the ideal maternal subject shaped by class, ethnicity and other unequal power relations in the various contexts?
- What is the role of gendered violence - understood intersectionally and context-specifically in terms of race, class and caste in particular - in reinforcing conditions of subordination and precarity in these work contexts?
- What are the new possibilities for collective agency which the creation of this form of work potentially generates? What are the multiple and contextually distinct challenges which women whose labour is mobilized in these schemes face in attempting to organise collectively? What individual and collective strategies have they adopted?
- What are the challenges posed by the rise of public/private partnerships in this context?
- BiGS is a supporter of this event
Contact name:
Dr Kalpana Wilson
Contact phone:
0207 852 3758