This volume explores activism, research and critique in the age of digital subjects and objects and Big Data capitalism after a digital turn said to have radically transformed our political futures. Optimists assert that the ‘digital’ promises: new forms of community and ways of knowing and sensing, innovation, participatory culture, networked activism, and distributed democracy. Pessimists argue that digital technologies have extended domination via new forms of control, networked authoritarianism and exploitation, dehumanization and the surveillance society. Leading international scholars present varied interdisciplinary assessments of such claims – in theory and via dialogue – and of the digital’s impact on society and the potentials, pitfalls, limits and ideologies, of digital activism. They reflect on whether computational social science, digital humanities and ubiquitous datafication lead to digital positivism that threatens critical research or lead to new horizons in theory and society. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. More information about the initiative and details about KU’s Open Access programme can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org .

https://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/books/10.16997/book29/download/2524/

Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data

As work and leisure have become increasingly intertwined in big data capitalism, the politics of the sphere of social reproduction have also come into view. This chapter examines the insights that can be generated by exploring these politics, both for understandings of digital labour but also contemporary sociopolitics. Drawing on the underlying principles that animate Jarrett’s book The Digital Housewife, it emphasises the importance of queer, feminist, and postcolonial approaches to reproductive work for understanding contemporary capitalism and its sites of struggle. It focuses on three key arenas which are re-drawn when the politics of reproduction are considered: history, value and subjects.

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Through the Reproductive Lens : Labour and Struggle at the Intersection of Culture and Economy

Beyond victimisation: Gendered legacies of mining, participation, and resistance

Recent years have witnessed shifts in the social organisation of emotional and care labour, especially as they intersect with new global trends in migratory patterns and international mobility, the restructuring of social reproduction and public—private divides, as well as the flexibilization of labour markets and a resurgence of unpaid labour such as volunteer work. With a focus on emotions and affect as a central epistemological and methodological orientation, this essay aims to draw connections between three distinct but related bodies of feminist scholarship: social reproduction theory, studies of emotional labour, and emotional geographies. The paper frames these approaches relative to the project of understanding the spatial dimensions of forms of emotional and care labour in neoliberal times.

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Geographies of emotional and care labour

Interest in social reproduction theory (SRT) has been revived in the in the last ten odd years. This paper positions SRT, and its refraction through a geographic lens, as particularly well placed to address emerging issues in the context of ongoing crises—economic, environmental and of care—which have been enhanced by the Covid‐19 pandemic. I present an overview of the Marxist‐feminist traditions that constitute the basis for modern SRT. Through a survey of recent literature, I discuss the potential for extending contemporary SRT through intersectionality theory and suggest the need to draw on theoretical insights originating in the global periphery towards a postcolonial, decolonial SRT. Finally, I contextualize social reproduction theories within geography and suggest three emerging areas of scholarship in which combining a geographic and SRT perspective would yield productive understandings of the current moment and signal towards the construction of alternative, livable futures. These areas are debt and the financialization of social reproduction under neoliberalism;a turn towards a socioecological understanding of reproduction;and resistance, transformation and visions of the future through a “conscious appropriation” of life’s work and life sustaining practices at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Geography Compass is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Social Reproduction Theory: State of the field and new directions in geography

The years since the rise of gay liberation in 1969 have seen remarkable changes in the realm of sexuality. Lesbians and gay men have won important rights and attained a cultural visibility that would have been impossible to imagine even thirty years ago. Yet these rights are limited, and apply only to specific sections of those who face exclusion, discrimination or violence on the basis of their queerness in the realm of gender and/or sexuality.

Situating Sexuality in Social Reproduction

Daniel Bensaid was prominent among the revolutionary thinkers and activists who emerged from the mass insurgency of the 1960s, a period in which anti-capitalist organisers had genuine social weight grounded in connections to broad layers of the working class and radical movements. As the neoliberal offensive developed, working-class and allied movements experienced crucial defeats that marginalised anti-capitalist theory and practice. Bensaid developed a unique theoretical analysis of radical mobilising during the neoliberal period, at once grounded in the history of revolutionary organising and audaciously open-ended in assessing the impact of capitalist restructuring and the employers’ offensive. The basis of his theoretical renewal lay in a new approach to understanding temporality that undercut any sense of socialist inevitability, and a commitment to revolutionary pluralism that was crucially located in the political sphere.

https://data.brill.com/files/journals/1569206X_024_04_s006_text.pdf

Alan Sears

Papers

Situating Sexuality in Social Reproduction

Beating Time in the Slow Movements: Bensaïd’s Revolutionary Rhythms