Pluralising Law and Social Reproduction: Concepts, Methods, Practices
About this Event
Pluralising Law and Social Reproduction: Concepts, Methods, Practices
This workshop builds on collaborations part of the Pluralising Social Reproduction Approaches Network (PSRN) to examine how the law enables the global maldistribution of social reproduction labour, and whether a prefigurative engagement with the law from the margins can help us to valorise social reproduction as a site of resistance.
Social reproduction can be broadly defined as the social relations, processes and labour that go into the daily and generational production and maintenance of life-making and which operate at multiple scales, from households and communities to the national and transnational (Fortunati 1981 and 2025, Picchio 1992 and 2003, Bakker and Silvey 2008, Rai et al 2010). In a capitalist system, social reproduction is disproportionately sustained by women and unequally distributed across race, geo-political location, class and migration status, with people at the lower end of the global income distribution having a higher burden of social reproduction labour because of their limited monetary resources.
In the analysis of social reproduction, the law is often regarded as an instrument of the ruling class that constructs and reinforces gendered and racialised inequalities. However, many grassroots groups and local and transnational feminist organisations recognise the importance to engage with the law to claim reparations for the past, improve their existence in the present, and organise towards a more revolutionary change in the future (see for instance Feminist Recovery Plans for Covid-19 and Beyond: Learning from Grassroots Activism). Socio-legal feminist scholars have addressed these concerns through engagement with the concept of social reproduction via different methodological approaches. Particularly significant is Prabha Kotiswaran’s project ‘Laws of Social Reproduction’ which, although mainly focused on India, has made a critical contribution to the otherwise limited literature on law and social reproduction (Kotiswaran 2023, Kotiswaran 2026). Also relevant is the feminist literature mapping law and social reproduction in global value chains such as care labour (Fudge 2014), body work (Stewart 2013), global supply (Alessandrini 2022, Zbyszweska and Sekalala 2023), digital finance chains (Natile 2020), and migration (Rigo 2025). Some of these engagements have informed a special section on ‘Social Reproduction and the Challenge to Legal Studies’ (edited by Alessandrini and Rigo 2023) published in the open access journal feminists@law. All these references come with the awareness that significant literature in the Global South and reports by grassroots groups have also raised and addressed questions related to law and ‘social reproduction’ without specifically using this term. This workshop, as the wider collaboration that inspired it, is an opportunity to open these debates in a reflexive and collaborative way.
This workshop will draw upon this scholarship on law and social reproduction and engage with the wider interdisciplinary literature and call to pluralise social reproduction approaches (Mezzadri et al 2025). The workshop aims to address the following questions: how can pluralising social reproduction approaches help us to understand, and possibly challenge, the legal structures that create and perpetuate global inequalities? Can we envisage a different role for the law to play in recognising and valuing social reproduction work by centring the experience of women at the margins of the global economy? Engaging with these questions will allow us to not only examine how the law enables the global unequal distribution of social reproduction labours, but also to understand whether an imaginative and prefigurative (Cooper 2020) engagement with the law from the margins can help us to conceptualise, with a view to valorising, social reproduction as a site of resistance and of non-capitalist economic relations (Gago 2020). In doing so we aim to place into conversation legal scholars with scholars working on social reproduction in disciplines such as economics, global political economy, development studies, politics, anthropology, sociology and history, and bring perspectives from the Global South firmly into the conversation. The workshop will also encourgae responses from/participation of policy-makers, practitioners, community and grassroots groups to understand the lived experience of social reproduction and discuss possible re-imaginative interventions. The first session will discuss the conceptualisation of social reproduction, bringing together academic and grassroots theorisations, and interrogating how the law is implicated in these theorisations. We aim to encourage a re-conceptualisation of the vocabularies of law and social reproduction based on the experiences, scholarship and activism of women at the lower end of the global power distribution. The second session will map the methods that have been used to analyse social reproduction across disciplines to understand what legal scholars can learn from this mapping: we will explore the potential of quantitative, qualitative, ethnographies, as well as prefigurative law-making approaches. The third session will focus on case studies of social reproduction at the margins of the law such as in the case of household, informal, solidarity labours and will consider them through the discussions on concepts and methods in the first two sessions.
Day 1 (9 September 2026, hybrid): IAS seminar room, University of Warwick
The workshop will be organised around the topics of concepts, methods, and practices to develop an interdisciplinary approach to law and social reproduction.
Day 2 (10 September 2026, in-person): (MRC), University of Warwick
This additional session is organised in collaboration with the MRC to explore historical archival documents on law and social reproduction.
The detailed schedule will be published closer to the time.
Participants will be sent a questionnaire to be completed prior to the workshop. The answers will be used to frame the discussions. The questionnaire will also ask if you intend to attend online, in which case we will send a Teams link.
The workshop is supported by the Warwick Institute of Advanced Studies Interdisciplinary Research Award, in collaboration with WLS gender & the law cluster, Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development (WICID) and the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender (CSWG).
Co-conspirators: Serena Natile (Warwick Law School), Donatella Alessandrini (Loughborough), Johanna Del Pilar Cortes Nieto (Universidad del Rosario), Shirin Rai (SOAS) and members of the PSRA network.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 0.00
