This conference will bring together scholars, organizers, and artists to think together about the intersections of social reproduction, racial capitalism, care, the state, and liberatory social change. The conference will draw on the long history of organizing, study, thinking, and praxis forged by feminist activists, organizers, scholars, and artists who have expanded our political analysis to include the dimensions of paid and unpaid domestic, emotional, and reproductive labor as well as those who have taught us about how social reproduction can expand how we understand and build transformative organizing for liberatory futures. At this conference, we will consider the following questions: How can we consider the relationships among social reproduction, racial capitalism, and the state? How have these relationships shifted over time? In considering this question, we want to problematize assumptions about the “care crisis” and map new locations and strategies of radical political possibility. What does care mean in the context of our organizing? How can we radically reimagine a collective, egalitarian, nonhierarchical, anti-capitalist politics of care as the basis for the world that is rooted in visions and praxis of mutuality and non-disposability? What does care offer as method, politics, and praxis to building transformative organizing against the carceral, capitalist, and imperialist state and for liberatory futures? Our intention is to generate a space for critical dialogue, inquiry, and collective learning that will inform organizing and grounded scholarship that advances social justice.
Program
- 9:45 - 10 a.m. | Welcome by Premilla Nadasen (Co-Director of BCRW and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History, Barnard College)
- 10 -11:30 a.m. | Social Reproduction, Racial Capitalism, and the State
- Tithi Bhattacharya (Associate Professor of History and the Director of Global Studies, Purdue University)
- Deirdre Cooper Owens (Associate Professor of History, University of Connecticut)
- Silvia Federici (Professor Emerita of New College, Hofstra University)
- Gabriel Winant (Assistant Professor of History, University of Chicago)
- Moderated by Premilla Nadasen (Co-Director, BCRW and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History, Barnard College)
- Panel description: What is the “care crisis”? In 2023, the World Economic Forum exposed the “fundamental mismatch” between the supply and demand of paid and unpaid care workers and services in the United States, sending a nearly $6 trillion industry to the brink of collapse. However, as activists and Black and Brown communities have long known, this “crisis” is the outcome of historical inequalities only exacerbated by neoliberalism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning by problematizing the concept of a “care crisis”, this panel will examine the relationships among social reproduction, racial capitalism, and the state. Panelists will address capital’s reliance on care work to generate labor power, the role of the welfare state, and profit extraction from care. They will also map new locations and strategies of exploitation and capital accumulation with the decline of an industrial economy and rise of the care economy. Finally, panelists will examine the implications of considering the reproduction of human life as a site of profit.
- 11:45 a.m. - 1 p.m. | Brown bag lunch and workshops
- Breakout A: Is social work a site of care or carcerality? A workshop with the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work
- Vivianne Guevara (Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work, Columbia University)
- Michelle Grier (Therapist, Critical Therapy Institute and Director, Center for Wellbeing and Happiness)
- Joyce McMillan (Executive Director, Just Making a Change for Families)
- Breakout B: What does the status of childcare in Mississippi teach us about the relationship between state and community? A workshop with the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative
- Jearlean Osborne (Program Coordinator, Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative)
- Belinda Thornton (Child Care Director/Social Work Consultant, North Jackson Day Care Center)
- Breakout C: How have harm reduction initiatives transformed the politics of care?
- Sterling Johnson (harm reduction and housing activist and Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography, Temple University)
- Breakout A: Is social work a site of care or carcerality? A workshop with the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work
- 1 - 1:15 p.m. | Performance by poet Christine Yvette Lewis
- 1:15 - 2:45 p.m. | The Politics and Praxis of Care
- Asmaa AbuMezied (Gender and Economic Justice Expert, Socio-Economic Institute)
- Anna Romina Guevarra (Professor of Global Asian Studies, University of Illinois-Chicago)
- Jina Kim (Assistant Professor of English Language & Literature and of the Study of Women & Gender, Smith College)
- Joyce McMillan (Executive Director, Just Making a Change for Families)
- Paula Rojas (community organizer and midwife, Mama Sana Vibrant Woman)
- Moderated by Ujju Aggarwal (Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Experiential Learning, The New School)
- Panel description: Activists, communities, and scholars have long reimagined care outside of racial capitalism as part of a liberatory future rooted in visions of mutuality and non-disposability. What do care and social reproduction offer as method, politics, and praxis for organizing against capitalism and imperialism? How can social movements care for Black and brown, disabled, poor, and queer life in the context of an expanding carceral state, neoliberal capitalist accumulation, and state abandonment? What models of collective care and radical care can we draw on from history?
- 3 - 4:30 p.m. | Keynote
- Linda Oalican (co-founder, Damayan Migrant Workers Association) and Riya Ortiz (Executive Director, Damayan Migrant Workers Association) in conversation with Premilla Nadasen (Co-Director of BCRW and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History, Barnard College)
Speaker Bios
Asmaa AbuMezied is a gender and economic justice expert with twelve years of experience addressing issues of gender, economic development, and climate change. Working with organizations such as Oxfam, International Finance Corporation, Internet2, and Al Shabaka, she provided solutions and programs for women's economic justice. Her work is published in spaces such as Oxfam policy and practice, Development and Gender Journal, Al-Shabaka, and the World Economic Forum. AbuMezied is a co-founder of Socio-Economic Institute (SEIN), a Palestine-based Think-tank working to address issues of inequalities in fragile and conflict areas by centering indigenous knowledge and voices. Her focus is on gendered economic policies, women's rights in economic sectors, unpaid care and domestic work campaigning, inclusive markets, and feminist economics in fragile and conflict areas. She is a global shaper alumna of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Initiative, a 2015 Atlas Corps Fellow, a Fulbright Grantee, and a 2023 Millennium Fellow.
Ujju Aggarwal is assistant professor of anthropology and experiential learning at The New School. She is co-editor of What’s Race Got to Do with It? How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality.
Tithi Bhattacharya is a professor of South Asian History at Purdue University. She is the author of The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2005) and the editor of the now classic study, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Pluto Press, 2017). Her coauthored book includes the popular Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019) which has been translated in over thirty languages. Her new book, Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal, is due out from Duke University Press in 2024. She writes extensively on Marxist theory, gender, and the politics of Islamophobia. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies, South Asia Research, The Guardian, Jacobin, The Nation, and the New Left Review. She is on the editorial board of Studies on Asia and Spectre.
Deirdre Cooper Owens is an Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut. Before her most recent appointment, she directed the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia and headed a medical humanities program at the University of Nebraska, making her one of two Black women in the nation to have held the post. A popular public speaker, writer, and reproductive justice advocate. Dr. Cooper Owens has published both scholarly and popular pieces on issues that concern African American historical experiences and reproductive justice. She is an Organization of American Historians (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer, a past American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Fellow and has won several prestigious honors and awards for her scholarly and advocacy work in history and reproductive and birthing justice. Her first book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology, won a Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the Organization of American Historians as the best book written in African American women’s and gender history. It has recently been translated into Korean and will be translated into Brazilian Portuguese this year. She is currently working on a popular biography of Harriet Tubman that examines her life through the lens of disability, and a monograph about the history of race, medical discovery, and the C-section.
Silvia Federici is a long-time feminist scholar, activist, and teacher. She is Professor Emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University, and co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, the Radical Philosophy Association Anti-Death Penalty Project, and the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. She is the author of numerous books and essays on feminist theory and history and political philosophy, including Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Capital Accumulation; Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, Feminist Struggle; Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and its Others (edited); and A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (co-edited).
Michelle Grier, LMSW, is a social justice worker, therapist, advocate, and organizer committed to transformative social change. Michelle has over ten years of experience facilitating conversations about race and oppression, cultivating youth programming, and providing mental health support services to children and their families. She engages restorative practices and systems theory in her work. Currently, Michelle leads strategy and programming for a hyperlocal nonprofit focused on health equity and healing justice. In her therapeutic practice, Michelle works with individuals and communities to foster connection and co-create tools to deepen healing from generational trauma and violence. She employs psychotherapy, relational therapy, and ancestral tools to engage in practices that support growth and healing. Michelle was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She received a B.A. in Anthropology from Wesleyan University and a Masters of Science in Social Work from Columbia University School of Social Work.
Vivanne Guevara has been a social worker in criminal and civil defense for over twelve years and is the Director of Social Work and Mitigation at the Federal Defenders of New York in the Eastern District. Vivianne was previously an Investigator and Social Worker at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia, where she supported litigation that challenged conditions in juvenile and adult jails and prisons in Georgia and Alabama, the provision of indigent defense in Georgia, and the proliferation of debtor’s prisons in Georgia. Vivianne began working in public defense as a Social Worker at the Bronx Defenders in 2007. There she worked with clients charged in domestic violence and mental health courts. While working towards her Master’s Degree in Social Work, Vivianne conducted street outreach at The Bowery Residents’ Committee where she worked one-on-one with homeless individuals on the streets and in the subways of New York City.
Vivianne is a graduate of New York University and Columbia University’s School of Social Work (CSSW ‘08). Vivianne holds a certificate in Restorative Justice and Restorative Circles and received training from Kay Pranis, Planning Change, and the International Institute in Restorative Practices. Vivianne Guevara began facilitating peacemaking and community-building circles in 2014. Since 2014, Vivianne planned and facilitated circles within/for the criminal legal system, schools, universities, coalitions, community members, and private and non-profit organizations. She is a volunteer circle-keeper at Hidden Water in NYC, an adjunct professor at CSSW, and a co-teacher of the first restorative justice class at CSSW. Vivianne comes from a family of farmworkers, religious workers, and social justice workers, and strives to honor their legacy and that of her ancestors through a life of service. She continues to learn through teaching others and by providing opportunities that promote community and healing.
Anna Romina Guevarra is a 1.5 Filipinx American who was born in the Philippines and grew up in California. She is a proud graduate of public schools, with a BA in Women’s Studies and BS in Biological Sciences from the University of California, Irvine and a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco. Before embarking on a winter wonderland adventure in Chicago in 2007, Guevarra lived in the desert, having taught at Arizona State University, West Campus from 2003-2007. She has dedicated her career to helping build Asian American Studies at UIC since 2007, first by becoming its director in 2012 and then facilitating the union of Asian Studies and Asian American Studies through Global Asian Studies (GLAS), which she founded in 2016. Under her leadership, UIC launched the first major of its kind in the Midwest, the Bachelors of Arts (BA) in Global Asian Studies. Guevarra is an interdisciplinary scholar whose intellectual and pedagogical interests are informed by transnational feminist theories, political economy, and critical race/ethnic studies. Her body of work has explored the racialization and commodification of immigrant and transnational labor from the Philippines, partly inspired by having come from a family of migrants. Currently, she is working on several projects that focus on the geopolitics of care work at the intersection of science and technology, food and foodways that connect India and the Philippines, and the urban removal projects and resistance movements currently underway in Uptown, Chicago.
Sterling Johnson is a black, queer, and disabled scholar-activist, organizer, lawyer, geographer, writer, orator, and doctoral candidate in the Geography and Urban Studies Department at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA/Lenapehoking. Their research focuses on political ecology of health and the body, black geographies, and theorizing the connections between homelessness, harm reduction, displacement, decolonization and settler colonialism. Within these interests, Johnson focuses on how Black people can thrive in this world free from racist ableist views of their abilities and worldview.
He is the Board President of the Philadelphia Community Land Trust, which arose from the 2020 Philadelphia Parkway Encampment Protest, an organizer with Philadelphia Housing Action, and a member of Black and Latinx Community Control, the National Survivors Union, the Pennsylvania HIV Justice Alliance, and the Masculinity Action Project.
They have worked in collaboration with their community to gain resources, build infrastructure for liberatory practice, and defend against state violence while combatting hegemonies of misogyny, misogynoir, classism, and transphobia. He earned a bachelor's degree at American University and a masters degree in geography from George Washington University. He has a juris doctorate from the University of California College of Law, San Francisco (formerly Hastings).
Jina B. Kim is a scholar, writer, and educator of feminist disability studies, queer-of-color critique, and contemporary multi-ethnic US literature. She is an assistant professor of English and the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College.
Jina is the author of Dreaming of Infrastructure: Crip-of-Color Writing after the US Welfare State (Duke University Press, forthcoming), which brings a disability lens to bear on feminist- and queer-of-color writing after 1996 US welfare reform. Her book develops an intersectional disability framework, or “crip-of-color critique,” to demonstrate why we need radical disability politics and aesthetics in navigating contemporary crises of care.
Jina’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Signs, Social Text, GLQ, American Quarterly, MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States), South Atlantic Quarterly, Disability Studies Quarterly, Lateral, and The Asian American Literary Review. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars and Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. In 2012, she received the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars from the Society for Disability Studies.
Christine Yvette Lewis is a worker, leader, organizer, activist, secretary, and Cultural Outreach Coordinator with Domestic Workers United. She is an articulate spokesperson for the movement. Christine appeared on The Colbert Report in 2011 where she reminisced on her early years when, at a performance of an Easter Cantata, the children needed to recite stories and poems. “It dawned on us that in the hot island sun we were reciting poems written by British poets about snow falling. That’s colonialism for you.” In addition to her activism, Christine Lewis acts with The Public Theater, plays the steel drum, and writes poetry. She says, “Providence and serendipity are my watchwords–because living brings us into things we can’t control, like fate and destiny.”
Joyce McMillan is a thought leader, advocate, community organizer, educator, and the Founder and Executive Director of Just Making A Change for Families (JMACforFamilies).
Joyce’s mission is to remove systemic barriers in communities of color by bringing awareness to the racial disparities in systems where people of color are disproportionately affected. Her ultimate goal is to abolish systems of harm–especially the family policing system (or the so-called “child welfare system”)–while creating concrete community resources.
Premilla Nadasen is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College and Co-Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She is past president of the National Women’s Studies Association, the inaugural recipient of the Ann Snitow Prize, a former Fulbright Fellow, and a member of the Society of American Historians. She has been involved in grassroots social justice organizing for many decades and has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grassroots community organizing. She is the author of two award-winning books, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (2005), Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (2015), and Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (2023). She is currently writing a biography of South African singer and anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba.
Linda Oalican is the Cofounder and former Executive Director of the Damayan Migrant Workers Association, a workers-based and workers-led organization that empowers Filipino migrant workers, mostly domestic and care workers, to fight for their labor, immigration, health and gender rights.
In her homeland, the Philippines, Linda was a student and community organizer, and a political activist. She worked as a government employee for many years and engaged in the organizing of government employees. In the late 1990s, she made the fateful decision to migrate to the US to support her children’s college education. Like many Filipino professional women, Linda worked as a domestic worker for over a decade, and personally experienced the systemic abuses and exploitation in the domestic work industry. Drawing upon her organizing background in the Philippines, in 2002 Linda co-founded Damayan with fellow Filipina domestic workers, to expose the problems and abuses in the industry, to organize and build the power of domestic and care workers through coalition and movement building work.
With an anti-imperialist analysis, Linda led in the visioning and execution of Damayan’s vision, mission, organizing principles, and strategies, rooting the forced and massive migration of Filipinos to the continuing neoliberal policies and domination of the Philippines. With her thought leadership, Damayan launched its flagship campaign against labor trafficking and modern-day slavery of Filipino domestic workers. Since its founding in 2002, Linda worked hard to nurture the organization and helped build Damayan as a sanctuary organization of Filipino survivors of labor and human trafficking and wage theft, committed to building the power of domestic and care workers to fight for fair labor standards, equity, and dignity.
Jearlean Osborne is a community organizer for the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative. She has organized community groups for more than twenty years, helping them to become more self-sufficient. She uses the learner-centered approach to get people to step outside their comfort zone and advocate and promote positive changes in their community. This method has proven to be very successful in getting organizations to actively seek community funding to sustain their work as well as to develop a sense of commitment and ownership at the local level.
Jearlean’s passion for working with communities grew out of her experiences as a disenfranchised person within her own community. She has extensive experience and expertise in early childhood education, adult literacy, non-profit board development, and advocacy with and for poor and low-income children and their families. Jearlean served on the Mississippi Center for Nonprofits board in Jackson, Mississippi, where she was Chair of the Board Development Committee. She has written several curriculum guides: “Welfare Rights and Change,” “My Community,” and “The ABC’S to Advocating for The Rights of Children in the Public School System.”
Jearlean is a 1993 graduate of Leadership Gulf Coast and has earned numerous awards including the Laurel Wreath Award, Zeta Phi Beta Outstanding Community Service Award, and NAACP Outstanding Community Service Award. She received her CDA certification in 1990.
Chilean-born community organizer, licensed midwife and social justice trainer Paula X. Rojas grew up in Houston and, following the footsteps of family members in Chile, began working as a teen on social justice issues affecting her local community. She then spent formative years of her youth back in Chile learning from grassroots revolutionary movements taking down the military dictatorship. For the last thirty-two years, she has organized at the intersection of class, race and gender to build collective people power in her local community, experimenting with different forms of grassroots organizations. Paula has worked on issues of gender violence, racial justice, reproductive justice, childcare and health care access and community alternatives to policing. She co-founded various community-based organizations including Sista II Sista, Pachamama, Mamas of Color Rising, Mama Sana Vibrant Woman, Refugio: Center for Community Organizing, and the New York Organizing Support Center. She has also played a key role in supporting and amplifying local organizing work including providing training and technical assistance to the local chapters and affiliates of INCITE! (Women and Trans People of Color Against Violence). Over the last fifteen years, she has supported the training and development of community organizers and their organizations in Texas working on a range of social justice issues.
In 2014 Rojas was licensed as a midwife while developing a model to practice a vision for a just and loving approach to pregnancy, birth and new parenthood for poor and working class BIPOC families. Paula became a doula in 2005, after a traumatic birth experience while on Medicaid which led her to work on birthing justice. In 2008, Paula co-founded Mamas of Color Rising (MOCR) in Austin, with other poor and working class BIPOC mothers to organize around issues affecting their families and communities. The all-volunteer organization MOCR organized families and passed a Rules Change in Texas Medicaid in 2011 to allow Medicaid coverage for pregnant persons cared for by midwives. In 2012, Paula co-founded Mama Sana Vibrant Woman, as a sister project to MOCR. Her work at Mama Sana integrated the midwifery model of care and racial justice organizing to both create holistic care services free of charge while working to build collective people power.
Paula contributed to the INCITE! collections: The Color of Violence and The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. In 2020, she served as co-chair of the Reimagining Public Safety Taskforce for the City of Austin, Texas, a process that culminated after many years of volunteer organizing with Communities of Color United for Racial Justice (CCU) to divest public funds from policing and invest in a holistic local People's Budget. She is the mother of two amazing kids, Xue-li and Camino, and she loves to dance!
Belinda Thornton is a Jackson, MS native who graduated from Tougaloo College with a BA in psychology/mental health with an emphasis in early childhood education. She also earned a master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Southern Mississippi and a Master’s of Education in School Psychometry from Mississippi College. Belinda has thirty-two years of experience as a childcare director, children’s mental health consultant, and social worker as well as a domestic violence social worker. In addition, she is an active member of the Mississippi Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, the Jackson Chapter of Black Social Workers, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, Zero to Three, Holy Ghost Catholic Church Ladies Auxiliary, and serves as Secretary of the Holy Ghost Catholic Church St. Martin De Porres Circle. She is a true advocate for children and families. Belinda lives by the motto: “The Three C’s in Life: Choice, Chance, Change. You must make the choice to take the chance, if you want anything in life to change.” She has two adult children and is the legal guardian to her great niece.
Gabriel Winant is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. His first book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, was published in 2021. He is also a frequent contributor to publications such as Dissent, The Nation, and n+1.
Accessibility
ASL Interpretation will be provided. For additional accessibility needs please email skreitzb@barnard.edu.
This is an in-person event, free and open to all. Please review our COVID safety guidelines. Registration is preferred.
Acknowledgments
This conference is co-convened with Ujju Aggarwal (Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Experiential Learning at The New School) and Vayne Ong (Ph.D. Student in History, Columbia University), and co-sponsored by the Center for Political Economy at Columbia University.
Image Credit
Damayan Migrant Workers Association