Everyday crisis, everyday care: A feminist political economy from below

Abstract

Engaging with International Political Economy scholarship on crisis, this article emphasises the need for a social reproduction approach that recognises the socially necessary labour that sustains life within conditions of everyday crisis. We set out a context-sensitive understanding of crisis, attentive to place-based struggles, and long-standing gendered, class, and racialised inequalities – an approach that chimes with calls for greater pluralism and engagement with diverse contexts in the development of social reproduction theorising. Our argument is illustrated through two cases: one from post-war Sri Lanka and the other from the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seemingly distinct, these cases enable reflection on the development of social reproduction approaches grounded in the everyday spaces of both Global South and Global North. We suggest that there is something particularly productive in holding these geographies together in a discussion of crisis. Together, our cases demonstrate how crisis is entangled with the ongoing undermining of social reproduction. At the same time, the comparison keeps in view the multiscalar nature of crisis, showing how crises of social reproduction take shape through wider processes of state restructuring, colonial legacies, and geopolitics, while also recognising the forms of agency exercised in everyday efforts to sustain life.