NOTE: The network now has its own site and has been renamed ‘New Times: Transforming Feminist Political Economies’.
Gender and Labour in New Times
Post-Fordist accumulation processes are entangled in major reorganizations of gender, labour and life in the contemporary present. These arrangements have demanded that social scientists think anew about many key categories of analysis, including the home, living, working, the private, the everyday and even the future.
Such rethinking is required not least because one of the outstanding features of post-Fordist accumulation is the putting to work – or making productive – of areas and conditions of life previously differentiated from the zone of exchange. Thus, the home is now a key site of capital accumulation, the unemployed are (quite literally) put to work, relationships in time are exploited for their profit maximising potential, and attempts are made to mine and to prospect for economic value in feelings, sensations and affects. In sum, what is at issue in post-Fordist accumulation is a broad – albeit uneven – process of the socialization of production, a process which demands that social scientists rethink a range of concepts and categories.
This network comprises internationally renowned and emerging scholars whose ongoing research is seriously and consequentially engaged in this work of rethinking. It brings together scholars from across social science disciplines (Sociology, Cultural Studies, Geography, Economics, Law, and Politics) who engage in:
- Inventively mapping the unfolding and uneven process of the socialization of production.
- Thinking through the implications of this process at conceptual and theoretical levels for the thoroughly entangled concepts of gender and labour.
The network brings together scholars working on this common ground at the forefront of contemporary social science debates. It began with a workshop in December 2012 and has developed through a series of large and small research gatherings in Australia, the UK, Finland and Italy. The network pursues a research programme that examines the shifting co-ordinates and contours of the categories of gender and labour in post-Fordist accumulation processes across a number of contexts or sites. These include: the home, working agreements and work contracts, unemployment, money and finance, and austerity.