Logistics of Social Reproduction

***Rescheduled due to strike action: now hybrid***

This hybrid seminar features three speakers and a discussant. Hannah Schling (Glasgow) will discuss her research on worker dormitories as key sites in the Czech Republic’s export-oriented electronics manufacturing sector, housing a multinational migrant workforce on differentiated employment statuses from Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Vietnam and Mongolia. Debbie Hopkins (Oxford) is PI on a new ESRC project ‘Trucking Lives: Making Space for People in Truck Driving Work.’ Francis Portes Virginio (Strathclyde) will discuss his research on labour trafficking of Venezuelan truck drivers in Brazil. Alessandra Mezzadri (SOAS) will serve as discussant. The seminar proposes to reflect on the organisation of working lives as a mode of logistics. We seek to examine how the complex spatial and temporal arrangements of contemporary forms of capitalism both include and shape patterns of social reproduction. We bring logistics to bear on how we understand the varied places, times, and forms of social reproduction in relation to capitalist production. Logistics not only circulates commodities, but mobilises labour. This is accompanied by new understandings of value, new contradictions, new spatial and temporal ‘fixes’, and new struggles around the spatial and temporal organisation of both waged work and social reproduction. The seminar will highlight work revitalising the labour regimes framework within which social reproduction is a central theoretical aspect. It will consider the varied ways that home, life, and work relate to each other in the contemporary moment of logistics-led capitalism. We hope the seminar will stimulate new thinking on precarity, capitalist crises, and work within and beyond the wage.