Care, Commons, Reproduction: The 2024 CRMEP Graduate Conference

Time: 2.30pm - 8.00pm
Venue: Day 1 (2:30- 8:00pm): PR SB2005 (Roberts Lecture Theatre); Day 2 (10:30 - 6:30pm) : PR MB0012 (Clattern Lecture Theatre), Penrhyn Road campus, Penrhyn Road, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 2EE
Price: free
Speaker(s): Jo Littler (City, University of London), Alessandra Mezzadri (School of Oriental and Asian Studies, University of London), Peter Osborne (CRMEP)

In recent years, the crisis of contemporary capitalism has increasingly been articulated in terms of threats and challenges posed to the reproduction of life — as an ecological or environmental crisis on the one hand and as a crisis of social, physical and emotional reproduction, or a ‘crisis of care', on the other. Simultaneously, we have seen rising social and political struggles over living conditions, natural resources, land, and urban spaces, as well as struggles around immigration and care work. These have accompanied calls to ‘reclaim the commons', to practice an ‘ethics of care', or to establish communal forms of living. In this context, three conceptual signifiers have gained special importance in critical thought: care, commons, reproduction.
In Marxist theory, there has been a turn away from a narrow focus on production towards the category of reproduction. Social reproduction theorists have conceptualised the ‘crisis of care' as a broader crisis of social reproduction involving neoliberal austerity measures on the one hand, and the exploitation of the workforce and the extraction of natural resources in the Global South on the other. In other strains of feminist theory, the notion of care has been used as the point of departure for developing alternative ethical-political theories based on interrelatedness and interconnectedness. An ‘ethics of care' has become central to environmental thinking articulated in terms of communal material interests and the recognition of a shared precarity and vulnerability. Simultaneously, the notion of the commons has emerged as a point of convergence and divergence amongst anarchists, Marxists, environmentalists and ecofeminists, where it is used to build a variety of often conflicting political visions.
Recognizing that the concepts of care, commons and reproduction point to very different philosophical problematics and approaches, the 2024 iteration of the CRMEP Graduate Conference intends to explore the philosophical terrain that emerges when they intersect. How have these concepts been engaged in recent Marxist, feminist, and environmental thinking? What are the potential possibilities and limits of thinking them together and how does establishing relations between them transform each of them?

Day 1: Thursday 23 May 2024
PR, Sopwith Building (SB), Roberts Lecture Theatre (Room 2005 – access via 1st floor)

2:30–3:00pm Registration
3:00–3:15 Opening Remarks
3:15–4:45 Panel 1: History of Philosophy
Anna Beria (CRMEP) The Concept of the Common in relation to the Third Kind of
Knowledge in Spinoza
Iñigo Baca Bordons (Universitat de València) The 'Common' and the Reproduction of
Substance in Hegel's Logic
Billie Cashmore (CRMEP) Remaking the Myth: Narrative and Reproduction, or, History after the Plantation
5:00–6:00: Plenary 1
Jo Littler (Goldsmiths, University of London)
From Care to Carewashing
6:00 –8:00 Drinks Reception
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Day 2: Friday 24 May
PR, Main Building (MN), Clattern Lecture Theatre (Room 0012)

10:30–11:30am: Plenary 2
Peter Osborne (CRMEP)
Temporalities of Reproduction
11:45am–13:15pm: Panel 2: Biological and Social Reproduction
Marina Sportelli (University of Toulouse) Between Social and Biological: Disentangling 
Reproduction
Holly Isard (University of West London) Refusing Reproduction: If 'Every Miscarriage is a
Workplace Accident' then Every Abortion is a Workplace Strike
Irina Herb (Friedrich-Schiller University Jena) Who owns the Means of Reproduction? Or, How We Cannot Think about Reproduction Without Thinking about Asset Management Firms

13:15–14:00: Lunch Break

14:00–15:30pm: Panel 3: Ecology and Land
Jacob Seagrave (London School of Economics) The Return of the Peasant? Prospects for an
Agrarian Marxism
Fin Worrall (CRMEP) The Ethics of Ecosystem Management
Lucy Everitt (King's College London) Queering Social Reproduction and Water Access in
New York City: Towards a Radically Embodied Hydrocommons
15:45–17:15: Panel 4: Feminism and Corporeality
Elisa Mozzelin (Ca' Foscari University) The Enclosed Body: Notes on Women's Spatial
Situatedness
Frida Sandström (University of Copenhagen) "Let's Not Forget": Sexuality and Separatism
1970 and 2023
Gabriela Filipowicz (University of Warsaw) From Co-Knowing to Community: Gossip as a
Practice of Commoning and Care
17:30–18:30: Plenary 3
Alessandra Mezzadri (School of Oriental and Asian Studies, University of London) Cartographies of Social Reproduction and Reproductive Struggles for a Common History of Global Capitalism.

Image credit:
Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Will I Still Carry Water When I am Dead Woman? 2013
Single-channel digital video, still, installation shot

For further information about this event:

Contact: Peter Osborne
Email: p.osborne@kingston.ac.uk