Alessandra Mezzadri | SOAS University of London (original) (raw)
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Papers by Alessandra Mezzadri
Dialogues in Human Geography
This conversation brings together feminist scholars from various backgrounds and epistemological ... more This conversation brings together feminist scholars from various backgrounds and epistemological traditions around a central topic in feminist debates that is today more relevant than ever, social reproduction. It begins by examining social reproduction as a concept and its entanglements with the dynamics of global capitalism from human geography and feminist international political economy perspectives. We ask, what does the lens of social reproduction bring to light? We discuss how social reproduction is a fundamentally political concept that bridges classic labour struggles with demands around housing, service provision and the reproduction of life in general. As a concept, it makes visible the systems of life that support the labour process, both daily and intergenerationally, in sites of production along global supply chains, from the garment industry, to mining and agriculture. Nevertheless, there is a need to consider how gendered dichotomies of productive and reproductive th...
Anthem Press, Feb 5, 2021
Macmillan Education, Apr 14, 2020
In April this year, the UK multi-channel retail brand Missguided advertised the sale of a £1 biki... more In April this year, the UK multi-channel retail brand Missguided advertised the sale of a £1 bikini. It was advertised as a one-off special deal to celebrate ten years of empowering women to look and feel good “without breaking the bank”. The publicity stunt backfired spectacularly. While many customers bought the product – the retailer sold 1,000 pieces a day – at the same time, many journalists, and other influencers, including a rising group of ethical fashionistas, condemned the saleas morally reprehensible, socially unacceptable and environmentally destructive. All true, clearly
Handbook on Social Structure of Accumulation Theory, 2021
Journal of South Asian Development, Sep 25, 2022
Unmaking the Global Sweatshop
Organization
This article portrays the COVID-19 pandemic as a planetary crisis of capitalist life and analyses... more This article portrays the COVID-19 pandemic as a planetary crisis of capitalist life and analyses it through the feminist political economy lens of social reproduction. Celebrating the plurality and distinctiveness of social reproduction theorisations, the article deploys three approaches to map the contours of the present conjuncture; namely Social Reproduction Theory, Early Social Reproduction Analyses and Raced Social Reproduction approaches. These provide key complementary insights over the planetary crisis and reorganisation of life, work and death triggered by the pandemic. Through the compounded insights of social reproduction theorisations, the article argues that the pandemic does not represent a crisis of neoliberalism. Rather, it represents its outcome, and deepening of its logics, an argument which is substantiated by exploring the impact of COVID-19 on the reproductive architecture of neoliberal capitalism; on the world of work; and on racialised processes manufacturing...
A Research Agenda for Critical Political Economy, 2020
This chapter argues that field-based research can provide key novel insights into the limitations... more This chapter argues that field-based research can provide key novel insights into the limitations of mainstream economic theories. The analysis provides a critique of comparative advantage and neoclassical trade models based on insights coming from years of field-based research on garment sweatshops in India. Field-based evidence deconstructs the assumptions and conclusions of classical and neoclassical theories of comparative advantage by touching upon issues of wage formation, productivity and convergence, and by illustrating the relevance of complex processes of social differentiation at work across labour markets embedded in multiple power relations. The chapter concludes that ‘sweatshop economics’ can powerfully contribute to debates on trade and inequality, particularly by re-centring the analysis of the implications of processes of exchange around labour. Notably, in building its case, the narrative draws from insights from economics, sociology, human geography and development studies and also shows how the study of production, exchange and inequality must transcend rigid divisions between the global, the national and the local.
Anthem Press, Feb 5, 2021
Dialogues in Human Geography
This conversation brings together feminist scholars from various backgrounds and epistemological ... more This conversation brings together feminist scholars from various backgrounds and epistemological traditions around a central topic in feminist debates that is today more relevant than ever, social reproduction. It begins by examining social reproduction as a concept and its entanglements with the dynamics of global capitalism from human geography and feminist international political economy perspectives. We ask, what does the lens of social reproduction bring to light? We discuss how social reproduction is a fundamentally political concept that bridges classic labour struggles with demands around housing, service provision and the reproduction of life in general. As a concept, it makes visible the systems of life that support the labour process, both daily and intergenerationally, in sites of production along global supply chains, from the garment industry, to mining and agriculture. Nevertheless, there is a need to consider how gendered dichotomies of productive and reproductive th...
Anthem Press, Feb 5, 2021
Macmillan Education, Apr 14, 2020
In April this year, the UK multi-channel retail brand Missguided advertised the sale of a £1 biki... more In April this year, the UK multi-channel retail brand Missguided advertised the sale of a £1 bikini. It was advertised as a one-off special deal to celebrate ten years of empowering women to look and feel good “without breaking the bank”. The publicity stunt backfired spectacularly. While many customers bought the product – the retailer sold 1,000 pieces a day – at the same time, many journalists, and other influencers, including a rising group of ethical fashionistas, condemned the saleas morally reprehensible, socially unacceptable and environmentally destructive. All true, clearly
Handbook on Social Structure of Accumulation Theory, 2021
Journal of South Asian Development, Sep 25, 2022
Unmaking the Global Sweatshop
Organization
This article portrays the COVID-19 pandemic as a planetary crisis of capitalist life and analyses... more This article portrays the COVID-19 pandemic as a planetary crisis of capitalist life and analyses it through the feminist political economy lens of social reproduction. Celebrating the plurality and distinctiveness of social reproduction theorisations, the article deploys three approaches to map the contours of the present conjuncture; namely Social Reproduction Theory, Early Social Reproduction Analyses and Raced Social Reproduction approaches. These provide key complementary insights over the planetary crisis and reorganisation of life, work and death triggered by the pandemic. Through the compounded insights of social reproduction theorisations, the article argues that the pandemic does not represent a crisis of neoliberalism. Rather, it represents its outcome, and deepening of its logics, an argument which is substantiated by exploring the impact of COVID-19 on the reproductive architecture of neoliberal capitalism; on the world of work; and on racialised processes manufacturing...
A Research Agenda for Critical Political Economy, 2020
This chapter argues that field-based research can provide key novel insights into the limitations... more This chapter argues that field-based research can provide key novel insights into the limitations of mainstream economic theories. The analysis provides a critique of comparative advantage and neoclassical trade models based on insights coming from years of field-based research on garment sweatshops in India. Field-based evidence deconstructs the assumptions and conclusions of classical and neoclassical theories of comparative advantage by touching upon issues of wage formation, productivity and convergence, and by illustrating the relevance of complex processes of social differentiation at work across labour markets embedded in multiple power relations. The chapter concludes that ‘sweatshop economics’ can powerfully contribute to debates on trade and inequality, particularly by re-centring the analysis of the implications of processes of exchange around labour. Notably, in building its case, the narrative draws from insights from economics, sociology, human geography and development studies and also shows how the study of production, exchange and inequality must transcend rigid divisions between the global, the national and the local.
Anthem Press, Feb 5, 2021
This book explores the processes producing and reproducing the garment sweatshop in India. Drawin... more This book explores the processes producing and reproducing the garment sweatshop in India. Drawing from Marxian and feminist insights, the book theorizes the sweatshop as a complex 'regime' of exploitation and oppression, jointly crafted by global, regional and local actors, and working across productive and reproductive realms. The analysis illustrates the links between the physical and social materiality of production, unveiling the distinct circuits of exploitation corresponding to different clothing items. As these circuits change across India, on the basis of regional patterns of product specialisation, so does the logic of the sweatshop, its composition, the social profile of the labouring poor engaged in garment work, and their working conditions. Through the eyes of sourcing actors, the whole country can be re-imagined as a giant department store, with different garment collections exhibited at different floors, and created through the sweat of different sets of labourers. Highlighting the great social differentiation of the garment workforce in factories, workshops and homes scattered across the Indian Subcontinent, the narrative also unveils the multiple patterns of unfreedom this workforce is subject to. These exceed narrow definitions of unfreedom mainly based on forced labour, which are becoming dominant in the debate on global labour standards and 'modern slavery'. By discussing interplays between productive and reproductive realms and processes of commodification and exploitation, on the contrary, the analysis highlights how social difference and unfreedom pre-exist the sweatshop and at the same time are also reproduced by it. It also highlights the role different actors – like global buyers, regional suppliers and retailers, and labour contractors – play in these processes. Indeed, the book depicts the sweatshop as a complex joint enterprise against the labouring poor, shaped and steered by multiple lords, and where production and circulation – of garments, processes and people – intertwine in manifold ways. It also shows how the labouring body is systematically and inexorably depleted and consumed by garment work, until it is finally ejected from the sweatshop. Finally, the book highlights how the study of India's sweatshop regime informs contemporary debates on industrial modernity, comparative advantage and cheap labour, modern slavery, and ethical consumerism. Alessandra Mezzadri teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research interests focus on globalisation and processes of labour informalisation; materialist approaches to global commodity chain analysis and global industrial systems, labour standards and CSR; gender and feminist theory; and the political economy of India. She has investigated in depth the Indian garment industry over a span of ten years, and illustrated the different ways in which distinct regional sweatshops are formed and reproduced across the subcontinent.
See the book launch at SOAS here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPPyhchfRdQ
themed semster: Global Cotton poster