Workshop: Life-making, care and social reproduction in migration

Conveners: Daria Krivonos, University of Helsinki; Pauliina Lukinmaa, University of Eastern Finland

Feminist theory has been rethinking standard conceptualisations of the economy beyond categories of production. This work brings the invisibilised activities, relations and practices of social reproduction, including various forms of social support, care and solidarity to the centre of social scientific inquiry. Meanwhile, migration research extensively shows that the lack or absence of institutional provisioning and the rollback of welfare state affects migrants and negatively racialized groups, so that the survival and the remaking of life is increasingly downloaded onto self-reliance and reliance on migrant communities and their precarious labour. These societal developments bring attention to the day-to-day and intergenerational processes of remaking of life itself –what recent scholarship has called “life’s work” or “life- making” (Mitchell et al., 2004; Bhattacharya, 2017; Ferguson, 2019). This refers to the invisibilised everyday material practices through which people maintain, continue and repair their social lives. This workshop invites multilingual but preferably English language papers that explore the connections between migration, life-making and social reproduction: from the role of migrant workers in care and services, to the role of transnational households in the reproduction of life and social relations, to the spaces of life’s work (e.g., migrant dormitories) to emotional reproduction and volunteering in the contexts of displacement, and beyond. We particularly welcome papers that offer reflections on the role of race, gender, class, nationality, citizenship, and sexuality in the labour of remaking life in the context of migration. We invite scholars working in various disciplines to address the following topics but not limited to them: Displacements caused by mass disasters such as wars, earthquakes, pandemics Collaboration of different providers of life-making labour, such as states, NGOs, grassroots initiatives Routine tacit micro-practices of reproductive labour in different settings, such as private households, care centres/institutes, communities, neighbourhoods Translocal care and solidarities The workshop is organized by two research projects funded by Kone Foundation in 2023–2026 –group project “Life-breaking and Life-making: A research project on social reproduction and survival in times of collapse” (LIFEMAKE) and individual project of Pauliina Lukinmaa “Ylirajaisen solidaarisuuden muotoja kriisin aikana: pietarilaislähtöisten LHBTIQ+ aktivistien toiminta Baltiassa”.

Presentations held during the workshop: