April 2, 16:00 – 17:00 (Helsinki time / EET)
Zhivka Valiavicharska (Pratt Institute, New York)
Social Reproduction and Migration: Recentering the Margins, Expanding the Horizons
In this talk I discuss questions emerging at the intersection of social reproduction, migration, and diasporic life, which to some extent move away from the literature on gender and immigration that sees migrants exclusively as a labor force. My discussion, emerging from the context of the challenges and struggles of migrant people in the United States, is driven by a set of questions beyond structural analyses of labor, welfare, and the law: What does the work of reproduction mean for precariously present people living in a state of prolonged or permanent suspension and under the impending possibility of expulsion? What are the meanings of “family,” “home,” and the labor that sustains community bonds when it is work that contends with the traumatic effects of uprooting, disruption, and loss? What does it take to sustain relationships within family, community, and lovers in legal conditions designed to restrict, sever, and punish even the most basic social and intimate bonds? How do we think of this work politically when it pushes against forces of cultural assimilation and historical erasure, of everyday hostility and xenophobia? By centering on the experiences of migrant people, the talk aims to broaden existing narratives of social reproduction. It highlights the tremendous political importance of reproductive, emotional, and care practices that persist on the margins of the system and explores their potentials for expanding our feminist histories, struggles, and social horizons.
Zhivka Valiavicharska is a political theorist and art historian working on the social, cultural, and art histories of twentieth-century Bulgaria and Eastern Europe in their global and diasporic dimensions. She is Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, New York, and the author of Restless History: Political Imaginaries and their Discontents in Post-Stalinist Bulgaria (McGill University Press, 2021).
Registration link: https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/128992/lomake.html