Thinking Care and Social Reproduction from the Third World

In “Thinking Care and Social Reproduction from the Third World,” Lyn Ossome introduces Care under Social Reproduction, a collaborative project in which five feminist scholars contextualize and conceptualize the nature of social reproduction in the global south.

This series was produced by the Nawi Collective, a Care Economies in Context project partner.

Citation

Ossome, L. (2025). Thinking Care and Social Reproduction from the Third World. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F8aqZgGV5LEdgJpxVozzBDWSMAL6YrIs/view

Abstract

In this collaborative project with Nawi, we set out to examine the contours of these debates from the vantage point of five feminist scholars working on questions of social reproduction and care in Africa and Latin America.
The writers were drawn from various academic, research institutions and activist spaces, and endeavored to develop feminist political economy theorizations of care and social reproduction within five identified subthemes including: energy, agrarian issues, social grants, petty commodity production, and approaches to community care. The project involved the development of a series of papers providing global south feminist analyses on care and social reproduction, which were peer reviewed. Early in the project, we also convened a discussion and opened up a space of internal review among the writers, with the aim of strengthening our shared methodological frames and providing feedback on the papers. In what follows, the contributions of each of the papers to the
debates is thematically outlined in more detail.