ISRF Political Economy Fellow 2023-24
ISRF Political Economy Fellow 2023-24
Elena Baglioni is Reader Lecturer in Global Supply Chain Management and Sustainability at School of Business and Management Queen Mary University of London. She holds a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Bologna, a MSc in Development Studies from SOAS, and a Degree in Political Sciences from the University of Bologna. Elena researches the political economy and ecology of global value chains and relations of production, exchange and reproduction that structure them. She has been studying for years historical processes of development in low income countries with particular reference to sub-Saharan Africa and has conducted extensive research in Senegal within poverty reduction, export agriculture and its evolving labour regimes. She is the director of the research Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) at Queen Mary University of London and has recently edited a book on Labour Regimes and Global Production (Agenda Publishing).
Women in the global South experience multiple forms of oppression, irregular, low-paid work at the bottom of global value chains (WB 2020) and are among the most vulnerable to climate change (Nelleman et al. 2011). Their work of social reproduction – the regenerative work at home and in fields, including child and family care and gardening – makes them the quintessential ‘meta-industrial labour’, i.e. historically the cheapest form of energy supply after horsepower (Salleh 2009). At the same time, through their reproductive work women are perceived as the last bastions of fading biodiversity, a beacon of social and environmental sustainability (UNDP 2016; Barca 2020). This project argues that to better understand the contradictions and the tensions, limits and potentials of women’s work for the necessary ecological transition we must comprehend how the process of social reproduction and, in particular, the reproduction of labour power and of the environment changes with the development of capitalism (Federici 2004). Thus, this project will undertake an ‘archaeology of reproductive subsumption’, i.e. a theoretical and historical investigation of how reproductive work became ‘women work’ from the late-17th, through the 18th and 19th centuries in Senegal, the region which pioneered the insertion of sub-Saharan Africa within global markets via the development of the Atlantic slave-trade and incipient global commodity chains. To do this, the project will explore the household as a territory of class relations and investigate how market pressures transformed households’ internal structures leading to the marginalisation and gendering of reproductive activities, i.e. how by this process women were reconstructed as unpaid and invisible members of the global working class. By developing a novel theory of reproductive subsumption and tracing its particular archaeology in the Senegambia region, the research offers new grounds to explore how women are included in capitalism elsewhere in the global South.
If you would like to contact any of our Fellows to discuss their ISRF-funded work, please contact Dr Lars Cornelissen (Academic Editor) in the first instance, at [email protected].