Social reproduction theory revisited

Abstract

Social reproduction theory names at least two distinct traditions, one of which has a long history in educational research. Social reproduction theory in education emerged out of a concern with education’s relationship to capitalist inequalities. By contrast, social reproduction feminism developed out of feminist interventions regarding the role of women’s unpaid care-work in the reproduction of capitalism. In this paper, we suggest that the renewed energy surrounding social reproduction feminism provides an opportunity to revisit social reproduction theorizing in education. We review the fields’ histories and ready the ground for an integrated framework. At the heart of this integration is a feminist analysis of reproductive labor in its contradictory relationship to capitalism. Expanding the analysis from the reproduction of capitalist relations to the reproduction of life under capitalism, this approach avoids the pitfalls of determinism and attends to students’ participation and teachers’ work in the contested labor of social reproduction.

Keywords:

• social reproduction
• feminist theory
• education
• capitalism
• reproductive labor

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Sue Ferguson and Michael Apple for their thoughtful feedback on early versions of this paper. We also thank the BJSE reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Because both of these traditions use the term Social Reproduction Theory, in this paper we use the terms “Social Reproduction Feminism” (SRF) and “Social Reproduction in Education” (SRE) to distinguish between them.

2 The socialist feminist Michele Barrett took Balibar to task here for using biological reproduction, particularly gestation, as an unexplored metaphor for the social reproduction of relations (cf. Barrett (1980). Women’s Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter, Verso, 23).

3 Though we know from McGrew (2011) that this story is much more complicated than it appears.

4 We should note that there are new readings of Althusser (Backer 2017; Lewis 2017) and what Morrow recently called a “recent revival of Pierre Bourdieu’s non-Marxist reflexive sociology and theory of cultural and educational reproduction” (2014, 706).