Social Reproduction Working Group – Events and Announcements

16th IIPPE Annual Conference – Call for Papers, Social Reproduction Working Group

CfP Extension!
Please submit your paper or panel proposal by 8th March (15 February) 2026. Detailed instructions can be found below. Select the Social Reproduction Working Group when submitting your proposal.

The IIPPE Social Reproduction Working Group embraces the study of capitalism and society with a focus on life-making activities. These include daily and generational maintenance, ranging from domestic work to biological reproduction, care to welfare provisions, as well as the values and practices that shape how these activities are done – and by whom. While social reproduction is vital to the existence of humanity and the planet, its systemic relevance has been largely neglected in the mainstream study of economic realities.

We warmly welcome all research engaging with social reproduction in its diverse forms and contexts. Given this year’s conference theme, we are particularly interested in contributions that interrogate what it means to speak of capitalism moving beyond neoliberalism from a social reproduction perspective. What can we learn from the practices and labour of sustaining life and communities about crises and changes in capitalism? Are areas of social reproduction subsumed and further hollowed out? Do they offer spaces of refuge, contestation, and imagination? And what if both are true?

Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Theorisation of social reproduction approaches, especially around
  • The intersection between social and ecological reproduction
  • Meaning, form, and evolution of crises of social reproduction
  • Advancing thinking of social reproduction beyond neoliberalism
• Empirical analyses of social reproduction, especially in the contexts of
  • The changing world economy and core-periphery relations
  • The climate crisis and exacerbating inequalities
  • State, community and private forms of social reproduction, such as education, health, social benefits, and care labour (both paid and unpaid)
  • Migration and social reproductive value chains across the Global South and North
• Methodological advancements in social reproduction research
• Policy approaches, activism and social movements campaigning to address social reproduction beyond neoliberalism

The Social Reproduction Working Group is committed to the study of capitalism by treating social reproduction not only as a theoretical issue, but as a political framework for organising thought, action, and collective inquiry. We invite scholars from varying disciplines and methodological traditions to foster rigorous debate that advances social reproduction theory, methodology, and practice. We also strongly encourage submissions from practitioners and activists engaged with social reproduction related struggles to challenge and advance academic debates with on-the-ground experiences.

To submit a proposal, please use the “Submit proposal” button at https://iippe.org/2026-iippe-annual-conference-2/, and carefully follow the instructions. You will need to select ‘Social Reproduction’ from the list to submit a proposal to our sessions. As usual, submissions may be made to this working group as (a) proposals for individual papers (which IIPPE will group into panels), b) proposals for panels, or (c) proposals for streams of panels. To propose a panel or stream of panels to this working group every individual paper must be submitted to the paper proposal system, and an email should be sent to one of our three working group coordinators indicating the panel(s) you want to propose, and what the papers will be in it (which papers again are all submitted to the proposal submission system as individual paper proposals). Please submit your proposal by March 8th (February 15th), 2026.

For further inquiries, the working group coordinators can be contacted: Serap Saritas (serapsaritas@gmail.com), Lena Gempke (695261@soas.ac.uk) and Sara Stevano (ss129@soas.ac.uk).