Social Reproduction and/as Infrastructure in Europe and Beyond: A Joint Jean Monnet Centre and Political Economy Centre Workshop, with Hallsworth Visting Professor Stefanie Wöhl
17 October, 2025, 11am-3pm, University of Manchester
The social sciences have seen an ‘infrastructural turn’ in re¬cent years, with Marxist and other critical scholars showing how states, corporations and other actors are shaping infrastruc-tures that are crucial to the accumulation of capital in ways that support their interests. They show how infrastructure develop¬ment can lead to displacement, dispossession, the exploitation of labour, the degradation of the environment, and the exacer¬bation of class-based, racialised, spatial and other inequalities. Social reproduction scholars have started to engage with the ‘infrastructural turn’, highlighting, for instance, the role that in¬frastructures play in supporting social reproduction (Ruddick et al., 2018; Gillespie and Hardy, 2021; Horton and Penny, 2023; McFadden, 2025a) and the embodied labour that shapes and is shaped by infrastructures (Strauss, 2019; Vindegg, 2022; Cowan, 2019). Some have gone as far as to say that social reproduction is itself a form of infrastructure, because this labour “does the work of maintaining and sustaining lifeworlds” and acts as an integral cog within the capitalist totality (Hall 2021: 89-90). However, there is still much to be done both in terms of analytically clarifying the relationship between infrastructure and social reproduction, and empirically detailing infrastructural configurations on the ground, both in Europe and beyond. Much of the existing scholarship in this area is also focused on the urban scale, while studies at the national, regional and global scales, and multi-scalar studies, are much less. So too are comparative studies. This workshop brings together Hallsworth Visiting Professor Stefanie Wöhl, scholars from the University of Manchester’s Jean Monnet Centre, Political Economy Centre, and others who have an interest in social reproduction and infrastructure to share our research, identify common themes, and raise questions about what social reproduction approaches can and should bring to the ‘infrastructural turn’. We aim to identify possible future research collaborations focused on this theme.
If you would like to join us, please submit a short abstract of max 150 words by October 1st to Adrienne.roberts@manchester.ac.uk and silke.trommer@manchester.ac.uk.
