Seminar - This is Essential Work: Art, Social Theory and Activism

Methods that employ creative practices as a primary mode of inquiry in the social sciences, humanities, and philosophy have been gaining in popularity. These methods go beyond traditional text-based research to explore complex, embodied, and emotional aspects of human experience and social phenomena.  As well as enriching social enquiry, arts-based methods can be a catalyst for social and political change, which involves nurturing imagination, empowering marginalized voices, and fostering collective action.

In this seminar artists from the OU Open Societal Challenges funded online exhibition, this is essential work will be in conversation with theorist  Rebecca Carson. Rebecca will sketch out her conception of Social Reproduction Theory by explaining key concepts developed in her book - Immanent Externalities. These concepts collectively form a method for understanding the relationship between capital’s social form and the reproduction of human life and nature, where socially reproductive labour and care move between conditions of paid and unpaid labour. Rebecca's orientation to social reproduction is rooted in the critique of the relation between capital’s abstract accumulation of profit premised on the exploitation of labour power (a class relation), and the concrete conditions of life and nature. This, it is argued, is helpful to understand both how capitalist social form produces and reproduces the conditions of possibility for the reproduction of life (daily and generational renewal), and to locate where the reproduction of life– which is immanently external to capital’s form – imposes limits on capital’s reproduction. It is in the space of these limits, as life making qua life making is a non-capitalist endeavour, where socially reproductive labour can be harnessed for anti-capitalist aims.

Through drawing out theoretical considerations within Marxist feminist theory of social reproduction, where reproduction is both internal and external to capitalism, this contribution aims to animate the political arena in which the artworks included in this exhibition are functioning. The works included in the this is essential work exhibition not only make visible the unpaid racialised and gendered toil extracted by capital through necessary life making work (or care), but also, crucially, offer clues to how these sites might be mobilised for anti-capitalist struggle.  

Register

Rebecca Carson is a theorist working in Marxism and philosophy. She is a Tutor and Researcher at the Royal College of Art and the author of Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of Life in Capital, Haymarket Books, 2024. She has written widely on capitalism and reproduction, contributing to the growing field of social reproduction theory (SRT).  

This Is Essential Work is an online open-access feminist exhibition co-curated by visual artist Yuko Edwards and academics Michal Nahman (Anthropologist, UWE) and Susan Newman (Political Economist, OU) who sought explore a visual dialogue between artists worldwide and their academic research into the commodification of breastmilk and social reproduction under capitalism more generally. 

Artists from the this is essential work online exhibition