Cindi Katz: Social Reproduction and the Topographies of Hope

Abstract: Social reproduction encompasses the material social practices and relations that sustain production and social life in all their variations. It is the stuff of everyday life and the structuring forces that constitute any social formation. Its temporality is at once daily, generational, and longue durée and its spatiality is similarly varied. With no single scale, social reproduction is bound dialectically with production everywhere. Not reducible to consumption, ideology, or the making of a differentiated labor force, social reproduction embraces all of these and more in a fluid congeries of practices with three aspects—political economic, cultural, and environmental—accomplished by social actors associated with the state, the workplace, the household, and civil society. Inhering in the activities that remake the conditions of capitalism are the possibilities of making them otherwise, altering social relations and the horizons of social and political economic life. It happens all the time, but enacting their transformational possibilities calls for consciously appropriating these cultural forms and practices, engaging what I have come to think of as topographies of hope.

Cindi Katz is Professor of Geography, Women’s and Gender Studies, and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research concerns social reproduction, the production of nature, the workings of the security state in everyday environments, the privatization of the public environment, the cultural politics of childhood, and the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination. She has published widely on these themes as well as on social theory and the politics of knowledge. She is the author of Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives (2004) which won the American Association of Geographers Meridian Book Award for the Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography. She is the editor (with Janice Monk) of Full Circles: Geographies of Gender over the Life Course (1993), Life’s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction (with Sallie Marston and Katharyne Mitchell) (2004), and The People, Place, and Space Reader (with Jen Jack Gieseking, William Mangold, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert) (2014). The 2024 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Honor and the 2021 recipient of Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the AAG, Katz held a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2003-4), and the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professorship in Gender Studies at Cambridge University (2011-12). She is working on two book projects: Childhood as Spectacle and a collection of her writings on social reproduction tentatively titled Vagabond Capitalism: Social Reproduction in Crisis.