Communities Under Capitalism: Meeting our Needs
- All levels
- 18 and older
- $150
- Earn 1,500 reward points
- Online Class, New York, NY
- 7 hours & 30 minutes over 6 sessions
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Full Course Name: Communities Under Capitalism: Meeting our Needs During Crisis
When government fails to help us through times of crisis, how can we meet each other's daily needs and make sure our communities are taken care of? In the face of capitalism that often feels ruthless we must look to other forms of community care. These are the activities of Social Reproduction, i.e the everyday tasks involved in staying alive and helping others stay alive. These tasks have traditionally been performed by women for low or no wages and can be very particular, like food access, or very broad, like cultural (re)production.
Regardless of form, the responsibilities of social reproduction vary between individuals, families, the state, and the private sector. A crisis of social reproduction occurs when one or more of those actors are unable to reproduce (or provide the conditions for reproduction). For example, the state retracting from its social-welfare role leads to a crisis of social reproduction for working parents who may rely on the state for childcare assistance. For geographers, social reproduction is always spatial; it impacts and is impacted by a changing landscape. What do crises of social reproduction mean for our lives in cities? How have people transformed urban landscapes to combat crisis?
This OlioCourse, will go in-depth on three different ‘crises’ of Social Reproduction: housework, food, and housing. These sectors are in an acute crisis today, but have been historically neglected forms of reproduction since the transition to capitalism. We’ll also explore how people have organized out of crisis, collectivized their efforts, and pushed back against scarcity. The purpose of these sessions is to recognize crisis when it occurs, and work towards solutions that don’t further legitimate state failure.
Weeks I & II - Housework
Housework is the ground zero for feminist social reproduction literature. It’s the place where much of our reproductive energy (eating, resting, socializing, raising children) occurs yet is uncompensated and unaccounted for. In this session we’ll review both contemporary and historical examples of housework-in-crisis, learn from examples of resistance, and co-create some of our own.
Weeks III & IV - Food
How do we know when our food system is in crisis? This section will cover food-as-social-reproduction, as well as food as the groundwork for collective action. So many popular responses to oppression are centered around food access. In this session we’ll discuss why that is, and how hard it can be to separate a collective, revolutionary food response from reformist, palliative measures. What can food in crisis and resistance tell us about how we value collective projects generally?
Weeks V & VI - Housing & Workshopping Solutions
We’ll end our time together circling back to the home, but more specifically, access to the places we reproduce. The privatization of housing inevitably creates a housing crisis, which becomes more apparent in eras of financial decline and organized abandonment by the state. This final session will look at the many ways housing is approached as a social reproduction concern, from aesthetics and planned communities to organized neglect. Like the other sessions, we’ll cover the myriad of ways people have collectivized housing in our own city and beyond. Finally, we’ll reflect on our time together by asking: how do we make these collective solutions actionable? We will go over some of the amazing efforts of mutual aid during the pandemic as a blueprint for ways we can help each other, right now.
OlioCourse Format
This OlioCourse will take place on Monday evenings from October 26th until November 30th. We will alternate each week between a recorded lecture from Lauren Hudson and a live Olio the professor with via zoom where we dissect, question and build upon the previous lecture.
You will have an entire week to digest the recorded content and come up with your thoughts and questions for the live session. The questions of the participants will structure the meetings, instead of being reduced to the common 10-15min Q&As at the end of a lecture.
What to expect from the course:
Participants will be able to engage on their own time with the pre-recorded lectures and curated materials (readings, podcast links, interviews, and film). These will be used as the fuel for the live Zoom discussions with the professor.
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