Living & labouring reproductive (in)justice: lifestories, histories, & fictions of epistemic disobedience
Lead Research Organisation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
Department Name: Sociology
Abstract
The thesis engages Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynters 'Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument'. Using Wynter's treatise, social reproduction, reproductive justice, black feminist and de/anticolonial scholarship, I consider the ways in which coloniality and Man's overrepresentation necessitates hierarchies of humanness, producing ongoing reproductive injustice.
Engaging black Caribbean heritage women in Britain as example, the thesis engages with ten women's life stories to view the ways in which Wynter's treatise manifests through dynamics of care and justice within everyday life in Britain.
In the colonial histories that connect Britain and the Caribbean, Caribbean women's provision of care has been central, from plantation, to Windrush, to a disproportionate presence in undervalued care-centred professions in the present. This caring work takes place across private and professional life, through which the thesis explores:
How histories and knowledges of reproductive injustice arising from European colonialism in the Caribbean affect the social reproduction of caring relations in Britain
How epistemic difference is navigated across everyday personal and professional lives, what influences choices to care given that caring work is undervalued in Britain?
What are the epistemic roots of their choices and their hopes for future generations?
What frictions are produced and what might we unsettle, when personal and intimate knowledge comes into tension with structural and institutional norms and values?
Unstructured interviews were used to collect oral histories from women aged between thirty and seventy years old experienced in care-centred occupations.
Through these women's lives the thesis explores the ways in which the global themes of Sylvia Wynter's treatise manifest and the ways in which we might unsettle the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom in everyday life
Engaging black Caribbean heritage women in Britain as example, the thesis engages with ten women's life stories to view the ways in which Wynter's treatise manifests through dynamics of care and justice within everyday life in Britain.
In the colonial histories that connect Britain and the Caribbean, Caribbean women's provision of care has been central, from plantation, to Windrush, to a disproportionate presence in undervalued care-centred professions in the present. This caring work takes place across private and professional life, through which the thesis explores:
How histories and knowledges of reproductive injustice arising from European colonialism in the Caribbean affect the social reproduction of caring relations in Britain
How epistemic difference is navigated across everyday personal and professional lives, what influences choices to care given that caring work is undervalued in Britain?
What are the epistemic roots of their choices and their hopes for future generations?
What frictions are produced and what might we unsettle, when personal and intimate knowledge comes into tension with structural and institutional norms and values?
Unstructured interviews were used to collect oral histories from women aged between thirty and seventy years old experienced in care-centred occupations.
Through these women's lives the thesis explores the ways in which the global themes of Sylvia Wynter's treatise manifest and the ways in which we might unsettle the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom in everyday life
People |
ORCID iD |
| Babette May (Student) |
Studentship Projects
| Project Reference | Relationship | Related To | Start | End | Student Name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES/P000622/1 | 30/09/2017 | 29/09/2028 | |||
| 2480099 | Studentship | ES/P000622/1 | 30/09/2020 | 08/06/2024 | Babette May |