In Reproductive Labor and Innovation, Jennifer Denbow examines how the push toward technoscientific innovation in contemporary American life often comes at the expense of the care work and reproductive labor that is necessary for society to function. Noting that the gutting of social welfare programs has shifted the burden of solving problems to individuals, Denbow argues that the aggrandizement of innovation and the degradation of reproductive labor are intertwined facets of neoliberalism. She shows that the construction of innovation as a panacea to social ills justifies the accumulation of wealth for corporate innovators and the impoverishment of those feminized and racialized people who do the bulk of reproductive labor. Moreover, even innovative technology aimed at reproduction—such as digital care work platforms and noninvasive prenatal testing—obscure structural injustices and further devalue reproductive labor. By drawing connections between innovation discourse, the rise of neoliberalism, financialized capitalism, and the social and political degradation of reproductive labor, Denbow illustrates what needs to be done to destabilize the overvaluation of innovation and to offer collective support for reproduction.

This innovative book analyses the role gender plays in the relationship between globalisation, migration and reproductive labour. Exploring the gendered experiences of migrant men and the social construction of racialised masculinities in the context of the 'international division of reproductive labour' (IDRL), it examines how new patterns of consumption and provision of paid domestic/care work lead to forms of inequality across racial, ethnic, gender and class lines. Based on an ethnographic analysis of the working and family lives of migrant men within the IDRL, it focuses on the practices and strategies of migrant men employed as domestic/care workers in Italy. The authors highlight how migrant men's experiences of reproductive labour and family are shaped by global forces and national public policies, and how they negotiate the changes and potential conflicts that their 'feminised' jobs entail. They draw on the voices of men and women of different nationalities to show how masculinities are constructed within the home through migrant men's interactions with male and female employers, women relations and their wider ethnic network. Bridging the divide between scholarship on international migration, care work and masculinity studies, this book will interest sociologists, anthropologists, economists, political scientists and social policy experts.

This issue addresses how laborers within intimate industries--those who do interpersonal work that tends to the sexual, bodily, health, hygiene, or care needs of individuals--are shaping Asia's growing role in the global economy. The contributors investigate how intimate industries support relational connections for consumers while disrupting laborers' relationships, as in the case of migrants who perform intimate labor away from their families and communities of origin. The articles collected here include examinations of such trade-offs and their complex meanings and implications for the workers. The authors explore these social processes through the lens of industries that organize, enable, or delimit the trade in domestic labor, marriage migration, companionship and romance, sex work, pornographic performance, surrogate mothering and ova donation, and cosmetics sales. This issue puts people, as embodied subjects, back into narratives of economic change and offers a perspective on globalization from below. Contributors: Danièle Bélanger, Hae Yeon Choo, Nicole Constable, Daisy Deomampo, Akhil Gupta, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, Pei-Chia Lan, Purnima Mankekar, Eileen Otis, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Rhacel Parreñas, Sharmila Rudrappa, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Rachel Silvey, Hung Cam Thai, Leslie Wang

DIVA cultural studies account of how the "bio-value" of blood, stem cells, organs, and cell lines moves back and forth between 'gift' and 'commodity'./div

The Reproductive Bargain reveals the institutional sources of labor insecurities behind Japan’s postwar employment system. This economic juggernaut’s decline cannot be understood without reference to the reproductive bargain. The historical terms of the reproductive bargain rests on the establishment of company citizenship in support of a standard employment relationship, privileging the male breadwinner in calculations for benefits in exchange for the salarymen working long hours in relatively secure jobs at the enterprise and relying on women’s unpaid reproductive labor in the family and increasingly on women’s waged work in nonstandard jobs. Such institutionalized relationships, formerly the engines of growth and stability, drag economic expansion and employment security. Gendering institutional analysis is a key to deciphering the enigma of Japanese capitalism.

How can we build a future of work that meets pressing challenges and delivers for workers? Contemporary societies are beset by interrelated ecological, political, and economic crises, from climate change to democratic erosion and economic instability. Uncertainty abounds about the sustainability of democratic capitalism. Yet mainstream debates on the evolution of work tend to remain narrowly circumscribed, exhibiting both technological and market determinism. This volume presents a labor studies perspective on the future of work, arguing that revaluing work--the efforts and contributions of workers--is crucial to realizing the promises of democracy and improving sustainability. It emphasizes that collective political action, and the collective agency of workers in particular, is central to driving this agenda forward. Moreover, it maintains that reproductive work--labor efforts from care to education that sustain the reproduction of society--can function as a crucible of innovation for the valuation and governance of work more broadly. Contributors: Robert Bruno, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; J. Mijin Cha, Occidental College; Dorothy Sue Cobble, Rutgers University; Sheri Davis-Faulkner, Rutgers University; Victor G. Devinatz, Illinois State University; Alysa Hannon, Rutgers University; William A. Herbert, Hunter College; David C. Jacobs, American University; John McCarthy, Cornell University; Joseph A. McMartin, Georgetown University; Heather A. McKay, Rutgers University; Michael Merrill, Hudson County Central Labor Council; Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, Rutgers University; Saul A. Rubinstein, Rutgers University; Erica Smiley, Jobs With Justice; Marilyn Sneiderman, Rutgers University; Joseph van der Naald, City University of New York; Michell Van Noy, Rutgers University; Naomi R Williams, Rutgers University; Joel S. Yudken, High Road Strategies LLC; Elaine Zundl, Harvard Kennedy School

A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism. Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In Data Feminism, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” Data Feminism offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But Data Feminism is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn't, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed.

In more than a metaphorical sense, the womb has proven to be an important site of political struggle in and about Africa. By examining the political significance—and complex ramifications—of reproductive controversies in twentieth-century Kenya, this book explores why and how control of female initiation, abortion, childbirth, and premarital pregnancy have been crucial to the exercise of colonial and postcolonial power. This innovative book enriches the study of gender, reproduction, sexuality, and African history by revealing how reproductive controversies challenged long-standing social hierarchies and contributed to the construction of new ones that continue to influence the fraught politics of abortion, birth control, female genital cutting, and HIV/AIDS in Africa.

The evaluation of reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health (RMNCH) by the Disease Control Priorities, Third Edition (DCP3) focuses on maternal conditions, childhood illness, and malnutrition. Specifically, the chapters address acute illness and undernutrition in children, principally under age 5. It also covers maternal mortality, morbidity, stillbirth, and influences to pregnancy and pre-pregnancy. Volume 3 focuses on developments since the publication of DCP2 and will also include the transition to older childhood, in particular, the overlap and commonality with the child development volume. The DCP3 evaluation of these conditions produced three key findings: 1. There is significant difficulty in measuring the burden of key conditions such as unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion, nonsexually transmitted infections, infertility, and violence against women. 2. Investments in the continuum of care can have significant returns for improved and equitable access, health, poverty, and health systems. 3. There is a large difference in how RMNCH conditions affect different income groups; investments in RMNCH can lessen the disparity in terms of both health and financial risk.

This book explains how the 20th century labor standard regime, forged by the International Labor Organization, cast the woman worker as a special type of worker, but a century later, previously excluded home-based workers placed caring labor at the center of debates over the future of work amid new precarity.