Shirin M. Rai is Distinguished Research Professor, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. Rai’s research interests lie in feminist international political economy, performance and politics, and gender and political institutions. She has published widely in these areas, including Gender and the Political Economy of Development (Polity, 2004) Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament (with Carole Spary; OUP), 2019; Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance (2021; co-eds M Gluhovic, S Jestrovic and M Saward). Her latest book is Depletion: the human costs of caring (2024, OUP).
Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?
The most exciting, or I should say what I consider most important research/debates fall into two areas of work – the first is the continuing interest in and development of debates on the conceptualisation of social reproduction and its place in the global economy; the second is on climate change and its effects on everyday life globally. Here, we see renewed engagement with earlier debates such as the Wages for Housework, and recent work on the costs of social reproduction during times of crisis of life and livelihoods by Adrienne Roberts, Mezzadri et al., and in my own book Depletion. There is also important research on pluralising the concept of social reproduction itself through a focus on labour and care practices in the Global South, for example by Sirisha C. Naidu and Lyn Ossome. In the second, Stefania Barca’s work brings issues of anti-capitalist labour and class politics to challenge climate change to the fore, which is important, as is Sylvia Federici’s book Reenchanting the World. Capitalism, climate change and caring are issues that are preoccupying me right now, and I have much to learn in this area. Building on the work of Astrid Ulloa’s and others, I am trying to bring the work on social reproduction and climate change together in my understanding of capitalism.
How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?
My world view has changed over time for sure. From a straightforward Marxist approach to inequality and social life, I became aware of the importance of gendered relations in political life as I conducted my doctoral fieldwork in China. The persistent complaint (and yes, complaint is political, as Sara Ahmed has shown us) of young female university students that their male counterparts got the better jobs alerted me to how gender intersects with state policy to generate unequal effects for women. This emerging insight was supported by a community of wonderful feminist scholars at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of Warwick, which I joined in 1989 – Terry Lovell, Annie Phizacklea, Carol Smart, Carol Wolkowitz, Joanna Liddle and Ann Stewart, among others, inspired me to engage with feminist scholarship on theory, migration, law, and labour in an interdisciplinary way. This allowed me to delve into issues of labour and employment related to young Chinese women as the country began to liberalise its economy.
The Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International Studies Association was another source of support in engaging with international feminist debates and experiencing both solidarity and how differences among feminist scholars played out and were (sometimes) resolved. L.H.M. Ling and Geeta Chowdhry were particularly important to the development of my thinking on IR and race. Thinking through how histories of colonialism, racialisation and capitalism have left traces in our scholarship and influenced our analyses has been a long and continuing journey.
My book Gender and the Political Economy of Development was an analysis of global development and its gendered inequalities, and the struggles to challenge them. It built on the course I introduced at Warwick on Gender and Development – my students have always helped me clarify my ideas and articulations by asking straightforward, awkward and sophisticated questions. Gender and political economy teaching and researching has a vibrant history in the UK. In working on Depletion: The Human Cost of Caring, I benefitted from working with colleagues and friends such as Diane Elson, Ruth Pearson, Juanita Elias, Kanchana Ruwanpura, and Stefanie Woehl, among many others, including a wonderful group of feminists working at my current university, SOAS (including Alessandra Mezzadri, Dzodzi Tsikata, and Sara Stevano). I am now engaged in working with colleagues on Pluralising Social Reproduction Approaches through a network that I established in 2024, which is now a collective engaged in taking this work forward.
The final element of my evolving interest in political economy was surely my experience of becoming a mother – the complexity of how the personal and the political intertwine were no longer theoretical issues: from conditions of employment (maternity leave, distribution of labour at work) and at home, the relentlessness of caring regimes and the importance of gender equal distribution of this labour, the importance of making these visible became clear to me. This was the time I met my collaborator and dear friend Catherine Hoskyns, and an enriching collaboration began, focusing on some of these issues. So, friendships, comradeship, solidarity and collegiality have helped me shift my thinking and my work.
In your book, Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring, you define the cost of caring as part of what you call “social reproduction.” Which forms does this work take, and why is it so central to our societies?
Social reproduction has been described in many different ways – through care, caring, reproduction of labour and life itself. While care is an immediately understood term from our everyday interactions and empathies, social reproduction is a structural approach to understanding how life is reproduced and maintained within the capitalist system, where the drive for accumulation is placed at the heart of social life, which itself is embedded in long histories of gendered and racist expropriation. As I have outlined in Depletion, “Social reproduction gestures towards intimate relations in the home, includes paid and unpaid work to reproduce and maintain life (care scholarship tends not to focus on reproduction but on maintaining life), not just through ‘caring’ but also through reproduction of ideologies that legitimise existing social relations.” Understanding social reproduction in this way can help to reveal, as Tithi Bhattacharya argues, how capitalism reproduces itself through “human labor and not commodities… and restores to the economic process its messy, sensuous, gendered, raced and unruly component: living human beings.” Through its emphasis on issues of value, exploitation and property regimes under capitalism, social reproduction also connects the precarity of systems of reproduction of life with those of environmental and planetary sustenance essential for maintenance of life (see also Chapters 1 and 6). An important element of debates on social reproduction is the fact that while it is valorised, it is not valued, as Emma Dowling has pointed out. Under conditions of exploitation and capitalist crises, the subsidy provided by social reproduction is increasingly relied upon to fill the gaps in the state provision of welfare in times of crises. However, I also feel that social reproduction cannot be experientially and conceptually detached from its location – it takes form within the global capitalist system, in different historical, geopolitical landscapes, and is experienced within radically different regimes of exploitation, which means that the struggles to reverse the costs of social reproduction are also entangled in differences of/in location.
How would you explain the concept of “depletion”? What are the risks of taking care-work for granted, and what consequences does depletion have for societies?
In simple terms, depletion is the condition when, for those who do social reproductive care work, the outflow of human resources – sleep, exhaustion, long working days, anxiety and foregoing opportunities – exceeds the inflow of resources – good food, shelter, adequate rest. This is not a simple calculus of harm, though it points towards thresholds and tipping points. Of course, depletion affects people differently depending on their class position, gender and race and other locational issues. Depletion is experienced at different levels too – at the individual, the household, and the level of the community, through the everyday systems of exploitation, through anxiety about anticipatory harm, through caring without the support of systems, people and discourse. So, my argument is that reproduction of life doesn’t just happen – it is laboured over, in different contexts and with differential resources, unequally. In all countries, in all classes, races, religions and cultures, women perform these labours more than men and are depleted in doing this work. This depletion endangers the society, the economy, and indeed the planet, even as it is drawn upon as a ‘free good’ available to plug deficits in our collective everyday regimes. We need new ways of thinking about social reproduction and caring if we are to address the urgent and increasing needs of care. So, depletion can only be understood in relational terms – mitigation of depletion of one kind (for example, through paid labour), can increase the depletion of another; mitigation of depletion of global north households can lead to care gaps in households of the global south. Reversing depletion is therefore a political project, not an individual one.
In your view, what would a fairer system of care look like? What practical steps can States or communities take to reduce these human costs?
If we take the structuralist approach, then transforming capitalist social relations has to be central to reducing depletion. However, we also know that a socialist, redistributive revolution is not round the corner. So, in the book, I address three different aspects of change: mitigation (individual strategies to reduce depletion); replenishment (mobilising state and non-state actors to support social reproductive labour) and transformation (changing capitalist social relations, challenging the distinction between paid and unpaid re/productive work – transforming the way we understand work itself). As I noted already, depletion is a relational concept, and attempts to reverse it take different forms. So, practical steps can include the state regulation of wages and working conditions (which has been a long struggle for domestic workers and finally resulted in the ILO’s Domestic Workers’ Convention 189 in 2011), and state support of child and care of older people, the struggle for which continues in all welfare states today, and the lack of which is covered by intergenerational familial labour. Austerity policies erode these social infrastructures of caring, and increase depletion. States can also be pushed to better take account of the importance of the migrant labour coming into the ‘host’ countries, and communities can mobilise to counter the growing racism and anti-migrant politics; we need a politics not of state sponsored hostile environments, but one of inclusion and support. Finally, socialising production and reproduction also holds the promise of not treating caring as an individual responsibility; rather, the idea of a good life for all needs to be at the heart of the project of reversing depletion.
In Gender and the Political Economy of Development, you critique how development processes rely on gendered inequalities. In Depletion, you focus on the hidden costs of care work. How do these two arguments interact? Do they reflect a broader thread in your thinking about gender and political economy?
The clearest way of understanding these entanglements of development processes, gendered inequalities, and hidden costs of work, is through the example of global care chains. Colonial and neocolonial developmental models of capitalism on the one hand, and the long histories of empire and its exploitative regime on the other, have created an unequal and precarious world. For the poorest, the labour of caring becomes one avenue of coping with the everyday crises of social reproduction; for the rich, buying the labour of caring at the cheapest prices means that the labour of migrant workers helps mitigate their depletion through social reproduction. In a racialised, anti-migrant political landscape, the exploitation of labour goes hand in hand with the threat of violence of both the state institutions and precarious employment. The work of this aspect of social reproduction has been well documented by feminist scholars such as Parvati Raghuram and Eleonore Kofman. Of course, through this one example, we also see how the politics of racism is mobilised to drive down the price of labour – the disposable bodies of migrant workers, the often less-than-minimum wage, everyday racialised and gendered violence, all of which I have studied, together with my colleagues Juanita Elias, Jayanthi Lingham and Shahnaz Akhter, and outlined in a study of care, carers and caring during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In Performing Representation, you explore how women MPs engage with and are shaped by a gendered political institution. Given the barriers women face, how can their representation help create more inclusive institutions? How does this connect to the wider gendered inequalities you examine in your work on care and social reproduction?
I have always been interested in understanding the political economy of inequality and the institutions that support this or can help reduce it. The state, in the Marxist tradition, is deeply entangled with capital and promotes its growth and stability through law, boundary making and policing. So, institutional politics has always been part of my research, as has been the political economy, especially of the global south. One of the justificatory explanations, which some feminists have sought to challenge, is that higher representation of women in political institutions will improve policies and laws towards gender equality. My approach, together with other feminist scholars, is that gender equal representation is about justice, not policy delivery, though that does, of course, matter. Structural barriers to women’s accessing of the public sphere and to seeking political representation, result in undermining the democratic political systems that make what Michael Saward has called ‘representative claims.’ Working on parliaments as national law making bodies, I became interested in how dominant institutional cultures are reproduced through ceremony and ritual, which often are performed to exclude the full participation of women representatives – sometimes formally, but mostly informally through everyday practices. This in turn led to an interest in politics and performance – to analyse how these exclusions are performed through embodied acts and scripts (sexist language in parliament for example), temporal rhythms (long and late seating of parliament that does not take into account care responsibilities), and the social hierarchies of class and race that are reproduced and enacted through performances of the everyday. This has been an important seam of work, encapsulated in The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance, which I have developed in interdisciplinary, theoretical and empirical ways, and through collaborations with anthropologists, sociologists and theatre study scholars, such as Emma Crewe, Silvija Jestrovic, Milija Gluhovic and Michael Saward.
What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?
I do not find it easy to give advice to young scholars, who are faced with a bitterly changed higher education landscape – neoliberal, subservient to austerity policies and to increasing conservatism, forgetting the social purpose of education and its contribution to a good life for all. I can just share what has helped me – be in solidarity with colleagues, challenge them when it is needed, remain curious and work across disciplines; think otherwise. As Audrey Lorde reminded us, ‘canons’ are there to discipline us; slipping disciplinary bonds is freeing our minds and developing our capacities to connect dots – between disciplines, methodologies, ontologies and empirical research. In my case, slipping disciplinary bonds has been hugely productive – it has kept my thinking fresh, my mind alert and has allowed me to access different literatures and intellectual landscapes, work with scholars who have challenged and supported me, and styles of writing that I wouldn’t have attempted otherwise. Despite all the challenges of/in higher education today, I still find excitement and stimulation in the world of academia – in thinking through the changing international relations and the consequences of deepening inequalities as well as the mobilisations against hierarchies, exploitation and oppression.
Further Reading on E-International Relations
