For the Construction of an International Research Network on Reproductive Labor

We would like to briefly suggest a few points that might be important for this morning’s discussion.

What kind of network do we want to build? Not an academic network, but a political one; a political network of feminist academics and researchers focused on reproductive labor. For this network to be effective, it must be international and interdisciplinary. There are comrades who have written their doctoral theses on reproductive labor in various parts of the world, and many others working on this topic, conducting empirical research or reflecting on it. However, they are divided by differences in language, culture, and discipline.

Why is it necessary to build such a network? There are many reasons to create a network.

We can identify several, but let’s start with the most evident ones.

The first reason is the need to unite our forces. To be influential, we must create a critical mass, and building a critical mass is essential because having weight allows us to attract young scholars and make our discourse increasingly shared.

Another reason is that the network can facilitate the creation of a newsletter to circulate useful information, to better and more quickly understand each other's work, and to disseminate it.

Another reason is that such a network is necessary to stay connected to struggles, including our own struggles as researchers, who are often at the bottom or, at best, in the middle ranks of the academic hierarchy, frequently in precarious conditions. Staying in touch with struggles helps us better understand which research topics are important to pursue.

Another reason is that such a network is useful for managing generational transitions among researchers and for developing political mentoring activities. This activity, which has always been neglected within the feminist movement and social movements in general, is instead fundamental for constructing a feminist future that is theoretically and methodologically strong. Every experienced researcher could mentor a young researcher.

Finally, another reason is that such a network should help break down the disciplinary barriers within which knowledge develops today, leading to extreme specialization and rendering us all blind. Female scholars, like their male colleagues, are experiencing this contradiction. If one remains isolated, it is easier to fall prey to the contradictions that currently define scientific knowledge, caught between excessive specialization and the loss of a broad vision of problems. Neocapitalism has demanded that universities, on the one hand, adapt scientific knowledge to its ideologies and, on the other, establish mechanisms that emphasize the quantity of papers over their quality. This has led to conformity and standardization of knowledge, as well as its internal emptying. In this context of weakened scientific research and free knowledge, the recent attack by the Trump administration on American universities has taken place. By suspending research funding, neocapitalism has decreed the end of universities as we have known them. Protests by scientists and researchers in various U.S. cities have been a first response to this attack.

In such a situation, remaining isolated means risking conducting research that serves the movement very little, while it almost exclusively benefits researchers' careers—when such an opportunity exists—and not the movement, which instead hungers for tools to understand the world.

The purpose of the network is therefore to construct the analyses and theoretical tools that activists need to build struggles. In other words, to create a protective barrier around the movement.

The feminist movement, even more than other movements, needs this protective barrier, capable of theoretical elaboration and empirical research on the most pressing issues to analyze in relation to organizing struggles. However, this need risks being frustrated by the great political void that has formed around those who fight. The structures that once supported political thought and action have dissolved. This concerns not only the feminist movement but the left-wing movement in general.

For years, party schools and union schools have disappeared, as well as less formal but equally necessary political training initiatives aimed at younger generations. The role of engaged intellectuals organically linked to a movement or political party has also vanished, as has the role of intellectuals who supported movements. Until a few decades ago, intellectuals formed a kind of protective barrier around the realm of political militancy. Their studies responded to the needs of the movement, tackled the most complex theoretical issues, and provided the broad political analyses that activists needed as theoretical frameworks to develop specific political analyses, necessary for legitimizing and launching political mobilization or struggle initiatives. Today, there is a significant disconnect between the work of left-wing intellectuals and/or academics and the needs of the movement. This includes feminism.

To restore this osmosis between militant intellectuals and feminist activists, it is necessary to reestablish the transmission belt of political knowledge in both directions—toward scholars and toward activists. There is knowledge that comes from struggles, which expresses certain theoretical needs while also providing indications on the conceptual directions to take. And there is knowledge that comes from study, which can forge the analytical tools necessary to build political strategies and programs and to support specific struggles.

This association should serve to build the necessary infrastructures to facilitate this osmosis.