From Informal Settlements to Global Bantustans: a Critical Urban Lens to Understand Local and Global Restructuring of Social Reproduction

In this presentation I discuss spatial strategies through which capitalism continues its accumulation through invisible and devalued work of social reproduction through processes I call global restructuring of social reproduction. In particular, I will draw on the experience of West African workers in the US Midwest and South African marginalized communities in Cape Town.

Speaker Biography:

Faranak Miraftab is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with courtesy appointments at the departments of Women and Gender Studies and Geography. Her work empirically based in Latin America, Southern Africa, and the US, draws on feminist, transnational and urban scholarship. Her research and teaching concerns the global and local development processes involved in the formation of cities and citizens' struggles to access dignified urban livelihood. Her most recent Book Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives and Local Placemaking received the ACSP’s 2017 Davidoff book award and the ASA’s Global & Transnational Sociology section book award.