CALL FOR PAPERS, PACO 20(3): 2027

CfP for the SPECIAL ISSUE 20(3), 2027 on:

Social Movement Reproduction

Borrowing from the now well-established Marxist feminist notion of social reproduction, this special issue interrogates the novel concept of social movement reproduction. While social reproduction highlights the unpaid and undervalued work that is involved in reproducing ‘productive’ labor, we propose using the concept of social movement reproduction to facilitate the examination of less studied and under-theorized forms of movement activity. Social movement reproduction can be understood as the efforts that enable the continuation of the forms of activism that are seen as more ‘productive’, such as protests, civil disobedience, and other means of claims-making. Social movement reproduction efforts involve the (ongoing) generation of commitment and desire to participate in forms of activism; the ‘weaving’ of interpersonal bonds and collective care; the facilitation of emotional and physical availability to sustain engagement; and the completion of quotidian tasks involved in organizing (e.g., communal cooking, minute-taking, scheduling meetings, arranging logistics, and cleaning up).

This novel theoretical framework brings together a number of existing but often disparate strands of social movement literature, including research on recruitment, burnout, and emotional and affective work. As is the case with its progenitor, the labor involved in social movement reproduction is often performed by women, intersex, non-binary, trans, and agender people, and is often invisibilized both within movements and in much of the academic literature. From this perspective, the concept adopts a feminist standpoint by identifying and studying the gender inequalities that emerge from and reinforce a gender division of social movement labor. However, some movement organizations and groups actively work to prevent such exploitative and unequal processes through prefigurative practices. Beyond internal movement processes, social movement reproduction can encompass external factors that are crucial for sustaining activism. These include representations of activism in the media and its role in persuading (or dissuading) individuals to mobilize, the diffusion of information on past or present movements in educational settings, and domestic divisions of labor and responsibilities that unevenly shape biographical availability for (potential) participants, in particular in the ongoing care crisis.

To explore the rich applications for the concept of social movement reproduction, and to further develop this theoretical concept in order to better understand social movements, this special issue seeks to include articles covering a diversity of movements, organizational structures, national contexts, and relevant movement processes. The special issue welcomes contributions that seek to empirically and theoretically develop the concept of social movement reproduction by addressing questions such as:

• What actions do movement actors engage in to encourage and sustain the participation of activists and how are these actions distributed?
• What ‘housekeeping’ activities do movement groups and organizations require in order to engage in protests and other forms of claim-making and how are such activities viewed by the activists?
• How does the work involved in social movement organization mirror or challenge the gendered division of labor in mainstream society?
• How do social movement organizations apply prefigurative practices to offset a gender division of labor?
• To what extent do social processes outside of typical movement spaces encourage and reproduce the desire to engage in activism?
• How can the relationship between social movement reproduction and more established concepts in the literature - e.g. prefigurative politics, political opportunity structures, collective identity, etc. - be understood and theorized?
• How can feminist theorizations of reproductive labor, such as Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) and feminist care ethics, contribute to our understanding of social movements in general and social movement reproduction in particular?
• How should social movement reproduction be understood in the context of the current political and economic conjuncture?

 

Guest Editors:

Bonu Rosenkranz, Giada (Scuola Normale Superiore), giada.bonu@sns.it

Schack, Lotte (Lund University), lotte.schack@soclaw.lu.se

Nulman, Eugene (Università degli Studi di Firenze), eugene.nulman@unifi.it

 

Abstracts should be between 400 and 600 words.

Please send your abstracts to eugene.nulman@unifi.it

Abstracts should be sent by 15 June 2026

Applicants will be informed of the decision shortly after the deadline.

Full papers (8,000 - 10,000 words, including references, notes, tables, figures and diagrams) will need to be submitted by 1st October 2026 for internal review.

If you have any questions, please contact the Guest Editors.