The Centre for Feminist Research presents the virtual launch of the book Social Reproduction and the City: Welfare Reform, Child Care, and Resistance in Neoliberal New York by Simon Black. The event will take place Nov. 5, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. via Zoom. To register for this event, visit https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0rcu6rpzojH9z2qAwj_LQ4jn1nC0lFOgUW.
The book launch will feature an introduction by Meg Luxton, professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, and the former director of the Graduate Program in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies and of the Centre for Feminist Research.
Idil Abdillahi, assistant professor in the School of Social Work at Ryerson University, will serve as the event’s discussant.
The transformation of child care after welfare reform in New York City and the struggle against that transformation is a largely untold story. In the decade following welfare reform, despite increases in child care funding, there was little growth in New York’s unionized, center-based child care system and no attempt to make this system more responsive to the needs of working mothers. As the city delivered child care services “on the cheap,” relying on non-union home child care providers, welfare rights organizations, community legal clinics, child care advocates, low-income community groups, activist mothers, and labor unions organized to demand fair solutions to the child care crisis that addressed poor single mothers’ need for quality, affordable child care as well as child care providers’ need for decent work and pay. Social Reproduction and the City tells this story, linking welfare reform to feminist research and activism around the “crisis of care,” social reproduction, and the neoliberal city.
Simon Black is an assistant professor in the Department of Labour Studies at Brock University. His research employs a feminist political economy approach to the study of work and labour in urban, national and transnational contexts and explores how race, class, gender, citizenship/migration shape social reproduction and the organization of paid and unpaid work. In addition to Social Reproduction and the City: Welfare Reform, Child Care, and Resistance in Neoliberal New York, (University of Georgia Press 2020), Black is producer (with Idil Abdillahi and Howard Grandison) of It Takes A Riot: Race, Rebellion, Reform, a documentary short film on police violence, anti-Black racism and resistance. Follow him on Twitter: @_SimonBlack.