Author Meets Critics: "Unsettled Labors: Migrant Care Work in Palestine/Israel"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Based on Rachel Brown’s Unsettled Labors (Duke UP, 2024), a work of interdisciplinary political theory, this session explores current and future research directions at the intersection of settler colonial studies, Marxist feminist thought, and theories of care. Looking at issues of gendered migrant labor in the context of Israeli settler colonialism, Unsettled Labors is a work of grounded political theory that draws on interviews with migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia, legal cases, media analysis, and critical political theory. Examining migrant labor–and eldercare for Jewish-Israelis specifically–as constitutive of settler colonial capitalism, the book asks how discourses of care reinforce dispossession of Palestinian land, even as migrant workers continually generate collective forms of care beyond the reach of the state. The book explores how moralizing determinations by the state and citizens alike about which collective and individual bodies are worthy of care emerge through intimate labors, popular media, and law, and always exist in relation to dispossession.


As is tragically clear in the present moment, investment in care for Jewish-Israelis is part of a broader bioplitical project of maintaining settler-citizen supremacy. This biopolitical investment includes the unequal distribution of resources necessary for the social reproduction of communities: medical resources, food, land, freedom from state violence. Considering the topics this book raises in the current moment raises important questions for future research in the areas of interdisciplinary political theory, critical political science, and the praxis of solidarity.


The session will therefore include discussion of the book’s major themes in relation to several areas of ongoing and future scholarship: migration and colonialism; migrant worker activism; social movements and collective care; labor and citizenship beyond a Native/settler binary; biopolitics, indigenous dispossession and militarism; political economy and land theft; and the state depoliticization of care–whether care work, gendrerd and racialized efforts towards community survival, or mutual aid.


Other session topics include the possibilities and limits of the reproductive labor framework, especially when considering the work of community-building and community survival outside the heteronuclear family; how theories of social reproduction can better grapple with colonialism; and the politics of resistance. These themes raise questions for interdisciplinary political theorists and political scientists about changing labor formations under late capitalism; how collective care can generate alternatives to capitalism; and resistance and the risks of its co-optation by fascist and authoritarian actors. The session will also think through a central question of the book: what does global solidarity with the Palestinian popular struggle look like at the intersection of migrant workers’ rights and land struggles? How does and can scholarship approach such intersecting questions of solidarity?

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Rachel Brown Washington University in St. Louis

Presenters

• Deva Woodly Brown University

• C. Heike Schotten University of Massachusetts Boston

• Ethel Tungohan York University

• Nicholas R. Micinski University of Maine

• Leila Farsakh University of Massachusetts Boston