Sara Stevano
Biographic Data
| ID | 135187 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sara Stevano |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sara |
| FAMILY NAME | Stevano |
| SIGNATURE | STEVANO S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0532-4894 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 238 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Forum on Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring
Depletion is a concept with great potential. The subtitle of Shirin Rai’s new book immediately points in a promising direction: depletion can help us uncover “the human cost of caring.” To date, fe
Ultra‐Processed Food, Depletion, and Social Reproduction: A Conceptual Intervention
What we eat and how we think about food and nutrition are undergoing a momentous change, driven by the rise of ultra‐processed food. There is a growing body of evidence linking the consumption of ultra‐processed food to poor health outcomes. However, the health depleting effects of ultra‐processed food go beyond changes in discrete indicators of nutrition and health. Processes of depletion entail social, economic, and political relations. This pa…
Pluralizing social reproduction approaches
The concept of social reproduction (SR) has gained renewed interest in the past decade. Discussed and elaborated by generations of feminists, the concept offers a rejection of productivism and the possibility of (re)telling the history of capitalism and its contemporary dynamics through the work and practices of “life making.” Yet, it is undeniable that much of the “old” and “new” theorizing around SR comes predominantly from the Global North. He…
The Devaluation of Essential Work: An Assessment of the 2023 ILO Report
The ILO report makes a crucial intervention by foregrounding the misalignment between the poor economic and/or social recognition of essential work and the vital contribution this work makes to society.This stark contrast was immediately visible from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as highlighted in early reflections on the use of essential work designations in response to the pandemic (e.g.The Lancet, 2020;Reid et al., 2021; Stevano, Ali and…
The social reproduction of agrarian change: Feminist political economy and rural transformations in the global south. An introduction
The last decade has seen a renaissance of feminist political economy studies centred on the concept of 'social reproduction'. These aim at studying global capitalism from the vantage-point of what produces and sustains life, expanding the social boundaries of processes and subjects analysed in political economy. Contributing to this research agenda, the special issue we present in this Introduction explores the Social Reproduction of Agrarian Cha…
Feminist Political Economy: A Global Perspective
Feminist political economy is essential to understanding the power relations and hierarchies that shape and sustain contemporary capitalism. Motivated by the rejection of gender-blind approaches in economics feminist political economy provides compelling insights into the relations between the economic, the social and the political in the reproduction of inequality. Sara Cantillon, Odile Mackett and Sara Stevano have written a much-needed introdu…
Reconfiguring African Studies, reconfiguring economics: Centring intersectionality and social stratification
African and African diaspora scholars have made key contributions to contemporary understandings of inequality, intersectionality, institutions and ‘development'. A recent major contribution to this debate is offered by Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Drawing on a wide range of literatures, but especially from traditions of Black radical economic thought that sp…
Common Challenges for All? A Critical Engagement with the Emerging Vision for Post-pandemic Development Studies
The COVID-19 pandemic motivated calls for the field of development studies to be recast. This article analyses two prominent, future-gazing 'pandemic papers' to illustrate salient features of the ascendant trend towards a new 'global development' paradigm. By unpacking and interpreting major lines of reasoning put forward by two agenda-setting articles, this contribution appraises how these texts make the case for the future of development studie…
Global Value Chains and Global Value Transfer
This chapter discusses the restructuring of production that has taken place over the last thirty years, namely the rise of global value chains/global production networks, and how this has shaped the transfer of value from the Global South to the Global North via direct channels of appropriation along these chains and the tendency towards impoverishment of workers engaged in primary production associated with this. In addition, this chapter discus…
Hidden Abodes in Plain Sight: The Social Reproduction of Households and Labor in the Covid-19 Pandemic
This article deploys a feminist political economy approach centered on social reproduction to analyze the reconfiguration and regeneration of multiple inequalities in households and the labor markets during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on this approach, the analysis unpacks the multiple trajectories of fragility the current crisis is intervening on and reshaping in the home and in the world of work, and their gendered and racialized features acro…
Classes of working women in Mozambique: An integrated framework to understand working lives
Feminist political economy has illuminated the gendered dimensions of the globalisation of production. Whilst this literature provides essential insights on gendered exploitation in export-oriented industries, women’s work in localised labour markets in the Global South remains underexplored. This paper seeks to address this gap by putting into dialogue three bodies of literature – feminist political economy of globalisation, political economy of…
Feminist global political economies of work and social reproduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed the relevance of social reproduction as a key analytical lens to interrogate contemporary capitalist processes. Building on insights from distinct theoretical traditions, in this introductory contribution to the special issue in Feminist Global Political Economies of Work we propose social reproduction as a prism to examine labour and work in the Global South from a feminist standpoint. We develop a social repr…
The workplace at the bottom of global supply chains as a site of reproduction of colonial relations: Reflections on the cashew‐processing industry in Mozambique
In the context of global supply chains, the workplace is a site of realization of global–local interrelations and materialization of class, gender and race exploitation. This paper explores these relations in the Mozambican cashew‐processing factory, the workplace at the bottom of the cashew global supply chain. The aim is to extend the literature on labor and global production networks by addressing the underexplored dimension of the everyday pr…
Work in agro-industry and the social reproduction of labour in Mozambique: Contradictions in the current accumulation system
This article discusses the tensions between job creation and employment quality in the system of accumulation in Mozambique. Addressing job quality is central because Mozambique’s economic structure has mostly failed to generate stable work and pay and dignified working conditions. However, this is neglected in the mainstream view of labour markets, which is dominated by dualisms and limited by its blind spot regarding social reproduction. The au…
Essential for what? A global social reproduction view on the re-organisation of work during the Covid-19 pandemic
COVID-19 has shaken a foundational pillar of global capitalism: the organisation of work. A pivotal dimension of such re-organisation has been the classification of work as essential or not. This article explores the concept of essential work using a global feminist social reproduction perspective. We show that the meaning of essential work is more ambiguous and politicised than it may appear and, although it can be used as a basis to reclaim the…
Covid-19 and crises of capitalism: Intensifying inequalities and global responses
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed multiple structural flaws of global capitalism. These have been reproduced through the intensification of inequalities and reinforced through policy responses that have failed to protect the most vulnerable from the health and socio-economic impacts of COVID-19. The COVID-19 pandemic has also revealed the materiality of human activity and complex geographies of inequality. It has highlighted how inequalities embe…
The Urban Food Question in the Context of Inequality and Dietary Change: A Study of Schoolchildren in Accra
Diets are changing globally, as agricultural and food systems have become globalised. Understanding how patterns of globalisation affect welfare is a key development question, but we know little about the way that the globalisation of food systems impacts different groups. This study explores food security and consumption among schoolchildren in Accra. We use a novel approach based on triangulation of primary data on food consumption and a synthe…
Nurture commodified? An investigation into commercial human milk supply chains
The material conditions in which women provide breast milk range widely, on the basis of their class and geographical provenance. The commercialisation of breast milk provision throws up questions related to debates on the transnational reconfiguration of social reproduction as they intersect with discourses on motherhood and healthy child development as well as contemporary processes of commodification of the body and the emergence of new gender…
The Limits of Instrumentalism: Informal Work and Gendered Cycles of Food Insecurity in Mozambique
The instrumentalist literature suggests that women can help achieve household food security if they have access to productive resources but do not become overburdened as a result. This paper seeks to assess the relevance of this literature by exploring the gendered cycles of food insecurity in the context of women’s informal labour in northern Mozambique. It considers the relation between women and food security as embedded in the broader socio-e…
Small development questions are important, but they require big answers
Time-Use Analytics: An Improved Way of Understanding Gendered Agriculture-Nutrition Pathways
There is a resurgence of interest in time-use research driven, inter alia, by the desire to understand if development interventions, especially when targeted to women, lead to time constraints by increasing work burdens. This has become a primary concern in agriculture-nutrition research. But are time-use data useful to explore agriculture-nutrition pathways? This study develops a conceptual framework of the micro-level linkages between agricultu…
Towards a political economy of the use of research assistants: Reflections from fieldwork in Tanzania and Mozambique
Research assistants play a vital role in the research process, often acting as more than just translators or interpreters. However, their contributions to and impacts on the research process and outcomes often remain unacknowledged or unaccounted for. We build on previous work that looks at the subjective relations between the researcher, research assistant and research participant to explore this issue. In particular, drawing on a political econ…
Global commodity chains and global value chains
This Companion takes stock of the trajectory, achievements, shortcomings and prospects of Marxist political economy. It reflects the contributors' shared commitment to bringing the methods, theories and concepts of Marx himself to bear across a wide range of topics and perspectives, and it provides a testimony to the continuing purpose and vitality of Marxist political economy.
Feminist global political economies of work and social reproduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed the relevance of social reproduction as a key analytical lens to interrogate contemporary capitalist processes. Building on insights from distinct theoretical traditions, in this introductory contribution to the special issue in Feminist Global Political Economies of Work we propose social reproduction as a prism to examine labour and work in the Global South from a feminist standpoint. We develop a social repr…
Hidden Abodes in Plain Sight: The Social Reproduction of Households and Labor in the Covid-19 Pandemic
This article deploys a feminist political economy approach centered on social reproduction to analyze the reconfiguration and regeneration of multiple inequalities in households and the labor markets during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on this approach, the analysis unpacks the multiple trajectories of fragility the current crisis is intervening on and reshaping in the home and in the world of work, and their gendered and racialized features acro…
The social reproduction of agrarian change: Feminist political economy and rural transformations in the global south. An introduction
The last decade has seen a renaissance of feminist political economy studies centred on the concept of 'social reproduction'. These aim at studying global capitalism from the vantage-point of what produces and sustains life, expanding the social boundaries of processes and subjects analysed in political economy. Contributing to this research agenda, the special issue we present in this Introduction explores the Social Reproduction of Agrarian Cha…
Covid-19 and crises of capitalism: Intensifying inequalities and global responses
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed multiple structural flaws of global capitalism. These have been reproduced through the intensification of inequalities and reinforced through policy responses that have failed to protect the most vulnerable from the health and socio-economic impacts of COVID-19. The COVID-19 pandemic has also revealed the materiality of human activity and complex geographies of inequality. It has highlighted how inequalities embe…
Essential for what? A global social reproduction view on the re-organisation of work during the Covid-19 pandemic
COVID-19 has shaken a foundational pillar of global capitalism: the organisation of work. A pivotal dimension of such re-organisation has been the classification of work as essential or not. This article explores the concept of essential work using a global feminist social reproduction perspective. We show that the meaning of essential work is more ambiguous and politicised than it may appear and, although it can be used as a basis to reclaim the…
Towards a political economy of the use of research assistants: Reflections from fieldwork in Tanzania and Mozambique
Research assistants play a vital role in the research process, often acting as more than just translators or interpreters. However, their contributions to and impacts on the research process and outcomes often remain unacknowledged or unaccounted for. We build on previous work that looks at the subjective relations between the researcher, research assistant and research participant to explore this issue. In particular, drawing on a political econ…
Common Challenges for All? A Critical Engagement with the Emerging Vision for Post-pandemic Development Studies
The COVID-19 pandemic motivated calls for the field of development studies to be recast. This article analyses two prominent, future-gazing 'pandemic papers' to illustrate salient features of the ascendant trend towards a new 'global development' paradigm. By unpacking and interpreting major lines of reasoning put forward by two agenda-setting articles, this contribution appraises how these texts make the case for the future of development studie…
Pluralizing social reproduction approaches
The concept of social reproduction (SR) has gained renewed interest in the past decade. Discussed and elaborated by generations of feminists, the concept offers a rejection of productivism and the possibility of (re)telling the history of capitalism and its contemporary dynamics through the work and practices of “life making.” Yet, it is undeniable that much of the “old” and “new” theorizing around SR comes predominantly from the Global North. He…
Classes of working women in Mozambique: An integrated framework to understand working lives
Feminist political economy has illuminated the gendered dimensions of the globalisation of production. Whilst this literature provides essential insights on gendered exploitation in export-oriented industries, women’s work in localised labour markets in the Global South remains underexplored. This paper seeks to address this gap by putting into dialogue three bodies of literature – feminist political economy of globalisation, political economy of…
The workplace at the bottom of global supply chains as a site of reproduction of colonial relations: Reflections on the cashew‐processing industry in Mozambique
In the context of global supply chains, the workplace is a site of realization of global–local interrelations and materialization of class, gender and race exploitation. This paper explores these relations in the Mozambican cashew‐processing factory, the workplace at the bottom of the cashew global supply chain. The aim is to extend the literature on labor and global production networks by addressing the underexplored dimension of the everyday pr…
Nurture commodified? An investigation into commercial human milk supply chains
The material conditions in which women provide breast milk range widely, on the basis of their class and geographical provenance. The commercialisation of breast milk provision throws up questions related to debates on the transnational reconfiguration of social reproduction as they intersect with discourses on motherhood and healthy child development as well as contemporary processes of commodification of the body and the emergence of new gender…
Small development questions are important, but they require big answers
Time-Use Analytics: An Improved Way of Understanding Gendered Agriculture-Nutrition Pathways
There is a resurgence of interest in time-use research driven, inter alia, by the desire to understand if development interventions, especially when targeted to women, lead to time constraints by increasing work burdens. This has become a primary concern in agriculture-nutrition research. But are time-use data useful to explore agriculture-nutrition pathways? This study develops a conceptual framework of the micro-level linkages between agricultu…
Work in agro-industry and the social reproduction of labour in Mozambique: Contradictions in the current accumulation system
This article discusses the tensions between job creation and employment quality in the system of accumulation in Mozambique. Addressing job quality is central because Mozambique’s economic structure has mostly failed to generate stable work and pay and dignified working conditions. However, this is neglected in the mainstream view of labour markets, which is dominated by dualisms and limited by its blind spot regarding social reproduction. The au…
Ultra‐Processed Food, Depletion, and Social Reproduction: A Conceptual Intervention
What we eat and how we think about food and nutrition are undergoing a momentous change, driven by the rise of ultra‐processed food. There is a growing body of evidence linking the consumption of ultra‐processed food to poor health outcomes. However, the health depleting effects of ultra‐processed food go beyond changes in discrete indicators of nutrition and health. Processes of depletion entail social, economic, and political relations. This pa…
Reconfiguring African Studies, reconfiguring economics: Centring intersectionality and social stratification
African and African diaspora scholars have made key contributions to contemporary understandings of inequality, intersectionality, institutions and ‘development'. A recent major contribution to this debate is offered by Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Drawing on a wide range of literatures, but especially from traditions of Black radical economic thought that sp…
The Devaluation of Essential Work: An Assessment of the 2023 ILO Report
The ILO report makes a crucial intervention by foregrounding the misalignment between the poor economic and/or social recognition of essential work and the vital contribution this work makes to society.This stark contrast was immediately visible from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as highlighted in early reflections on the use of essential work designations in response to the pandemic (e.g.The Lancet, 2020;Reid et al., 2021; Stevano, Ali and…
Global commodity chains and global value chains
This Companion takes stock of the trajectory, achievements, shortcomings and prospects of Marxist political economy. It reflects the contributors' shared commitment to bringing the methods, theories and concepts of Marx himself to bear across a wide range of topics and perspectives, and it provides a testimony to the continuing purpose and vitality of Marxist political economy.
Towards a political economy of the use of research assistants: Reflections from fieldwork in Tanzania and Mozambique
Research assistants play a vital role in the research process, often acting as more than just translators or interpreters. However, their contributions to and impacts on the research process and outcomes often remain unacknowledged or unaccounted for. We build on previous work that looks at the subjective relations between the researcher, research assistant and research participant to explore this issue. In particular, drawing on a political econ…
Time-Use Analytics: An Improved Way of Understanding Gendered Agriculture-Nutrition Pathways
There is a resurgence of interest in time-use research driven, inter alia, by the desire to understand if development interventions, especially when targeted to women, lead to time constraints by increasing work burdens. This has become a primary concern in agriculture-nutrition research. But are time-use data useful to explore agriculture-nutrition pathways? This study develops a conceptual framework of the micro-level linkages between agricultu…
The Limits of Instrumentalism: Informal Work and Gendered Cycles of Food Insecurity in Mozambique
The instrumentalist literature suggests that women can help achieve household food security if they have access to productive resources but do not become overburdened as a result. This paper seeks to assess the relevance of this literature by exploring the gendered cycles of food insecurity in the context of women’s informal labour in northern Mozambique. It considers the relation between women and food security as embedded in the broader socio-e…
Small development questions are important, but they require big answers
The Urban Food Question in the Context of Inequality and Dietary Change: A Study of Schoolchildren in Accra
Diets are changing globally, as agricultural and food systems have become globalised. Understanding how patterns of globalisation affect welfare is a key development question, but we know little about the way that the globalisation of food systems impacts different groups. This study explores food security and consumption among schoolchildren in Accra. We use a novel approach based on triangulation of primary data on food consumption and a synthe…
Nurture commodified? An investigation into commercial human milk supply chains
The material conditions in which women provide breast milk range widely, on the basis of their class and geographical provenance. The commercialisation of breast milk provision throws up questions related to debates on the transnational reconfiguration of social reproduction as they intersect with discourses on motherhood and healthy child development as well as contemporary processes of commodification of the body and the emergence of new gender…
Hidden Abodes in Plain Sight: The Social Reproduction of Households and Labor in the Covid-19 Pandemic
This article deploys a feminist political economy approach centered on social reproduction to analyze the reconfiguration and regeneration of multiple inequalities in households and the labor markets during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on this approach, the analysis unpacks the multiple trajectories of fragility the current crisis is intervening on and reshaping in the home and in the world of work, and their gendered and racialized features acro…
Classes of working women in Mozambique: An integrated framework to understand working lives
Feminist political economy has illuminated the gendered dimensions of the globalisation of production. Whilst this literature provides essential insights on gendered exploitation in export-oriented industries, women’s work in localised labour markets in the Global South remains underexplored. This paper seeks to address this gap by putting into dialogue three bodies of literature – feminist political economy of globalisation, political economy of…
Feminist global political economies of work and social reproduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed the relevance of social reproduction as a key analytical lens to interrogate contemporary capitalist processes. Building on insights from distinct theoretical traditions, in this introductory contribution to the special issue in Feminist Global Political Economies of Work we propose social reproduction as a prism to examine labour and work in the Global South from a feminist standpoint. We develop a social repr…
The workplace at the bottom of global supply chains as a site of reproduction of colonial relations: Reflections on the cashew‐processing industry in Mozambique
In the context of global supply chains, the workplace is a site of realization of global–local interrelations and materialization of class, gender and race exploitation. This paper explores these relations in the Mozambican cashew‐processing factory, the workplace at the bottom of the cashew global supply chain. The aim is to extend the literature on labor and global production networks by addressing the underexplored dimension of the everyday pr…
Work in agro-industry and the social reproduction of labour in Mozambique: Contradictions in the current accumulation system
This article discusses the tensions between job creation and employment quality in the system of accumulation in Mozambique. Addressing job quality is central because Mozambique’s economic structure has mostly failed to generate stable work and pay and dignified working conditions. However, this is neglected in the mainstream view of labour markets, which is dominated by dualisms and limited by its blind spot regarding social reproduction. The au…
Essential for what? A global social reproduction view on the re-organisation of work during the Covid-19 pandemic
COVID-19 has shaken a foundational pillar of global capitalism: the organisation of work. A pivotal dimension of such re-organisation has been the classification of work as essential or not. This article explores the concept of essential work using a global feminist social reproduction perspective. We show that the meaning of essential work is more ambiguous and politicised than it may appear and, although it can be used as a basis to reclaim the…
Covid-19 and crises of capitalism: Intensifying inequalities and global responses
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed multiple structural flaws of global capitalism. These have been reproduced through the intensification of inequalities and reinforced through policy responses that have failed to protect the most vulnerable from the health and socio-economic impacts of COVID-19. The COVID-19 pandemic has also revealed the materiality of human activity and complex geographies of inequality. It has highlighted how inequalities embe…
Global Value Chains and Global Value Transfer
This chapter discusses the restructuring of production that has taken place over the last thirty years, namely the rise of global value chains/global production networks, and how this has shaped the transfer of value from the Global South to the Global North via direct channels of appropriation along these chains and the tendency towards impoverishment of workers engaged in primary production associated with this. In addition, this chapter discus…
Feminist Political Economy: A Global Perspective
Feminist political economy is essential to understanding the power relations and hierarchies that shape and sustain contemporary capitalism. Motivated by the rejection of gender-blind approaches in economics feminist political economy provides compelling insights into the relations between the economic, the social and the political in the reproduction of inequality. Sara Cantillon, Odile Mackett and Sara Stevano have written a much-needed introdu…
Reconfiguring African Studies, reconfiguring economics: Centring intersectionality and social stratification
African and African diaspora scholars have made key contributions to contemporary understandings of inequality, intersectionality, institutions and ‘development'. A recent major contribution to this debate is offered by Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Drawing on a wide range of literatures, but especially from traditions of Black radical economic thought that sp…
Common Challenges for All? A Critical Engagement with the Emerging Vision for Post-pandemic Development Studies
The COVID-19 pandemic motivated calls for the field of development studies to be recast. This article analyses two prominent, future-gazing 'pandemic papers' to illustrate salient features of the ascendant trend towards a new 'global development' paradigm. By unpacking and interpreting major lines of reasoning put forward by two agenda-setting articles, this contribution appraises how these texts make the case for the future of development studie…
The Devaluation of Essential Work: An Assessment of the 2023 ILO Report
The ILO report makes a crucial intervention by foregrounding the misalignment between the poor economic and/or social recognition of essential work and the vital contribution this work makes to society.This stark contrast was immediately visible from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as highlighted in early reflections on the use of essential work designations in response to the pandemic (e.g.The Lancet, 2020;Reid et al., 2021; Stevano, Ali and…
The social reproduction of agrarian change: Feminist political economy and rural transformations in the global south. An introduction
The last decade has seen a renaissance of feminist political economy studies centred on the concept of 'social reproduction'. These aim at studying global capitalism from the vantage-point of what produces and sustains life, expanding the social boundaries of processes and subjects analysed in political economy. Contributing to this research agenda, the special issue we present in this Introduction explores the Social Reproduction of Agrarian Cha…
Ultra‐Processed Food, Depletion, and Social Reproduction: A Conceptual Intervention
What we eat and how we think about food and nutrition are undergoing a momentous change, driven by the rise of ultra‐processed food. There is a growing body of evidence linking the consumption of ultra‐processed food to poor health outcomes. However, the health depleting effects of ultra‐processed food go beyond changes in discrete indicators of nutrition and health. Processes of depletion entail social, economic, and political relations. This pa…
Pluralizing social reproduction approaches
The concept of social reproduction (SR) has gained renewed interest in the past decade. Discussed and elaborated by generations of feminists, the concept offers a rejection of productivism and the possibility of (re)telling the history of capitalism and its contemporary dynamics through the work and practices of “life making.” Yet, it is undeniable that much of the “old” and “new” theorizing around SR comes predominantly from the Global North. He…
Forum on Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring
Depletion is a concept with great potential. The subtitle of Shirin Rai’s new book immediately points in a promising direction: depletion can help us uncover “the human cost of caring.” To date, fe
Sociology (19 works) · Economics (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · Politics (10 works) · Social science (10 works) · Reproduction (9 works) · Biology (8 works) · Political economy (8 works) · Ecology (6 works) · Engineering (6 works)