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Fierce, wise, tireless and transformational, an inspiration to us all in these difficult times. An obituary written by Professor Sarah Franklin: "Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933–2020), US Supreme Court justice, champion of equity, environment, democracy."

In this talk, Charis Thompson presents her recent work advocating the addition of a migrapolitical lens to biopolitical and necropolitical ways of understanding the differential valuing of contemporary human life. With reference to her own concept of selective pronatalism, and in conversation with other bio- and necropolitical work on stratified reproduction, reproductive justice, selecting societies, and queer reproductions, Thompson argues for the importance of considering migration as foundational, with birth and death, to a new sociology of reproduction. To illustrate, she does a close reading of the concept of ‘separation’ as a kinship and family term, and argues that its current political salience in regard to migration can help us understand and potentially influence the role that migrapolitics play more generally in kinship and reproduction.

In spring and summer 2020, Marcin Smietana is carrying out interviews with gay men who live in the UK and who have pursued surrogacy, whether in the UK or overseas. He is interested in people’s stories about their paths to surrogacy and their experiences of it. Under the current Covid-19 circumstances, he is conducting interviews online (via Zoom, Skype etc.) until further notice.

From Silvia Federici to Angela Davis, marxist feminist theorists of political economy have demonstrated the historical contingency of the hierarchical sexual and racial division of labour, characteristic of contemporary capitalism. The consolidation of industrial capitalism, Davis explains, saw a split between the new ‘economic sphere’ and what was formerly the ‘home economy’, now recast as a devalued ‘domestic sphere’ to be presided over by the modern (bourgeois) housewife (Davis 1981). It has been the remit of ‘social reproduction’ scholars, like Silvia Federici, to make clear this dependency of capitalist production on this “particular type of family, sexuality, procreation” (Federici 2013, 90).