Shirin M. Rai is Distinguished Research Professor, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. Rai’s research interests lie in feminist international political economy, performance and politics, and gender and political institutions. She has published widely in these areas, including Gender and the Political Economy of Development (Polity, 2004) Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament (with Carole Spary; OUP), 2019; Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance (2021; co-eds M Gluhovic, S Jestrovic and M Saward). Her latest book is Depletion: the human costs of caring (2024, OUP).

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

The most exciting, or I should say what I consider most important research/debates fall into two areas of work – the first is the continuing interest in and development of debates on the conceptualisation of social reproduction and its place in the global economy; the second is on climate change and its effects on everyday life globally. Here, we see renewed engagement with earlier debates such as the Wages for Housework, and recent work on the costs of social reproduction during times of crisis of life and livelihoods by Adrienne Roberts, Mezzadri et al., and in my own book Depletion. There is also important research on pluralising the concept of social reproduction itself through a focus on labour and care practices in the Global South, for example by Sirisha C. Naidu and Lyn Ossome. In the second, Stefania Barca’s work brings issues of anti-capitalist labour and class politics to challenge climate change to the fore, which is important, as is Sylvia Federici’s book Reenchanting the World. Capitalism, climate change and caring are issues that are preoccupying me right now, and I have much to learn in this area. Building on the work of Astrid Ulloa’s and others, I am trying to bring the work on social reproduction and climate change together in my understanding of capitalism.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

My world view has changed over time for sure. From a straightforward Marxist approach to inequality and social life, I became aware of the importance of gendered relations in political life as I conducted my doctoral fieldwork in China. The persistent complaint (and yes, complaint is political, as Sara Ahmed has shown us) of young female university students that their male counterparts got the better jobs alerted me to how gender intersects with state policy to generate unequal effects for women. This emerging insight was supported by a community of wonderful feminist scholars at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of Warwick, which I joined in 1989 – Terry Lovell, Annie Phizacklea, Carol Smart, Carol Wolkowitz, Joanna Liddle and Ann Stewart, among others, inspired me to engage with feminist scholarship on theory, migration, law, and labour in an interdisciplinary way. This allowed me to delve into issues of labour and employment related to young Chinese women as the country began to liberalise its economy.

The Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International Studies Association was another source of support in engaging with international feminist debates and experiencing both solidarity and how differences among feminist scholars played out and were (sometimes) resolved. L.H.M. Ling and Geeta Chowdhry were particularly important to the development of my thinking on IR and race. Thinking through how histories of colonialism, racialisation and capitalism have left traces in our scholarship and influenced our analyses has been a long and continuing journey.

My book Gender and the Political Economy of Development was an analysis of global development and its gendered inequalities, and the struggles to challenge them. It built on the course I introduced at Warwick on Gender and Development – my students have always helped me clarify my ideas and articulations by asking straightforward, awkward and sophisticated questions. Gender and political economy teaching and researching has a vibrant history in the UK. In working on Depletion: The Human Cost of Caring, I........

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