SOCIOPLASTICS: Tracing the politics of care

Production depends on reproduction, yet reproduction remains invisible. Silvia Federici's commons feminism reveals the hidden labour that sustains capitalist accumulation—the unpaid work of childbearing, domestic care, emotional maintenance that reproduces the workforce daily without appearing in economic accounts. Donna Haraway's naturecultures dissolve the nature-culture binary that justified women's exclusion from rationality, proposing instead that we are all compost—hybrid beings enmeshed in multispecies relations. This lens transforms how we see infrastructure: not as technical system but as care work materialised, the always-invisible substrate that enables visible production. Proteolytic transmutation—the capacity to transform residues into resources—operates at this register as the continuous labour of turning waste into value, breakdown into repair, exhaustion into renewal. Infrastructure Studies supplies the material frame, revealing how built environments encode gendered assumptions about who moves, who waits, who works. Science and Technology Studies traces the socio-technical reproduction of expertise, showing how women's knowledge is systematically excluded from protocols.

Media Archaeology excavates forgotten histories of women's technical labour—the telephone operators, computer programmers, factory workers whose work was erased from official accounts. Political Ecology connects reproductive work to metabolic flows, showing how care sustains the circuits of extraction and accumulation. Network Science reveals the topological patterns of care, the invisible networks of kinship and mutual aid that underlie formal economies. Decolonial Theory adds the colonial division of reproductive labour, showing how women of the global south bear the burden of producing life and absorbing externalities. Disability Studies reveals the work of accommodation—the invisible labour of making worlds accessible. Sound Studies attends to gendered acoustic spaces, the voices silenced or ignored. Philosophical Botany offers vegetal models of patient reproduction, the slow work of germination and growth that mirrors reproductive labour. What emerges from this convergence is not a new feminist theory but a recognition that certain aesthetic operations—like proteolytic transmutation—function as reproductive infrastructures. This capacity to make visible the labour that sustains, which might be termed socioplastics, names the infrastructural work of aesthetic forms that reveal reproduction as condition of production.

Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics. https://antolloveras.blogspot.com

FAMILY

Infrastructure Studies, Ontology, Cybernetics, Systems Theory, Science and Technology Studies, Critical Urban Studies, Posthumanism, Sovereignty Studies, Semiotics, Media Archaeology, Complexity Theory, Spatial Justice, Political Ecology, Feminism and Gender Theory, Decolonial Theory, Anthropocene Studies, Relational Aesthetics, Commons Theory, Mobility Studies, Technological Critique, Software Studies, Platform Studies, Environmental Psychology, Phenomenology, Place Theory, Landscape Theory, Urban Ecology, Multispecies Studies, New Materialism, Speculative Realism, Actor-Network Theory, Biopolitics, Postcolonial Theory, Critical Aesthetics, Contemporary Art Theory, Social Practice Art, Spatial Politics, Urban Anthropology, Informality Studies, Urban Marginality, Digital Capitalism, Surveillance Studies, Smart City Theory, Sound Studies, Visual Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Humanistic Geography, Hybrid Geographies, Philosophical Botany, Neuroaesthetics, Perception Theory, Disability Studies, Intersectionality Theory, Utopian Theory, Postmodern Theory, Radical Pedagogy, Globalization Theory, Geopolitics, Marxist Theory, Post-Marxism, Value Theory, Evolutionary Economics, Game Theory, Network Science, Scaling Theory, Complex Systems, Historical Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, Interface Theory, Protocol Theory, Maintenance Studies, Critical Infrastructure Theory, Southern Epistemologies, Indigenous Theory, Territorial Feminism, Latin American Political Ecology, Subaltern Studies, Accelerationism, Materialist Philosophy, Post-Operaismo, Immaterialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Digital Political Economy, Law and Technology, Algorithmic Culture, Urban Media Studies, Spatial Art Theory, Architectural Criticism, Urban Planning Theory, Sustainable Urbanism, Right to the City Theory, Environmental Humanities, Political Theology, Governmentality Studies, Logistics Studies, Data Studies, Institutional Theory.