Kirsten Lloyd

Excerpt: ‘The Common Sense will be the first acquisition made for The University of Edinburgh’s new Contemporary Art Research Collection.  Taking globalisation as its central theme the collection will analyse what the transformation of geographic, political, cultural and economic boundaries has meant in terms of artistic practice.  Though driven by current research undertaken within the School of History of Art, the theme has been selected for its potential to build links across disciplines.   In our first phase of activity this broad topic will be given an explicitly feminist inflection as we focus our attention on the scaffolding and shadows of the formal economy – those hidden dimensions of conventional production involving the maintenance, reproduction and socialisation of people. A common term within feminist political economy, ‘social reproduction’ concerns everything that relates to how we live, survive and thrive, from childrearing and cleaning to education and healthcare. Its contradictory relationship with capital accumulation has become yet more pronounced in response to intensified processes of globalisation and the re-privatisation of previously shared services, responsibilities and risks. That the impact of these changes – including the associated shifts in labour patterns – impacts particularly on the experiences of women is well documented, backed up by the recent prevalence of phrases like the ‘feminisation of poverty/labour/survival’. Our research considers how social reproduction has been negotiated in the field of art.’