The Affective Geographies Of Social Reproduction: The Case Of Athens Under Austerity

This dissertation titled “Affective geographies of social reproduction: the case of Athens under austerity”, explores the ways women’s and feminized subjects’ socially reproductive labor, in the context of everyday life and solidarity organizing in Athens, is socio-spatially performed, organized, and experienced under austerity. The dissertation introduces Athens as a locus of original knowledge production, centering social reproduction and affect in research on the affective dimensions of the austerity ‘crisis’, and on spatialized processes of resistance and anti-capitalist commoning against austerity urbanism. The dissertation covers the period from 2005 to 2021, providing an alternative, expanded timeline of austerity in the Athenian context, focusing on the lives of women and feminized subjects living, working and organizing in its underprivileged downtown neighborhoods: Omonia, Exarcheia, Sepolia Agios Panteleimonas, Gkyzi, Kypseli, Ano Patisia and Kato Patisia. Through its research questions, the dissertation addresses: the ways everyday socially productive labor, performed by women and feminized subjects, is vital to placemaking and the right to the city in Athens; the way women and feminized subjects navigate, process and produce the Athenian urban through affective, emotional, relational, and embodied understandings of the self and community in the city-in-crisis; and they ways women’s and feminized subjects everyday struggles for survival over social reproduction, and against austerity and neoliberalism, inform expanded understandings of the political and of the right to the city. Within the context of feminist and critical urban geography, the dissertation answers these questions by synthesizing a theoretical framework of social reproduction and affect in a context of decolonial knowledge production and critical historiography, utilizing digital geohumanities methods to analyze primary data from fieldwork conducted between June 2021 to April 2022.