Social reproduction Jack Norton and Cindi Katz City University of New York, USA Social reproduction encompasses the daily and long-term reproduction of the means of pro- duction, the labor power to make them work, and the social relations that hold them in place. Under capitalism, social reproduction entails the production and reproduction of the capitalist and laboring classes as such, the means and arenas of capital circulation, and the physical and discursive conditions to maintain the production and reproduction process over time and across space. It includes both the reproduction of capitalist social relations as a whole, along with the sphere of everyday life, which may appear outside of the relationship between waged labor and capital but is wholly entwined with it. In other words, social reproduction includes the production and reproduction of a diferentiated labor force and the cultural forms and practices that at once maintain these diferences and make them common sense. These distinctions may be constructed as sectoral or related to skill, educa- tion, and training, but they mobilize diferences associated with gender, race, sexuality, and nation even as they produce them. The material social practices associated with social reproduction build upon, reproduce, and reshape inequalities that enable and enhance capital accumulation, racial capitalism, and patriarchy among other means of uneven development. Social reproduction is at once the “feshy, messy” stuf of everyday life and the structured practices that unfold in dialectical relation to The International Encyclopedia of Geography. Edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg1107 production. These material social practices take place across geographic and temporal scales, encompassing daily and generational relations that are as much intimate as global in their efects and charge (Marston 2004). The form and con- tent of social reproduction, as much as the means of its provision, are forged through struggle, making it a contradictory realm of both the continuation of capitalist social relations and the possibility of their transformation. Geographers have been attentive to geographical variations in what constitutes social reproduction (e.g., Cravey 2003; Laurie, Andolina, and Radclife 2004; Mullings 2009; Brickell and Yeoh 2014; Meehan and Strauss 2015; Kofman and Raghuram 2015), and marked the environment as part of the means of production, thereby recognizing envi- ronmental care and rehabilitation as part of social reproduction (Di Chiro 2008; Marks 2015). Production and social reproduction are histor- ically as well as geographically contingent. What is required of a labor force – and what is con- sidered socially necessary labor – varies by time and place, as do the work and other resources required to reproduce the labor force (or an individual worker) on a daily, monthly, yearly, and generational basis. What may be required of a worker in New York City will difer from what is required for the daily reproduction of a worker in Guangzhou. Among other things, the cost of living will difer, the clothes one is expected to wear may be diferent, educational requirements will vary, and so on. What is considered neces- sary for the production of any given labor force is a social and political economic question, and changes with and alongside the shifting ground of capitalist social relations in any given time and place. This dialectical relationship between