Dr Alessandra Mezzadri

Alessandra is a feminist political economist of global development, writing on global production, work, and social reproduction. 

She read Economics, Political Economy and Business at La Sapienza, Rome, and Development, Gender, and Labour Studies at SOAS. Her first research project focused on the ‘making’ of cheap labour in India’s garment industry, its labour regimes, and productive/reproductive links to the informal economy. Her first book, the Sweatshop Regime, has excellent reviews, including in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), Antipode, Global Labour Journal, ILR Review, Economic & Political Weekly. She has written on labour grievances in the Sweatshop Regime in the ILO report The Social Life of Industrial Disputes. 

She also works on Marxian and feminist political economy theories and methods and the global political economy of work. Her work on the social reproduction of value has featured in journals like Radical Philosophy, Antipode, Environment and Planning F. Her work on methods has led to her second book project, the edited volume Marx in the Field, which is very positively reviewed in Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, Capital and Class, Progress in Development Studies, and British Journal of Industrial Relations. Her work on the global political economy of work has led to her third book project, the co-edited Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work. Alessandra has worked extensively on the political economy of COVID-19 from a feminist lens centred on social reproduction and intersecting class, gender, and race inequalities. This work features in journals like Organization, and Development and Change, and is inspiring her fourth book project, provisionally titled Cartographies of Social Reproduction and Global Development as Social Factory. 

Alessandra has collaborated with international organisations, including ILO and UNIDO; with INGO and labour unions, including ActionAid, Labour Behind the Label, War on Want, SEWA and Cividep India; and with global development research or education centres like UNU-WIDER and the Global Labour University. She is co-founder of the Labour Transfer summer school. She is Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies. 

At SOAS, Alessandra teaches on theories of development; political economy of trade and inequalities; global supply-chain capitalism, work, ecology; feminist political economy & gender and development; and contemporary India. She welcomes PhD applications in the areas of India’s informal economy; global supply-chain capitalism, work, and development; global feminist political economy and social reproduction; labour standards and modern slavery in global industries.

Programmes Convened

• MSc Development Studies (Gender)  

Modules Convened

• Feminist Political Economy and Global Development
• Global Commodity Chains, Production Networks and Informal Work
• Introduction to Global Development

Alessandra also teaches in:

• Theory Policy and Practice of Development
• Political Economy of Development
• Political Ecology of Development
• Introduction to Political Economy of Development 

I published extensively on the political economy of the garment industry, globally and in India; on the informal economy and processes of labour informalisation; on feminist political economy theories, methodologies, and methods of research; and on the global political economy of COVID-19 through the lens of social reproduction. My first book, the Sweatshop Regime, provides a detailed account of the garment sweatshop in India, as a regime of exploitative social relations shaped by multiple masters; crossing productive and reproductive, formal and informal realms and spaces; and with harsh health implications for the labouring bodies of the workers involved. The book has excellent reviews in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), Antipode, Global Labour Journal, Millennial Asia, South Asia Research, ILR Review, and Economic and Political Weekly.

The Sweatshop Regime is based on extensive fieldwork experience in India, across urban, peri-urban and rural outposts of the garment industry, where I deployed multiple methods of data collection, ranging from semi-quantitative surveys, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and life-histories. During over fifteen years of research work in the sector, I have collected both business histories as well as workers’ interviews and life histories, across varied echelons of the formal and informal economy. I have researched both large and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in a variety of industrial clusters. I studied labour contractors and traders, and factory labour as well as home-based work. Based on my findings, I have also engaged with global policy debates on CSR, labour standards, ethical trade initiatives and modern slavery.

My interest in methodologies for the study of exploitation and in support of fieldwork centred on social justice inspired my second book project, which is the edited collection Marx in the Field (Anthem 2021). This book shows the contemporary relevance of Marxian concepts and categories of analysis for the study of our global present. The collection includes chapters by leading scholars of global political economy who work on different regions of the world economy, and who reflect on the challenges of field-based research for critical global development scholars; on the synergies between Marxian analysis and other radical theoretical traditions; and on the strengths and limitations of different methods of data collection for ‘doing’ political economy in practice. The book is very positively reviewed in Whatisworthreading, in the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, Capital and Class and Progress in Development Studies.

In the last few years, reflecting on my field-based experience, I have returned to theory. First, I have written extensively on the feminist political economy analysis of value and labour surplus extraction. Through an engagement with early and more recent debates and frameworks focusing on social reproduction, I have developed a ‘value theory of inclusion’ which accounts for the role that social reproduction plays in value generation and exploitation. In this body of work, published in outlets like Radical Philosophy and Antipode, among others, I show how feminist takes of value are crucial to understand the world of informal labour across our planet. Secondly, I have written on the feminist political economy of COVID-19. Using social reproduction as method, I explored how the pandemic has reinforced neoliberalism; restructured life-sustaining sectors, the world of work, and deepened racial and gendered inequalities and exclusion, manufacturing surplus populations.

I am currently co-editing a Handbook on the Global Political Economy of Work. I welcome PhD applications in the areas of India’s informal economy; global supply chain capitalism, work and global development; global feminist political economy and social reproduction; and critical approaches to modern slavery in global industries.

• Scholar profile