Affiliated Researcher, Feminist theory, social reproduction, and childhood studies
Ph.D., York University, Toronto 

Email: sueferguson@sympatico.ca

Biographical Summary

Susan Ferguson is Associate Professor Emerita at Wilfrid Laurier in Canada and Adjunct Professor with the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Rutgers University. Before joining the academy fulltime in 2005, she was a senior writer for Canada's national news magazine, Maclean's. Her areas of scholarly research and writing span feminist theory, childhood and capitalism, media studies, and Canadian political discourse. Ferguson is a leading contributor to the renewal of Social Reproduction Theory, a critical political economic approach to understanding the interrelations between capitalist class exploitation and social oppressions of race, gender, cisheterosexuality and more. Her articles discussing SRT have been translated for German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Turkish publications. Her book, Women and Work: Social Reproduction, Feminism and Labour, published in 2020 by Pluto Press, has been widely read and translated into Spanish by Sylone/Viento Sur, with translations into Portuguese and Polish forthcoming. Ferguson co-edits the Pluto book series, Mapping Social Reproduction, and serves on the editorial board of the webzine, Midnight Sun. She moved to Houston, Texas, in 2019 where she now lives.

Current Research

Ferguson’s on-going book project is titled Capitalist Childhoods, Anti-Capitalist Children: The Social Reproduction of Childhood. This project analyzes the nature and meanings of children's experiences as players, learners and workers in modern capitalist societies. Viewing these experiences as both forms of creative activity and modes of alienation, it explores childhood as a complex site of capitalist social reproduction, and considers the implications that childish play may have for anti-oppression organizing and liberation.

Selected Publications

Book
Ferguson, S. 2020. Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction. London: Pluto;
Toronto: Between the Lines (US and Canada).

Articles, Essays and Chapters in Books
Ferguson, S., Sara Farris and Tithi Bhattacharya. 2022. Social Reproduction Feminism. In The Sage
Handbook of Marxism, ed. Beverley Skeggs et al. London: Brill, pp. 45-67.

Ferguson, S. 2022. Engaging Federici on Marx, Capitalism and Social Reproduction. New Politics
72: 9-15.

Ferguson, S. 2020. Notes on Sophie Lewis: Wombs, Production, and Value. Spectre 1(1): 62-72.

Ferguson, S. 2017. Children, Childhood and Capitalism. In Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping
Class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya. London: Pluto, pp. 112-30.

Ferguson, S. 2016. Intersectionality and Social Reproduction Feminisms: Toward an Integrative
Ontology. Historical Materialism 24(2): 38-60.

Ferguson, S. and David McNally. 2014. Class and its Global Reproduction in the Age of Austerity.
Socialist Register, 2015: 1-23.

Ferguson, S. and David McNally. 2013. Capital, Labour-Power, and Gender-Relations:
Introduction to the Historical Materialism Edition of Marxism and the Oppression of Women. In
Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, 2nd edition, Lise Vogel. London:
Brill, pp. xvii toxl.

Ferguson, S. 1999. Building on the Strengths of the Socialist Feminist Tradition. Critical Sociology
25(1): 1-15.

Ferguson, S. 1999. The Radical Liberalism of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminism. Canadian Journal
of Political Science 32(3): 427-50.