Bio 

Drucilla K. Barker (Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1988) is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Women’s & Gender Studies Program. She is a Marxist feminist economist whose research interests are globalization, feminist political economy, and economic anthropology. Her work is interdisciplinary and ranges from examinations of the roles of gender, race and class in social valuations of labor, especially affective labor, to accounts of the financial crises that characterize late global capitalism.

Teaching 

ANTH 208                 Globalization and Development

ANTH/WGST 381    Gender and Globalization

ANTH/WGST 706    Engendering Global Capitalism

ANTH/WGST 772    Gender and Culture

WGST 701                 Feminist Theory

Research 

Dr. Barker’s work follows three interdisciplinary trajectories. It interrogates the nature of labor, especially those types of affective labor named as caring labor. It demystifies economics and demonstrates the importance of gender and intersectionality, and it examines questions around the role of debt as cause of inequality on both an individual and an institutional level. She has recently completed the second edition of Liberating Economics: A Feminist Perspective on Families, Work, and Globalization, written with Suzanne Bergeron and Susan F. Feiner.

Representative Publications 

Books:

Liberating Economics: A Feminist Perspective on Families, Work, and Globalization, 2nd edition, with Suzanne Bergeron and Susan F. Feiner, University of Michigan Press, 2021.

In this brand-new critical analysis of economics, Barker, Bergeron, and Feiner provide a feminist understanding of the economic processes that shape households, labor markets, globalization, and human well-being. With all new and updated chapters, the second edition of Liberating Economics examines recent trends in inequality, global indebtedness, crises of care, labor precarity, and climate change. Taking an interdisciplinary and intersectional feminist approach, the new edition places even more emphasis on the ways that gender, race, class, sexuality, and nationality shape the economy. It also highlights the centrality of social reproduction in economic systems and makes connections between the economic circumstances of women in global North and global South. Throughout, the authors reject the idea that there is no alternative to our current neoliberal market economy and offer alternative ways of thinking about and organizing economic systems to achieve gender-equitable outcomes.

Feminist Economics: Critical Concepts. 4 vols. Drucilla K. Barker and Edith Kuiper, eds. London & New York: Routledge, 2009.

Feminist Economics and the World Bank: History, Theory and Policy, Edith Kuiper and Drucilla K. Barker, eds. London & New York: Routledge, 2006.

Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics, Drucilla K. Barker and Edith Kuiper, eds. New York & London: Routledge, 2003.

Selected Articles and Chapters:

“The Other Side of the Portal: Covid-19 and the Crisis of Social Reproduction,” invited book chapter for Pandemic and the Crisis of Capitalism: A Rethinking Marxism Dossier, edited by the Editorial Collective of Rethinking Marxism, ReMarx Books, 2020. pp. 28 – 36.

“Marxism, Feminism, and the Household,” with Suzanne Bergeron, invited book chapter for Routledge Handbook of Marxian Economics, David M. Brennan, David Kristjanson-Gural, Catherine P. Mulder and Erik K. Olsen, eds. Routledge. 2017. pp. 390-399.

“The Real Wolves of Wall Street: Examining Debt, Austerity, and Accountability Through the Lens of Primitive Accumulation.” International Critical Thought, November 2018, Vol 8, No. 14, pp. 535 – 552. Part of a symposium on the 10th Anniversary of the International Financial Crisis.

Recent Accomplishments 

University of Washington Bothell Labor Colloquium: Social Reproduction Reimagined with The Feminist Radical Political Economy (FRPE) Collective, April 2021. Virtual Roundtable.

Paper Presentation: A Feminist Economist Joins the Conversation, Part of the Session Global Representations and Non-Capitalist Imaginaries, Association for Economic and Social Analysis, July 2021, Virtual Retreat.

Panelist: Social Reproduction Reimagined: A Conversation with the Feminist Radical Political Economy (FRPE) Collective, April 2021 University of Washington at Bothell and June 2021, International Association of Feminist Economics, IAFFE, Virtual Conference.

Member of the Rethinking Marxism editorial board since 2013.