Federici co-founded the International Feminist Collective, which launched the campaign for Wages for Housework in the ’70s, the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, and the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) anti-death penalty project. She is a Professor of Political Philosophy and International Studies, Emerita, at Hofstra University.

Her talk, “Feminism, Social Reproduction, and the Reconstruction of the Commons,” found Betts Auditorium packed, with standing and floor-seating room only. Federici was introduced by Esther Schor, who serves as chair of the Humanities Council, director of Gauss Seminars in Criticism, and Brooke Holmes, Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classic. Jeannine Matt Pitarresi, Program Manager of the Humanities Council and Gauss Seminars in Criticism, organized the event with Holmes.

Federici began the talk by situating the moment of both the “Israeli war and the U.S. and Europe’s war on migrants.” In true Federici fashion, she also situated her work by discussing recent feminist activism, reporting, and scholarship: anti-logging efforts in India and Vandana Shiva’s reporting on the issue, Verónica Gago’s book Feminist International: How to Change Everything, communal kitchens in Latin America, and territorial feminism among indigenous North American women.

“There can be no commons without community,” Federici shared to begin exploring the topic of the day. The commons refers to shared resources, including natural resources and knowledge resources among others. Federici also referred to “commoning,” a process of creating collective interest and mutual bonds. At the lecture, she said, “Commoning means struggle is something that produces affective relation.” This is to say that struggling together can create emotional ties between agitators.

Following the talk, the audience proposed questions of whether the state could be a site of commoning, on resisting versus going outside of capitalist social reproduction, on institutions, such as organized religions,that have been historically oppressive, holding seeds of new commons, dissolution of the labor and leisure binary, as well as on what mobilization is possible inside the classroom, especially given its proclivity for producing affective relations.

The following day, after attending the Princeton Walkout In Solidarity with Palestine, Federici hosted a seminar, “The Body as a Site of Resistance,” in which the texts of discussion were her two papers “Feminism And the Politics of the Commons” and “We Have Seen Other Countries and Have Another Culture: Migrant Domestic Workers and the International Production and Circulation of Feminist Knowledge and Organization,” as well as an interview with Federici featured in the appendix of Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery.

One question asked in the seminar was on the politicization of the body and how Black rest, refusal, and resistance to productivity interact with these concepts, to which Federici responded, “I don’t apply the concept of productivity to our struggle. Overwork [causes] no space and time for regeneration. This is what makes us sick. This is what makes us depressed.” Other questions in discussion were on reconciling solidarity with those holding less social power who are organizing autonomously, affective ties in exploitative situations, bourgeois commoning, pleasure, and Sarah Ahmed’s work on the killjoy in relation to Federici’s work.