The state of/and depletion

As a feminist geographer, I have long been inspired by research and thinking in feminist political economy.I have also been one of the many readers-and indeed beneficiaries-of Shirin Rai's coauthored article on "depletion through social reproduction" (DSR) (Rai et al. 2014).In fact, it was so foundational that a large international team of geographers, anthropologists, international development scholars, nutrition economists, environmental scientists, and artists, including myself, applied for a UKRI grant titled "Depleted by Debt?Focusing a Gendered Lens on Climate Resilience, Credit, and Nutrition in Translocal Cambodia and South India."The project ran between 2019 and 2022.We explored how small-scale credit, particularly microfinance, is exalted in mainstream development thinking as a key means of supporting women and their families in dealing with daily, ongoing, and often slow-onset climate disasters.Facing growing crises of agricultural productivity from droughts and floods, and taking primary responsibility for the nutritional well-being of their households, women are being targeted as credit borrowers globally.We were concerned that "climate resilience" should not come at the cost of women's emotional and bodily depletion through processes of household nutrition provisioning.Such was the importance of Rai's work that Vincent Guermond, Nithya Natarajan, and I subsequently organized a special issue of the journal Antipode on replenishing geographical thinking on depletion through and of social reproduction.Rai was kind enough to write an afterword.We wrote the editorial introduction (Guermond et al. 2025a), and our own paper (Guermond et al. 2025b) largely before Rai's book (Rai 2024) was published, so this review gives me the opportunity to think more about what the book offers in three main but not exhaustive areas.First, I want to mention the depletion that is entailed through social reproductive labor, and the wider structural depletion of social reproduction that, in capitalist times, is being supercharged.As Rai urges the reader, it is crucial to center the human costs of social reproduction for those undertaking it, and