Search results

"Tungohan's project traces the arrival of migrant care workers in Canada beginning in the early twentieth century through to the contemporary age in which Filipina migrant care workers constitute nearly 95% of all live-in caregivers in the country. Within that timeline, the project concentrates more fully on the emergent migrant care worker activism which has led to institutional policy changes with both the Foreign Domestics Movement (FDM) and the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) -- programs that have placed strict terms on workers. Unlike other migrant worker groups, migrant care workers have been inordinately successful with their activism; besides policy changes, migrant care worker activism has created greater public awareness regarding the rights of migrant care workers, and has formed new organizations that meet the needs of migrant care workers in ways that sending and receiving states cannot or will not. Incorporating seven years of primary and archival research, Tungohan's project examines the types of organizing currently taking place among migrant care workers, the internal dynamics of such organizing, as well as the different activist sites, strategies, and short- and long-term goals that define migrant care worker activism. Through this specified focus on Canadian migrant care workers, Tungohan's project makes greater connections to the role migrant workers play in Western societies. Care activism challenges the stereotype of downtrodden migrant caregivers by showing that care workers have distinct ways of caring for themselves, for each other, and for the larger transnational community of care workers and their families. Ethel Tungohan illuminates how the goals and desires of migrant care worker activists goes beyond political considerations like policy changes and overturning power structures. Through practices of subversive friendships and being there for each other, care activism acts as an extension of the daily work that caregivers do, oftentimes also instilling practices of resistance and critical hope among care workers. At the same time, the communities created by care activism help migrant caregivers survive and even thrive in the face of arduous working and living conditions and the pains surrounding family separation. As Tungohan shows, care activism also unifies caregivers to resist society's legal and economic devaluations of care and domestic work by reaffirming a belief that they, and what they do, are important and necessary."

"Tungohan's project traces the arrival of migrant care workers in Canada beginning in the early twentieth century through to the contemporary age in which Filipina migrant care workers constitute nearly 95% of all live-in caregivers in the country. Within that timeline, the project concentrates more fully on the emergent migrant care worker activism which has led to institutional policy changes with both the Foreign Domestics Movement (FDM) and the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) -- programs that have placed strict terms on workers. Unlike other migrant worker groups, migrant care workers have been inordinately successful with their activism; besides policy changes, migrant care worker activism has created greater public awareness regarding the rights of migrant care workers, and has formed new organizations that meet the needs of migrant care workers in ways that sending and receiving states cannot or will not. Incorporating seven years of primary and archival research, Tungohan's project examines the types of organizing currently taking place among migrant care workers, the internal dynamics of such organizing, as well as the different activist sites, strategies, and short- and long-term goals that define migrant care worker activism. Through this specified focus on Canadian migrant care workers, Tungohan's project makes greater connections to the role migrant workers play in Western societies. Care activism challenges the stereotype of downtrodden migrant caregivers by showing that care workers have distinct ways of caring for themselves, for each other, and for the larger transnational community of care workers and their families. Ethel Tungohan illuminates how the goals and desires of migrant care worker activists goes beyond political considerations like policy changes and overturning power structures. Through practices of subversive friendships and being there for each other, care activism acts as an extension of the daily work that caregivers do, oftentimes also instilling practices of resistance and critical hope among care workers. At the same time, the communities created by care activism help migrant caregivers survive and even thrive in the face of arduous working and living conditions and the pains surrounding family separation. As Tungohan shows, care activism also unifies caregivers to resist society's legal and economic devaluations of care and domestic work by reaffirming a belief that they, and what they do, are important and necessary"--

This article unearths hidden narratives that have been ignored in care migration research by using intersectional, decolonial and queer approaches. I examine the following: the accounts of a child of a migrant caregiver versus the child of a migrant caregiver's employer; caregiver 'Clara's' experience when working for an employer who was a surrogate grandmother; and caregiver 'Linda's' lived experiences of being in a same-sex partnership in Canada while still being legally married to a man in the Philippines. Ultimately, I show how care migration research benefits from considering the 'spectral histories' that are part of people's encounters with care migration.

AbstractThis article highlights the manifold ways that migrants strategically use their social networks in order to survive in Alberta with compromised legal status. The conditionality of their status is affected by individual encounters and by new policy developments, showing that their ability to control their life trajectories is constrained by factors beyond their control. Nevertheless, although they experienced high amounts of stress because of their situations, the role played by cognitive processes, which include imagining, strategizing, and what I call "inter‐provincial legal consciousness", allowed them to exercise agency. These processes allowed them to build communities and networks of support and to imagine potential life paths in other provinces through other provinces' provincial nominee programmes.

Using the results of ethnographic research and focus group interviews with Filipino temporary foreign workers in Alberta, Canada, the goal of this article is to bring temporary foreign workers into academic and policy discussions by critically assessing how they fare at different stages of the migration process. Such analysis shows the strengths of ideational, affective and structural factors in determining temporary foreign workers' motivations and goals. Ultimately, this article shows that temporary foreign workers reconstruct belonging and remake citizenship by making membership claims in Canada on the basis of their economic and social contributions to the country. Such claims, however, are grounded in dual modes of belonging in both Canada and in the Philippines. Their participation in migrants' rights organizations that endeavour to provide temporary foreign workers with pathways to permanent residency shows their belief in their 'right to have rights' (Isin, 2008).

AbstractI argue in this article that migrant workers' resistance to neoliberalism, as seen through their participation in the migrant organizations highlights their ability to establish 'spaces of power' amid debilitating living and working conditions. This, then, illustrates how feminism in the 21st century is alive and well. In fact, the strengths of their activism show the transformative and radical possibilities of feminism by highlighting that structural transformations, and not only liberal attempts at inclusion, are necessary for gender justice.