Care Activism

Abstract

Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement-Building, and Communities of Care is a landmark book examining migrant domestic workers’ activism in Canada, in transnational forums such as the International Labor Conference’s Discussions on the Convention of Domestic Work and the International Migrants Alliance meetings, and in the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Through the use of feminist interpretive methods, the author undertakes ethnographic research involving 136 one-on-one interviews and participant observation and observant participation of different moments of migrant domestic workers activism, ultimately illustrating how at the heart of it, migrant domestic worker activism is rooted in care activism. As activists, migrant domestic workers desire more than policy changes to engender material improvements in their lives. Rather, their activism revolves around the creation of communities of care that help them and their families survive and even thrive despite arduous working and living conditions, prolonged family separation, and acrimonious experiences with family reunification. In using “care activism” as an analytical framework, the book shows how affective forms of relationships inform the way migrant domestic workers interact with and relate to each other. Migrant domestic worker organizations become crucial spaces where migrant domestic workers become dissident friends who collectively contest harmful policies and structures and who bear witness to each other’s journeys.