Finding a Home Away from Home: An Explorative Study on the Use of Social Space with the Voices of Foreign Domestic Workers in Hong Kong

Abstract

Being far away from friends and family, and sometimes facing hardships at work and in society, foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong have a strong need for access to social space to gather together and to empower each other. At the same time, social space can satisfy their needs for privacy, which has been stripped away from them due to the mandatory live-in rule in the employer’s home. In view of this, we devised an explorative case study to probe into the significance and usage patterns of social space by foreign domestic workers and report our findings using their own statements and experiences. We found that the dual-functional social space is an important physical attribute that aided the development of their social identity, and that they have achieved partial success in sharing—or taking over—the social space that was never intended for the sake of their well-being.