 | Families Apart: Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love Subjects: Foreign workers Philippine -- Canada; Women foreign workers -- Canada; Women household employees -- Canada; Filipinos -- Canada; Working mothers -- Canada; Immigrant families -- Canada; Mother and child -- Philippines; Philippines -- Emigration and immig; In a developing nation like the Philippines, many mothers provide for their families by traveling to a foreign country to care for someone elseOCOs. Families Apart focuses on Filipino overseas workers in Canada to reveal what such arrangements mean for families on both sides of the global divide. The outcome of Geraldine PrattOCOs collaboration with the Philippine Women Centre of British Columbia, this study documents the difficulties of family separation and the problems that children have when they reunite with their mothers in Vancouver. Aimed at those who have lived this experience, those who directly benefit from it, and those who simply stand by and watch, Families Apart shows how Filipino migrant domestic workersOCooften mothers themselvesOCoare caught between competing neoliberal policies of sending and receiving countries and how, rather than paying rich returns, their ambitions as migrants often result in social and economic exclusion for themselves and for their children. This argument takes shape as an open-ended series of encounters, moving between a singular academic voice and the OC weOCO of various research collaborations, between Vancouver and the Philippines, and between genres of OC evidence-basedOCO social scientific research, personal testimony, theatrical performance, and nonfictional narrative writing. Through these experiments with different modes of storytelling, Pratt seeks to transform frameworks of perception, to create and collect sympathetic witnessesOCoin short, to promote a wide-ranging public discussion and debate about a massive worldwide shift in family (and nonfamily) relations of intimacy and care. |
