Debating the Politics of Temporary Migrant Labour: a transnational exchange

Developed in a four-year partnership between geographers, migrant advocacy organisations and professional theatre artists, this proposed research seeks to generate substantive, transnational debate on the policies of temporary migrant labour and the politics of domestic caregiving in the United Kingdom, Canada and Philippines. Our work responds directly to the way the old paradigm of permanent immigrant settlement is giving way to temporary or circular migration, and we engage issues related directly to Canada's Live-In Caregiver Program and the current restructuring of immigration policy in the United Kingdom. We suggest the scope of our knowledge exchange (KE) activities is necessary because labour migration from the global south to global north is a transnational issue, and as such, we must reconfigure the scale at which discussions of justice, rights, care and need take place. This project represents an unusual and creative instance of knowledge exchange that disseminates conventional social science in a novel way. We are proposing to take a testimonial theatre production (entitled Nanay) to Manila to bring the experiences of Filipino caregivers into conversation with debates happening within the Philippines. Written as a knowledge vehicle, Nanay transforms traditional qualitative research transcripts into testimonial theatre; our script is based entirely on verbatim monologues taken from interviews conducted over a fifteen year period with Filipino domestic workers, their children, employers, and nanny agents. As social scientists, we turned to testimonial theatre because its embodied quality offers space in which to encourage audiences to think about the world differently, to temporarily suspend judgment, and to extend the terrain of political discussion on temporary migrant labour and the ethics of care in productive ways. The project thus offers one instance where social science has been translated in order to devise affective ways of putting research into greater public debate. Following our KE activities in the Philippines, we will conduct a series of public forums in the cities of Glasgow, London, Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. These forums will be designed to bring together policy makers, migrant advocacy groups, and researchers in order for us to report on the debates that took place in the Philippines, and to facilitate dialogue on immigration policy and the precarity of migrant workers in the United Kingdom and Canada. In the Philippines, we will be working with members of the Ateno de Manila University; in Canada, we will continue our long-standing partnership with the Philippine Women Centre of British Columbia; and in the United Kingdom, these activities will be orchestrated in collaboration with the Glasgow Refugee, Asylum, and Migration Network, and London's Kalayaan centre. Our development of innovative KE pedagogy and collaborations with advocacy groups is motivated by the desire to create new ways to affect change and to produce opportunities in which we can model (and not just profess) a more egalitarian space for political debate.

There are several key stakeholder and user groups that stand to benefit from our knowledge exchange activities. The central objective of this research is to bring important perspectives to on-going debates on temporary labour migration in the UK, Canada, and Philippines. Our work will have a direct impact for Filipino families of domestic workers in Canada and the UK. These families will be contacted and invited to participate in the public production of our testimonial play, in which migrant workers narrate their experiences in ways that are otherwise difficult, making a critical contribution to deepening and broadening discussion within the Philippines about the long-term impact of temporary labour migration on Filipino families. Performances of Nanay will be accompanied by public talkback sessions. In our previous productions of Nanay in Vancouver and Berlin, these talkbacks produced extraordinary conversations and exchange between user groups (employers, migrants, advocacy organisations and policy makers) who do not normally have the opportunity to dialogue on the issues. These forums will be video recorded and published online. Second, our subsequent public forums in the United Kingdom and Canada will have direct impact for policy makers, civil society partners, migrants, and researchers-who will be brought together to dialogue on issues pertaining to a new global paradigm of temporary migration. Thirdly, we believe that this project represents a significant effort to further the development and practice of innovative knowledge exchange pedagogy within the social sciences. This builds directly on the project's existing and considerable academic and non-academic impact. Responding to the intense interest across the social sciences in knowledge translation, we have devised this project to maximize public effect. In this respect, the broader academic community will benefit through our on-going publication on the project. We will submit a journal article to the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and a working paper to the Metropolis project-an international network for public policy development and which circulates its working papers within an extensive network of government agencies, researchers and advocacy groups. Lastly, this project will have lasting effects for Caleb Johnston and Geraldine Pratt; enabling them to continue a highly productive research and writing partnership, and in doing so, strengthen the international exchange between researchers at the University of Glasgow and University of British Columbia.