When: November 14, 2017
Time: 18-20 Uhr (ST)
Where: Room 410, Invalidentrasse 118, HU-IAAW
Caring for Strangers explores the personal narratives, experiences and aspirations of Filipino medical workers living and working in Singapore and beyond.
Today, the Philippines has become one of the largest exporters of medical workers in the world, with nursing in particular offering many the hope of a lucrative and stable career abroad. This timely volume narrates their stories in a multi-sited ethnography that follows aspiring migrants from Manila’s vibrant nursing schools, where they dream of glamorous, cosmopolitan lives abroad, to a different reality in Singapore’s multicultural hospitals and nursing homes. It also accompanies nurses’ off-duty activities in shopping malls and churches and their rich online lives, where they connect with friends and family around the world and search for future opportunities. Finally, Caring forStrangers follows them back home on a visit to a Filipino village.
Mirroring migrants’ transnational lives, this book offers anthropological insights into the everyday experiences, anxieties and expectations of Filipino medical workers who care for strangers in a global Asian city. It locates their stories within wider debates on migration, labour, care, gender and citizenship, while contributing a new and distinctive perspective to the scholarship on labour migration in Asia.
Caring for Strangers is published by NIAS Press.
https://www.niaspress.dk/books/caring-strangers
About the author:
Megha Amrith is an urban anthropologist and has published on migrant labour, cultural diversity, care, and citizenship in comparative contexts. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Since October 2017, she is a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen for the project ‘Ageing in a Time of Mobility.’
With responses from:
Ma. Rhoda Francisco is a Filipino lawyer who is working as a project manager at Care.com Europe GmbH connecting Filipino nurses to German healthcare employers.
Samia Dinkelaker is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at Universität Osnabrück. Her dissertation project is titled ‘Governing migration through sending states: the case of Indonesia. A transnational ethnography’. She is also a research fellow of the research project ‘The Researchers’ Affects’, which is based at Freie Universität Berlin and Universiät Bern.
