The DOI matches its Crossref record; 47 of the 48 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Circulating sadness: witnessing Filipina mothers' stories of family separation
Open accessAbstract
I reflect upon a collaborative research project with activist groups at the Kalayaan Centre in Vancouver, in which we collected stories of family separation, loss, grief and traumatic returns to more fully trace the impacts of the Canadian temporary work visa program (the Live-in Caregiver Program), which brings mostly Filipino women to Canada as live-in domestic workers. Our hope is that these stories of maternal loss will find an audience and evoke an affective response among policy-makers and a wide public beyond the Filipino community in ways that earlier critiques of the program have not. The article draws upon critical literatures on trauma and testimony to consider some of the risks of circulating these kinds of testimonials, and the possibilities of moving the audience from the position of spectator to witness. I then work closely with two mothers' testimonies to experiment with ways of establishing a ‘more difficult contract’ between those who give testimony and those who receive it, one that creates a complex ethical and political space in which the audience is required to register their own complicity in the other's loss or grief. I consider of the possibilities of assembling stories that tell a collective history without reducing the complexity of individual's lives into the same sad story of victimization, and of telling these stories so that the categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother are exhausted and the listener/reader is forced to listen/read more closely, just beyond the expected story line or cultural cliché.
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“The result of this study supports the healthy immigrant effect (ie, migrant workers arrive healthy as indicated during predeparture medical screening); however, their health status declines during their stay in Canada [21,44-46].”
From Effects of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) on Mental Health and Resiliency of Migrant Live-in Caregivers in Canada: Pilot Randomized Wait List Controlled Trial (2022) · cites this paper as [44]
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Citations
Cites
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“This fragment of analysis gestures towards a rich field of emotional proximities and distances, unsettling the integrity of the viewer and disrupting what Cathy Caruth (1996) has characterized as ‘facile empathy and a rush to comprehension’.”
BackgroundServants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work
Avila, E., & Parreñas, R. S. (2002) · Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · doi:10.2307/3089067 · Cited by 2,544
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- Macklin A., 1992, McGill Law Journal, 37, 681
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Chapter 9 Fear - The Calculative Making of Technologies
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Part I Conclusion: Technocapitalism - An Affective Economy of Promises and Performances
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Chapter 8 Love - The Careful Making of Technologies
Coban, A. (2024) · Sozial- und Kulturgeographie · doi:10.14361/9783839467077-013
Chapter 7 Hustle - The Making of Technologies in Kenya
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Making: The Careful and Calculative Manufacturing of Professional Products
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Chapter 10 Resisting - Incalculable and Unloved Working Conditions
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Chapter 11 Conclusion: Performing Technocapitalism
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Storytelling: Affective Promises and Performances about Technology
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Chapter 6 Marketing Poverty - The Conservatism of Social Impact Technologies
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Chapter 5 Writing Media Stories - The Socio-Technical Care Work of Storytelling
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Chapter 3 The Normativity of Kenya's Tech Story
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Chapter 4 Tangible Tech Stories - The Embodied Performances of Visitor Tours
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Chapter 1 Introduction: The Postcolonial Making of Technology
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Chapter 2 The Politics of Postcolonial Technology Entrepreneurship
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Metadata
- Authors
- Pratt, G.
- Affiliations
- University of British Columbia (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Pratt, Geraldine
- ORCID
- Pratt, Geraldine
- Venue
- Gender, Place & Culture
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2009-02
- Volume
- 16
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 3-22
- ISSN
- 0966-369X (ISSN-L)
- 1360-0524
- OpenAlex
- W2037905915
- Cited by
- 151
- References
- 48
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 25 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 13 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 14 · 2014: 10 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 11
- FWCI
- 19.41
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- public-domain
- Locations
- Gender Place & Culture (publishedVersion, public-domain)
- Funders
- National Taiwan University
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Migration and Labor Dynamics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Memory, Trauma, and Testimony
- Social Sciences › Demography › Diaspora, migration, transnational identity
- Keywords
- family separation, Filipino migrant women, Live-in Caregiver Program, temporary work visas, maternal loss, grief, trauma, witness testimony, witnessing, spectatorship, ethics of testimony, collective history, migrant activism
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