Curating Development: Filipino migrants' investment in Philippine futures

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Around the world, people, mainly women, leave their home place in lower income countries to take care of people and look after other people's homes in higher income countries. This project investigates one group of migrant care workers, women from the Philippines, who live and work in London and Hong Kong, two important destinations for Filipino migrant care and domestic workers. Our aim is to use art events and public exhibitions to increase migrant welfare in the places they live and work and enhance the benefits of migration for themselves, their families and their home country. The work that these migrant domestic and care workers undertake elsewhere enables them to build houses and invest in the future of family and loved ones who are left at home. More broadly their remittances collectively account for a significant percentage of GDP in their home country. Scholars debate whether those remittances contribute to longer term development. However, they generally agree that the development benefits of migration would be substantially greater if migrant rights to a fair wage and good working conditions were protected and if migrants invested not just in personal consumption but in sustainable social and economic enterprises. Working closely in collaboration with our non-academic partners, community based and charitable organisations in London, Hong Kong and Manila, we will run a series of art events and public exhibitions about Filipino migrant care workers. Migrant care workers themselves will be centrally involved in producing and curating the art events and exhibitions. First, using photographic and collage techniques with objects and images from social media, camera phones, posted photographs and personal collections, we will ask migrants to illustrate both their experiences as migrant care workers living abroad and their contributions to development in their home country. We will use the images they produce to engage migrants in conversations both about their everyday concerns and welfare needs and about their future aspirations for themselves, their families and their home country. Second, working with both migrants and our non-academic partners, we will select some of the images they produce to be professionally printed and displayed in a series of public exhibitions to be held in each city. We will also commission two original pieces of art work from Filipino visual artists residing in London and Hong Kong respectively to contribute to the exhibition. Together, the images and art works created and displayed at those events and exhibitions will help to raise public awareness about the vital work that these migrant care workers perform and help us show that by protecting migrant rights and ensuring their welfare we enhance the welfare of those that they care for both in home and in host countries. The art and public exhibitions, together with the workshops we organize around the exhibitions, will also generate discussions among migrants and with policy makers and collectively enable them to identify new ways to increase the longer term benefit and development impact of migrants' investments. Scholars and activists have for some time now actively sought to challenge the view that migrant care and domestic workers are simply 'maids to order' . That has led to a better appreciation for the skills these women acquire and the creativity they exercise in overcoming different sorts of social boundaries and cultural barriers. However, those migrant care workers are still largely left out of conversations about migration and development in their home country. Through novel use of art and public exhibitions this project will bring these creative and resourceful people into that conversation and jump start those long overdue dialogues about development.