Debating the Politics of Temporary Migrant Labour: a transnational exchange

这项拟议的研究是地理学家、移民倡导组织和专业戏剧艺术家之间为期四年的合作伙伴关系制定的，旨在就联合王国、加拿大和菲律宾的临时移民劳工政策和国内照料政治引发实质性的跨国辩论。我们的工作直接回应了永久移民安置的旧模式正在让位于临时或循环移民的方式，我们直接参与了与加拿大的同居照顾者计划和英国当前移民政策重组相关的问题。我们建议，我们知识交流活动的范围是必要的，因为从全球南方向全球北方的劳动力移徙是一个跨国问题，因此，我们必须调整讨论正义、权利、关怀和需要的规模。这一项目代表了以一种新颖的方式传播传统社会科学的知识交流的不同寻常和创造性的实例。我们建议在马尼拉上演一部名为《纳奈》的纪念剧目，将菲律宾护理者的经历与菲律宾国内正在进行的辩论联系起来。作为一种知识载体，Nanay将传统的定性研究记录转变为证言戏剧；我们的剧本完全基于15年来对菲律宾家政工人、他们的孩子、雇主和保姆代理人进行的逐字独白。作为社会科学家，我们求助于证言剧场，因为它所体现的品质提供了空间，鼓励观众以不同的方式思考世界，暂时停止评判，并以富有成效的方式扩大关于临时移民劳动力和关怀伦理的政治讨论的领域。因此，该项目提供了一个翻译社会科学的例子，以便设计出情感上的方式，将研究纳入更大的公共辩论中。继我们在菲律宾的KE活动之后，我们将在格拉斯哥、伦敦、多伦多、温哥华和蒙特利尔等城市举办一系列公共论坛。这些论坛旨在将政策制定者、移民倡导团体和研究人员聚集在一起，以便我们报告在菲律宾进行的辩论，并促进关于移民政策和联合王国和加拿大移民工人早产问题的对话。在菲律宾，我们将与Ateno de Manila大学的成员合作；在加拿大，我们将继续与不列颠哥伦比亚省菲律宾妇女中心建立长期伙伴关系；在联合王国，这些活动将与格拉斯哥难民、庇护和移民网络以及伦敦的卡拉扬中心合作安排。我们开发创新的KE教学法并与倡导团体合作的动机是，我们希望创造新的方式来影响变化，并创造机会，在其中我们可以为政治辩论建立(而不仅仅是公开宣称)更平等的空间。

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.