Care Worker Activism with Professor Ethel Tungohan

Perspectives: A Journal of Political Economy and Social Democracy

Perspectives Journal chats with Broadbent Institute Policy Fellow Ethel Tungohan; Canada Research Chair in Canadian Migration Policy, Impacts and Activism, and Professor of Politics at York University.
Her new book released late this summer is called Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement-Building and Communities of Care, published by University of Illinois Press.
Care Activism is about workers empowerment, and not in the traditional sense that most would think of through things like a labour union.
Care Activism challenges the stereotype of a downtrodden migrant caregivers by showing that care workers have distinct ways of caring for themselves, for each other, and for the larger transnational community of care workers and their families.
Professor Tungohan illuminates how the goals and desires of migrant care worker activists goes beyond political considerations like policy changes and overturning power structures.
From the militant activist marches in protest of policy change, to beauty pageants that challenges stereotypes with unique Filipino cultural camp and humour, while emboldening a sense of community, to the use of the Catholic church as an organizing and value-informing institution, Care Activism is a very rare look into an otherwise hidden part of the working-class.
You can read an excerpt of Care Activism at perspectivesjournal.ca
Other works referenced in this episode:
Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898–1941, by Genevieve Alva Clutario (Duke University Press, 2023), available here.
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, by Benedict Anderson (Verso, originally published 1983), available here.
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, by Vincent Bevins (Public Affairs, 2023), available here.