AHRC The Footsteps Project

Researchers:

Professor Pnina Werbner (Keele) (PI)
Dr. Deirdre McKay (Keele)
Claudia Liebelt (Keele)
Dr. Mark Johnson (Hull)
Dr. Alicia Pingol (Hull)

The Footsteps project is a multi-sited collaborative project between the universities of Keele and Hull, funded by the AHRC within the framework of the Diaspora Programme. It centres on the international migration of millions of Filipina women, to work as nurses, domestic caregivers , maidsand other domestic workers throughout the world.

The Project is divided in two. At Keele University  the study is of Christian Filipina women labour migrants travelling to the Holy Land (Israel) as carers. At the University of Hull the study is of Muslim Filipinas travelling to Saudi Arabia.

The project challenges a dominant scholarly and popular discourse that views these migrants merely as economically deprived and semi-educated passive victims, who endure harsh working conditions and unjust legal regimes in order to remit a few meagre dollars back home. It builds on pioneering work about forms of subjectification and emotional labour endured by Filipinas as ‘maids to order,’ as they seek to become agents of their own destiny. Rather than victimisation, the project aims to disclose the rich cultural and religious lives of Filipinas in the diaspora by studying them as cosmopolitan travellers who develop and maintain identity, community and international networks across national borders and cultural boundaries.

Key aims of the project are:

1. to draw on interdisciplinary resources in anthropology, religious studies, law, and human geography;
2. to make a distinctive contribution by focusing on the religious and celebratory worlds of Filipina women diasporics;
3. to facilitate a discourse on domestic caring with caring agencies and migrant organisations;
4. to contribute to the ongoing discourse on new diasporas through a detailed comparative study of one important migrant transnational community;
5. to contribute to the international debate on religious transnationalism and global religiosity;
6. to develop new approaches to the study of gender and religious transnationalism

Keele University

In the Footsteps of Jesus: Sociality, Caring, and the Religious Imagination in the Filipina Diaspora

Commonly in studies of diaspora, ‘home’ is assumed to be a place of origin. But for Filipinos travelling to places holy to Christianity these homes of the religious imagination are discovered as real places of worship: Jerusalem, Rome, the River Jordan, the Garden of Gesthemane, the Sea of Galilee, become places of pilgrimage and baptism. Filipinos overseas build up close, newly formed social networks through churches, participating in a global network visited by peripatetic preachers from the Phillipines. In Israel Filipino born-again Baptists baptize in the Jordan river, go on pilgrimage to Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Nazerath, collect charitable gifts for Palestinian refugees while commiserating (somewhat contradictorily) with Jewish settler removed from the Gaza Strip. For these Catholic and evangelical Christians, the landscape is alive. They form new congregations as far North as Haifa and South as Eilat. Even in Hong Kong, far removed from the Holy Land, migrants reconstruct and inscribe their religious faith in the landscape while celebrating personal joys and sorrows – birthday parties, the death of a close family member, Phillipines Independence Day and even (in Israel) Jewish festivals. They enjoy the climate, the sea, sightseeing and touring as they visit sister congregations.
This creation of community through religious congregational activities is significant for understanding why Filipinas enjoy their work and are reluctant to return home. Even when they give economic reasons, there is clearly much fun and experiential reward for Christians working in Israel.
There is always a darker side to overseas labour migration, particularly when it comes to visa regimes and work permits, while not all employers are equally kind or generous. Indeed, Filipinas have learnt from their hosts to construct a narrative of themselves as a diaspora of suffering, much like Jewish diasporic narratives. Yet at the same time, Filipina migrants have created autonomous spaces by colonising certain occupations. Hence, another dimension of Filipina workers in the Mediterranean is their employment as carers for the elderly. This gives them independence, with few restrictions on dress or residence. They often manage households and their highly developed ethos of responsibility and caring is rewarded with familial gratitude and reasonable salaries. If they live in households, they usually rent weekend flats with other Filipinas. All this adds to their sense of communal, religious and personal well-being, despite painful separation from home and family. This dimension of their overseas work has so far received little attention in the literature.

• One principal hypothesis of the project is therefore is that religion is central to Filipinas’ migratory experience, and especially so when they work in places sacred to Christianity.
• A second key hypothesis is that Filipinas working as carers for the elderly construct their identity through notions of religious sacrifice and an ethos of caring and responsibility.

The project contributes to the overall AHRC programme by providing new empirical data on an important global diasporic community and by advancing our understanding of gender and religiosity in a transnational context. This is also a key theme of the project at the University of Hull.

Hull University

In the Footsteps of the Prophet: Sociality, Work and the Religious Imagination in the Filipina Diaspora