Political fashion show satirizing the western demand for Filipina women as mail-order brides, Philippine Women Centre, 2004.
Filipino Family Reunification in Vancouver
I have collaborated with the Philippine Women Centre of BC for the last 13 years, researching the lives of Filipino women who come to Canada through a temporary work visa program, the Live-in Caregiver Program. We first researched the circumstances of women in the program, and are now examining their lives after leaving the program, gaining Canadian citizenship and sponsoring their families.
We have been particularly interested in the circumstances of the youth joining their mothers after many years of separation. Filipino youth are not doing well in Vancouver high schools; they have one of the highest drop-out rates of all youth in Vancouver. This aspect of the project is part of a larger interest in migrant youth and the state; for instance, one of my Ph.D. students, Gina Wang, is studying the ways that the Canadian state processes child refugee claimants.
This research pinpoints a central contradiction of the Live-in Caregiver Program: it is designed as a temporary work visa program for individual workers but also is a de facto immigration program for families. Given the expansion of temporary foreign worker programs in Canada and elsewhere, it is extremely important that its long-term implications be studied and addressed.
Testimonial Theatre
I am collaborating with the Philippine Women Centre of BC and 2 Vancouver theatre artists in the creation and production of a testimonial play, Nanay, based on research transcripts. This will be performed at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver in February 2009. http://pushffestival.ca/index.
Film and the City
For several years I co-taught a seminar on this theme with Rose Marie San Juan, a colleague in Art History (now at University College, London). We are presently pursuing this in a book-length project that explores the critical possibilities of cinema in relation to the modern city. We draw inspiration for Lars von Trier’s film, Five Obstructions, and especially the insight that opportunities come from confronting the limit.
Transnational Political Organising
There are two strands to this interest. I have been part of a group of feminist scholars, located at different universities throughout North America, who all do transnational participatory research, in different ways in different contexts. We have begun to meet regularly to discuss how we might push this agenda collaboratively, and draw non-academic feminist activists in different international contexts into this network. Second, through my collaborations with various groups at the Kalayaan Centre in Vancouver, I have been impressed and intrigued by their transnational organising. I first wrote about this in relation to second-generation Filipino youth active in the Filipiino-Canadian Youth Alliance, whose organising moves between the Philippines and Vancouver. For instance, an international youth conference held in November 2005 to celebrate the 15th year of their organisation’s existence was entitled ‘Living the Storm’, in reference to the First Quarter Storm movement in the Philippines in 1970, and the keynote was delivered (via audio-conference) by Professor Jose Maria Sison, Chairperson of the First Quarter Storm movement, now exiled in Amsterdam (IPAGPATULOY: Living the Storm). More recently, in November 2006, a group of observers from the Kalayaan Centre in Vancouver went to the Philippines to document human rights abuses, and to use their standing as Canadian observers to draw international attention to the ongoing crisis of political killings in the Philippines. Stop the Political Killings! We have documented this instance of international accompaniment and transnational witnessing (Pratt in collaboration with Philippines-Canada Task Force on Human Rights, 2008).
A scene from Five Obstructions
Filipino youth in Vancouver draw inspiration from a history of student organising in the Philippines