Talk of technology was in every interview, group interview, gathering, observation (you name it) of my dissertation. It was really awesome to see how Filipino women in the middle of their life course, women who didn’t grow up with computers much less knew how to do work on one, pushed themselves to learn new technologies to keep their families together. This talk is about the inventive technology strategies of Filipino domestic workers in NYC and their families in the Philippines as they made meaning of their motherhood and daughterhood from afar. Come kick it with me for an hour, hear their stories and ask questions and give comments!

Skype Mothers and Facebook Daughters: How Technology is Transforming Care Work in Transnational Families

Speaker: USF Sociology Department Professor and Dissertation Writing Fellow Valerie Francisco
Date: Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Time: 11:40 am to 12:45 pm
Location: McLaren 251

Cosponsored by the Yuchengco Philippine Studies program, Asian American Studies, and the International Studies Department

This presentation explores the production and redefinition of care in the transnational Filipino family. Scholars have posited that “transnational motherhood” has reorganized the way that migrant mothers participate in family life from afar. Professor Francisco extends that concept by providing evidence that care work changes for all members of transnational Filipino families going and coming from multiple directions: from migrant mothers to families left behind and from families left behind to their migrant counterparts. This talk will focus on a concept Francisco calls “multidirectionality of care,” which highlights the reorganization of care work through the use of technology to redefine new roles, definitions and forms of care in the lives of migrants and their families. The inventive experiences and approaches of Filipino families stretched over time and space allows us to see how the global has been sutured to change the very intimate parts of social life. In an increasingly globalized world, understanding the changes in the family can also help us to understand the social processes that insist on conditions of separation and individuation.

Valerie Francisco is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at City University of New York, The Graduate Center. Francisco’s academic interests include transnationalism and diaspora with a special interest on the Philippine migration, family, gender and labor, and globalization. Her dissertation research is with Filipino migrant women working as domestic workers in New York City and their families in the Philippines. In journals like The Philippine Sociological Review and International Review of Qualitative Research, Francisco writes about how families are changing under neoliberal immigration policies and what types of political subjectivities emerge from those conditions. In the 2011-2012 academic year, Francisco is teaching and completing her dissertation as the Dissertation Writing Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of San Francisco.

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