Valerie Francisco-Menchavez is an award-winning scholar-activist, researcher, writer and educator whose academic and political work calls attention to the experiences of Filipina migrants in care work industries and their indelible abilities to form solidarities and organize with one another. Her academic writing critically interrogates systems of capitalism that produce the conditions for historic and continued labor migration from the Philippines. More importantly, Francisco’s body of work aims to recognize the multifaceted experiences of migration and transnationalism for people in the Filipina/x/o diaspora exploring their communities of care, political activism, conditions of low-wage work, and intergenerational dialogue. Her development of innovative methods such as kuwentuhan in her research explores Filipino cultural practices as valid ways of knowing and navigation.

Her second book project, Caring for Caregivers: Filipina Migrant Workers and Community Building during Crisis, is the inaugural book in the University of Washington Press, Critical Filipinx Studies Series, set to be published in November 2024.

Dr. Francisco is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University where she is committed to teaching, organizing and conducting research on the topics of Filipina/o migration, transnational lives, community-building, family-making in the United States and in the Philippines. She served as Assistant Dean of Restorative and Transformative Racial Justice in the College of Health and Social Sciences from 2022-2024. Among her achievements in this position are shifting college policy to be attuned to intersectional inequities for faculty and publishing guiding questions for departments to consider when revising their tenure and promotion protocols towards equitable practices.

Her first book entitled, The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age, explores the dynamics of gender and technology of care work and intimacy in Filipino transnational families in the Philippines and the U.S. Through an examination of neoliberal immigration policies and market forces, Francisco contextualizes the shifts in the long-standing transnational family formation in the Philippines. The Labor of Care won an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award competition for Outstanding Achievement in the Social Sciences. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at City University of New York, The Graduate Center.

Her academic work has been published in journals such as Critical Sociology, Working USA, The Philippine Sociological Review, Action Research and Alon: Journal of Filipinx Studies. Dr. Francisco writes on the transnational activism that emerges from the social conditions of migration, separation and migrant labor. She won the Best Article Award for her article, “Save Mary Jane Veloso: Building Solidarity and Global Migrant Activism in the Filipino Labor Diaspora” in 2018 awarded by the Filipino Studies section in the Association of Asian American Studies.

Francisco’s research is informed by the transnational activism of GABRIELA, an alliance of progressive Filipino women’s organizations in the Philippines and internationally, and MIGRANTE International, an international alliance of Filipino migrant workers. These networks of diasporic and transnational solidarity between Filipino migrant communities and the national democratic movement in the Philippines has helped shape her critical perspective on neoliberalism. To this end, Francisco has engaged in participatory action research and community-based methodologies in all of her research projects where Filipino and Filipina migrants’ experiences are centered as experts. Currently, she is conducting a community-based research project about Filipino migrant workers’ mental and physical health outcomes while working in the understudied industry of caregiving to the elderly. More importantly, this research project prioritizes the development of leadership and organizing capacity in the Filipino community in the Bay Area through migrant workers organization, such as PAWIS South Bay.

Dr. Francisco was a Fulbright scholar to Cebu, Philippines in 2022. She was awarded the 2020 Early Career Award by the Association of Asian American Studies. In 2015, she was awarded the Pacific Sociological Association’s Distinguished Contribution to Sociological Praxis Award. She was also a doctoral recipient of the Davis-Putter Scholarship and received a University of Michigan NCID Diversity Scholar citation. Dr. Francisco has worked as a post-doctoral fellow with the Public Science Project, served as an Ethnic Minority Dissertation Writing Fellow at the University of San Francisco in 2012 and a graduate fellow for the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY, The Graduate Center in 2011.