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Home Makers
Project researcher: Dr Ella Parry-Davies, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
Employed (and frequently residing) in the homes of others, migrant domestic workers often live with precarious migratory status and inadequate domestic space of their own. Yet they must become experts at feeling “at home” in unfamiliar cities. This three year project develops a distinctive, collaborative practice-research method to prioritise migrant women’s self-representation in the production of new insights into transnational labour migration. It challenges the social science norms of observation, interview and transcription through making soundwalks recorded in places chosen by participants and co-edited with them. The soundwalks are designed to be downloaded by general publics and listened to on location, or with customisable prompts. The practice-research took place in the UK and Lebanon, two destination countries with similar “tied visa” or visa sponsorship systems that restrict migrant domestic workers’ labour rights and home-making practices. The soundwalk locations range from London’s Kensington Gardens to a supermarket carpark in Beirut, and reflect on themes as diverse as escaping from abusive employers, collective political activism, faith, love, sexuality and music.
Listen to the soundwalks and find out more here.
The project was shortlisted for a Times Higher Education award for Research Project of the Year (Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, 2020) and a Soundwalk September award (2020), and the soundwalks have been programmed in the International Festival of Online Theatre (2020) and the British Academy Summer Showcase (2021). They have been used in Lebanon and the UK as teaching resources in gender studies, critical race theory and performance-ethnographic methodologies. Drawing on close collaboration with migrant domestic workers, Ella has written about the project for Anti-Trafficking Review and has also shared the work via BBC Radio 3, The Guardian, OpenDemocracy, The Theatre Times and The Londonist (links available here). She is currently working on a monograph.
One strand of the project focuses specifically on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on precarious Filipino migrants in the UK, through the soundwalk COVID bayanihan and a policy report, ‘A Chance to Feel Safe: Precarious Filipino Migrants amid the UK Coronavirus Outbreak,’ commissioned by Kanlungan Filipino Consortium.