Lifetimes of Disposability and Surplus Entrepreneurs in Bagong Barrio,Manila

Working in collaboration with Migrante International and drawing on testimony of residents in the remittance‐dependent, migrant‐sending community of Bagong Barrio in Caloocan City in Metro Manila, Philippines, we examine the systematic production of lifetimes of disposability that drives labour migration across the generations. The closure of factories and contractualisation of work in the 1980s created the conditions in which labour migration is not a choice but a necessity. Diligent use of remittances to pay for the education of their children in many cases has produced a new generation of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), and investment in housing often is another route to OFW status. Alongside this narrative of ongoing precarity, we listen closely to the testimony of residents for ways of living that are both subsumed within and somewhat excessive to accounts that might render their lives as merely waste or wasted.     

Circulating sadness: witnessing Filipina mothers' stories of family separation

I reflect upon a collaborative research project with activist groups at the Kalayaan Centre in Vancouver, in which we collected stories of family separation, loss, grief and traumatic returns to more fully trace the impacts of the Canadian temporary work visa program (the Live-in Caregiver Program), which brings mostly Filipino women to Canada as live-in domestic workers. Our hope is that these stories of maternal loss will find an audience and evoke an affective response among policy-makers and a wide public beyond the Filipino community in ways that earlier critiques of the program have not. The article draws upon critical literatures on trauma and testimony to consider some of the risks of circulating these kinds of testimonials, and the possibilities of moving the audience from the position of spectator to witness. I then work closely with two mothers' testimonies to experiment with ways of establishing a ‘more difficult contract’ between those who give testimony and those who receive it, one that creates a complex ethical and political space in which the audience is required to register their own complicity in the other's loss or grief. I consider of the possibilities of assembling stories that tell a collective history without reducing the complexity of individual's lives into the same sad story of victimization, and of telling these stories so that the categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother are exhausted and the listener/reader is forced to listen/read more closely, just beyond the expected story line or cultural cliché.     

Retention of hunter–gatherer economies among maritime foragers from Caleta Vitor,northern Chile,during the late Holocene: evidence from stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic analysis of skeletal remains

On the basis of stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of human remains, this paper provides evidence for the retention of hunter–gatherer economies among coastal inhabitants in northern Chile during the late Holocene – at the same time that inland populations were adopting agricultural economies. Coastal diets from the Caleta Vitor region of the Atacama Desert were dominated by marine-based foods, predominantly from upper trophic levels. The focus on reliable marine food resources is interpreted as a risk minimisation strategy in this marginal arid environment. Although these coastal hunter–gatherers adopted other goods and traditions from agricultural populations, their participation in this larger interregional exchange network did not affect their basic subsistence economies.     

A disconnected journey

Driving is a dynamic human experience. The act of operating a vehicle, our movement across space and time, and the landscapes we pass afford rich sensory experiences. However, an increasingly controlled environment in the car and on roads is diminishing many sensuous encounters of orientation, sound, smell, touch, and even sight. The growing emphasis on transport infrastructure that prioritises speed, safety, comfort and convenience – dual carriageways, bypasses, ring roads, tunnels and sound barriers – is serving to disconnect us from our journeys as emplaced experiences. These changes are leading to starkly homogeneous journeys devoid of character that result in a loss of experience and place. In this paper we examine the sensory engagement and experiences of car journeys across landscapes, considering both urban and rural environments. Using case studies from different regions of Australia, we examine the bodily experiences of modern motoring. We suggest that there is no longer an immediate engagement with the landscape being traversed. With particular consideration of understanding places in an embodied way, we consider how modernised highways are disconnecting us from developing and maintaining meaning in our understanding of roads as a significant form of heritage, and as an important mechanism through which people experience heritage.     

International Accompaniment and Witnessing State Violence in the Philippines

Abstract: This paper is an examination of a fact‐finding mission by Canadian grassroots organizations to the Philippines in November 2006, focused on investigating the large number of extra‐judicial killings that have occurred since 2001. The mission accompanied KARAPATAN, a Philippines‐based human rights organization, with hopes that their international status would allow KARAPATAN access to militarized regions otherwise inaccessible to them, and that the international attention brought by Canadians would protect them from military violence. The paper tackles the ethics, politics and potentials of such international human rights solidarity, and both explores and unsettles conventional concerns about the power dynamics of international solidarity by considering the complexity of the positionings of the Canadian observers. These positionings both reproduce and disrupt static stable geographies of the global North/South. In Central Luzon, for instance, the politics and ethics of their status as outsiders was a persistent issue. In Southern Tagalog, however, the Canadian observers could not quite keep their distance, found that they were not as firmly located in their Canadian identities as they might have supposed, and not only observed but experienced the theatrics of state violence.     

No Way Back? Adaptation and Urbanization of IDP Livelihoods in the Darfur Region of Sudan

This article explores how people in conflict zones adapt their livelihoods after they migrate to urban areas. Drawing on case studies in two towns in the Darfur region of Sudan, the authors find that livelihood systems are in transition and have undergone fundamental changes resulting from displacement and the effects of conflict on dysfunctional and failing institutions. Urban migrants’ livelihood strategies evolve in a context of insecurity, distorted markets, lack of regulation and punitive rent‐seeking regimes such as protection payments. Maladaptive livelihood strategies emerge in response to the need for food and income in the short term. New strategies also can increase societal inequities and marginalization, and over‐exploit limited natural resources. Thus the ‘new’ livelihoods cannot be considered sustainable or equitable, or even able to provide food security in the short term. Locally appropriate and innovative approaches to support livelihoods are badly needed, but it is important to monitor and evaluate their impacts on livelihood groups, local economic recovery, environment and conflict.     

Geography and the construction of difference

There is growing evidence of ‘horizontal hostilities’ among women: many women are affirming their identities along axes of class, race, sexuality, age and/or relationship to colonialism. Within recent feminist writing, geography—space, place and location—has been used as a vehicle for rethinking a feminist affinity that does not erase or undermine ‘difference’. We review contemporary uses of geographical metaphors and caution against an excessive emphasis on displacement as a metaphor for a critical feminist stance. We argue that geographies of placement must be held in tension with an ideal of displacement. We develop this point through a case study of women and work in contemporary Worcester, Massachusetts. Women in Worcester are very much rooted in place and this is a vehicle for the construction of differences across women. We argue that studies of the construction of feminine identities in particular places counteract the current tendency within feminism to rigidify differences among women and are an important means of rebuilding affinities among women.