Home against home:
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Portineria del Dipartimento di Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale
Via Verdi, 26 I - 38122 Trento
tel. +39 0461 281300
portineria.sociologia [at] unitn.it
Time: 5 P.M.
Venue: Dipartimento di Sociologia e Ricerca sociale, via Verdi, 22 - Trento - Sala riunioni terzo piano
In the Filipino diaspora, migrants are expected to send boxes of used goods - balikbayan boxes - ‘back home' to the Philippines. This diasporic social norm is a form of long-distance household provisioning. Sending boxes places the needs of migrants' Philippine homes in competition with their home-making practices in the UK. The contents of these boxes remake Philippine homes as spaces of global care. The boxes have the opposite effect in the UK, however, requiring migrants to neglect their own domestic spaces, their UK futures and UK social networks in order to source gifts.
This paper unpacks the ethical choices behind these boxes and explores the meanings attached to their contents by donors and recipients alike. Setting the demands of one home against the other, balikbayan boxes express a profound domestic ambivalence. While materialising migrant resistance to ideas of permanent settlement and amplifying practices of sojourning, the boxes simultaneously reassert migrants’ growing distance from quotidian domestic exchanges in their Philippine households. Migrants’ ethical choices are read in to the materiality of their boxes and reveal, over time, where their home truly lies.
Speaker:
- Deirdre McKay - Keele University
Introduce:
- Paolo Boccagni - Università degli Studi di Trento
Il seminario è organizzato nell'ambito del progetto ERC HOMInG - The Home-Migration Nexus |