Imagining Futures: Youth Identities in Transnationally-Linked Villages in the Northern Philippines

de los Reyes, Elizer Jay (2019) Imagining Futures: Youth Identities in Transnationally-Linked Villages in the Northern Philippines. University of Melbourne, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

Each year a sizeable proportion of mothers leave their villages in the Philippines to work abroad. While they leave behind their families and onlookers who remain, attend schools, and work in the villages, the mother’s connection and sense of belonging persists, reinforced through sending home gift boxes, remittances, and ideas. These women’s left behind children and their peers are connected too – directly or vicariously – to the rest of the world because of the flow of these material and cultural goods into the villages. These create a complicated relationship between home and away that transforms the villages, making them into a new and different kind of place.

The disciplines that have studied this complex phenomenon include transnational, migration, diaspora, and youth studies, and have two general focal tendencies. First, they tend to be adult-centric such that experiences of migrant women are well studied from Barcelona to Taiwan while young people are framed as merely secondary to the struggles of their parents. Second, they are mobile-centric. The research literature teems with accounts of social and emotional challenges faced by immigrant children while left behind children are rarely studied. These focal proclivities render the left behind and onlooking children as not full subjects in terms of their stake in the emigration of their mothers, and their participation in emergent globalising processes, because of their age and of remaining moored in the villages respectively. Therefore, there is a need for scholarship to move beyond the dualism of the active and agentic, adult, mobile citizen in global cites and the passively receiving left behind children in rural areas.

This thesis is borne out of biographic and historical connections to transnational movements, a curiosity to understand young people’s complex experience of it while they are moored in the villages, and a desire to engage with existing scholarship on transnational movements and rural youth. It enquires about the ways in which young people who remain in villages respond to the deluge of global forces; and more specifically, it examines how young people in the villages of the northern Philippines come to imagine the world and their futures, in light of the pervasive and different sorts of movements they experience.

By using conceptual resources drawn from the mobility turn and the imaginative turn, as well as insights from an ethnographically-informed study that mustered various approaches such as go alongs, focus groups, interviews, and use of student-generated materials, this thesis examines three salient domains of young people’s lives: schooling, labour, and gender. This thesis found that young people respond to challenges brought forth by the transnational mobilities in these domains through the use of an imaginative capacity that I conceptualise as practices of making do. I argue that their responses possess tactical, creative, and calculative qualities yet are less eventful, or ordinary. They come in the form of affective grammatical practices, acts that disrupt conventional notions of logical responses, and at times, as playful responses. I show how these bundles of imaginative practices of making do have significant material and discursive effects that, in turn, produce their village as locality.

This thesis seeks to contribute to theoretical discussions by opening a space for the possibility of operationalising imagination as a form of everyday practice, undertaken not by artists or activists, but by ordinary people. By focusing on young people’s imagination of their futures in relation to mobilities and transformations in school, work, and home, the underlying costs and labour necessary for the work of the imagination are also surfaced. Overall, this thesis illuminates the complex, contingent, and dynamic character of transnational movements by highlighting their asymmetrical impact upon people and institutions in specific localities, and their tactical and creative responses.

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Contributors

Author: Elizer Jay de los Reyes

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