Thank you for your patience but I can’t go out!: methodological and ethical reflections on the temporalities and spatialities of working with Filipina domestic workers

de los Reyes, Elizer Jay and Yue, Audrey (2022) Thank you for your patience but I can’t go out!: methodological and ethical reflections on the temporalities and spatialities of working with Filipina domestic workers. MIGRATION METHODOLOGIES: CHALLENGES, INNOVATIONS AND CONCEPTUAL IMPLICATIONS FOR ASIAN MIGRATIONS, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore. 20 - 22 Jan 2022. 1 pp .

Abstract

Several works have conceptuality enriched the spatiality and temporality of migrancy in recent years. On the one hand, they describe the hierarchical (Paul, 2017), circuitous (Parreñas, Silvey, Hwang, & Choi, 2018), and crisscrossing (Parreñas, 2021) spatial patterns of international migration. On the other hand, they account for the temporary (Liu Farrer & Yeoh, 2018), contemporaneous (Ho, 2018), and staggard (Robertson, 2019) temporal configuration of migrancy. While there are rich conceptual handles for the temporal and spatial experiences of migrants, there has been a lack of methodological and ethical reflections from migration scholars on how they engage with the material or tangible inequalities related to time and space among the migrants they work with.

This paper offers methodological and ethical reflections about working with ten Filipina Domestic Workers (FDWS) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore. By using the researchers and the participants’ experiences during the course of a research project, this paper engages with the following questions:

• How do researchers navigate the intersections of various time cultures such as the polychronic Filipino time that FDWs bring with; the transactional and rigid monochronic time (Hall, 1983) that academic researchers adhere to; and the pronounced mobilechronic temporality (Chung & Lim, 2005) during the pandemic?

• How do researchers use various space of place and space of flows (Castells, et al., 2007) in their work with FDWs that are cognizant of institutional, cultural, and racial dynamics of academia and labor migration in contemporary Singapore?

In grappling with these questions, we tap into conceptual and methodological resources from Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino Psychology) (Enriquez, 1975; Pe Pua & Protacio-Marcelino, 2000) to forward an ‘indigenization from within’ Filipino migration, and potentially nuance this approach from a transnational and diasporic context.

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Contributors

Author: Elizer Jay de los Reyes

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