"Pagod, Dugot, Pawis (Exhaustion, Blood, and Sweat)": Transnational Practices of Care and Emotional Labour among Filipino Kin Networks

While the global care chains literature presupposes that care work flows unidirectionally along a hierarchical chain from the Global South to the Global North (Hochschild 2000; Parreas 1998, 2000), this dissertation argues for a reconceptualization of transnational care and emotional labour that goes beyond links in a chain. Drawing on multisited ethnographic research conducted with a total of seventy participants in the Philippines, Canada, and Hong Kong, this study offers a more expansive approach to understanding transnational care and emotional labour as multiphased, multidirectional, multirelational, and multilocational in scope. 
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\nThis dissertation makes some key interventions in gender, migration, and care scholarship. First, it understands that transnational care occurs in multiple phases in order to account for reconfigurations of care across the life course, such as migrants performing end-of-life care for elderly kin. Second, in contrast to the global care chains literature, which frames care as unidirectional, it highlights the ways in which care flows in multiple directions, showing how those who receive care also give care. Third, it moves away from an exclusive focus on the mother-child dyad, thereby decentering the Western heteronormative nuclear family structure and demonstrating how transnational care is multirelational, involving several generations and broader communities of carers. Fourth, it underscores the ways in which transnational care is multilocational by acknowledging how migrant networks often shift locales and perform care labour from multiple sites at once. 
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\nFinally and most importantly, this dissertation foregrounds Pinay peminist kuwentuhan, or Filipina feminist talkstory - a dynamic, collective, inclusive, participatory storytelling and storybuilding process that activates Pinay ways of knowing and being in the world. Pinay peminist kuwentuhan guides readers on a journey towards understanding the ways in which transnational Filipinos maintain kin solidarity and support the collective survival of migrant carers over time. Tracing the transnational caring practices of four Filipino migrant networks specifically, their innovative use of traveling artefacts and information and communication technologies (ICTs) this dissertation provides a more culturally nuanced approach to understanding transnational practices of care and emotional labour.

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