Geraldine Pratt

This book follows the travels of Nanay, a testimonial theatre play developed from research with migrant domestic workers in Canada, as it was recreated and restaged in different places around the globe. This work examines how Canadian migration policy is embedded across and within histories of colonialism in the Philippines and settler colonialism in Canada. Translations between scholarship and performance – and between Canada and the Philippines – became more uneasy as the play travelled internationally, raising pressing questions of how decolonial collaborations might take shape in practice. This book examines the strengths and limits of existing framings of Filipina migration and offers rich ideas of how care – the care of children, the elderly and each other – might be rethought in radically new ways within less violently unequal relations that span different colonial histories and complex triangulations of racialised migrants, settlers and Indigenous peoples.This book is a journey towards a new way of doing and performing research and theory. It is part of a growing interdisciplinary exchange between the performing arts and social sciences and will appeal to researchers and students within human geography and performance studies, and those working on migration, colonialisms, documentary theatre and social reproduction.

This book follows the travels of Nanay, a testimonial theatre play developed from research with migrant domestic workers in Canada, as it was recreated and restaged in different places around the globe. This work examines how Canadian migration policy is embedded across and within histories of colonialism in the Philippines and settler colonialism in Canada. Translations between scholarship and performance – and between Canada and the Philippines – became more uneasy as the play travelled internationally, raising pressing questions of how decolonial collaborations might take shape in practice. This book examines the strengths and limits of existing framings of Filipina migration and offers rich ideas of how care – the care of children and elderly and each other – might be rethought in radically new ways within less violently unequal relations that span different colonial histories and complex triangulations of racialised migrants, settlers and Indigenous peoples.This book is a journey towards a new way of doing and performing research and theory. It is part of a growing interdisciplinary exchange between the performing arts and social sciences and will appeal to researchers and students within human geography and performance studies, and those working on migration, colonialisms, documentary theatre and social reproduction.

This title traces the dynamic relationship between film and the city. How do film and urban space work together to challenge and forge our changing ideas of modern urban life? How does film intervene with what is erased or retained from the existing urban fabric? What are the possibilities and limits of contemporary utopic visions built into urban form? How does film itself work as a utopic space? How has the space of the cinema created a vibrant public space over the course of last century, and what is its future? These are some of the questions tackled in this book. Drawing on films as diverse as Man with a Movie Camera, Bicycle Thieves, Dogville, Safe, Los Angeles Plays Itself, Chungking Express and The Circle, the book identifies and analyses the major debates about the crucial historical relationship between film and the city to consider existing and future possibilities.

This book traces the dynamic relationship between film and the city. How do film and urban space work together to challenge and forge our changing ideas of modern urban life? How does film intervene with what is erased or retained from the existing urban fabric? What are the possibilities and limits of contemporary utopic visions built into urban form? How does film itself work as a utopic space? How has the space of the cinema created a vibrant public space over the course of last century, and what is its future? These are some of the questions tackled in this book. Drawing on films as diverse as Man with a Movie Camera, Bicycle Thieves, Dogville, Safe, Los Angeles Plays Itself, Chungking Express and The Circle, the book identifies and analyses the major debates about the crucial historical relationship between film and the city to consider existing and future possibilities.

In a developing nation like the Philippines, many mothers provide for their families by traveling to a foreign country to care for someone else’s. Families Apart focuses on Filipino overseas workers in Canada to reveal what such arrangements mean for families on both sides of the global divide. The outcome of Geraldine Pratt’s collaboration with the Philippine Women Centre of British Columbia, this study documents the difficulties of family separation and the problems that children have when they reunite with their mothers in Vancouver. Aimed at those who have lived this experience, those who directly benefit from it, and those who simply stand by and watch, Families Apart shows how Filipino migrant domestic workers-often mothers themselves-are caught between competing neoliberal policies of sending and receiving countries and how, rather than paying rich returns, their ambitions as migrants often result in social and economic exclusion for themselves and for their children. This argument takes shape as an open-ended series of encounters, moving between a singular academic voice and the “we” of various research collaborations, between Vancouver and the Philippines, and between genres of “evidence-based” social scientific research, personal testimony, theatrical performance, and nonfictional narrative writing. Through these experiments with different modes of storytelling, Pratt seeks to transform frameworks of perception, to create and collect sympathetic witnesses-in short, to promote a wide-ranging public discussion and debate about a massive worldwide shift in family (and nonfamily) relations of intimacy and care.

Working Feminism looks at key concepts and debates within feminist theory and puts them to work concretely in relation to the real problems faced by Filipina domestic workers and Asian youth in Canada. It draws to the fore the metaphorical and concrete geographies that lie implicit and underdeveloped within much feminist theory and suggests that a geographical imagination offers a means of reframing debates beyond polarised theoretical and political positions. Alternating between theoretical and empirical chapters, substantial and wide-ranging discussions of human rights, multiculturalism, transnationalism and feminist politics are brought to earth and -- by putting them into the context of individual predicaments -- to life. The empirical chapters build from a decade-long collaboration with an activist group -- the Philippine Women Centre -- in Vancouver, Canada. They demonstrate the fruits of a close and innovative engagement between poststructuralist feminist theory and participatory action research. The book demonstrates the immediate practicality of abstract debate, and works away at divisions between culturalist and materialist, theoretical and practical feminisms.

Working Feminism looks at key concepts and debates within feminist theory and puts them to work concretely in relation to the real problems faced by Filipina domestic workers and Asian youth in Canada. It draws to the fore the metaphorical and concrete geographies that lie implicit and underdeveloped within much feminist theory and suggests that a geographical imagination offers a means of reframing debates beyond polarised theoretical and political positions. Alternating between theoretical and empirical chapters, substantial and wide-ranging discussions of human rights, multiculturalism, transnationalism and feminist politics are brought to earth and -- by putting them into the context of individual predicaments -- to life. The empirical chapters build from a decade-long collaboration with an activist group -- the Philippine Women Centre -- in Vancouver, Canada. They demonstrate the fruits of a close and innovative engagement between poststructuralist feminist theory and participatory action research. The book demonstrates the immediate practicality of abstract debate, and works away at divisions between culturalist and materialist, theoretical and practical feminisms.

Gender, Work and Space explores how social boundaries are constructed between women and men, and among women living in different places. Focusing on work, the segregation of men and women into different occupations, and variations in women's work experiences in different parts of the city, the authors argue that these differences are grounded, constituted in and through, space, place, and situated social networks.The sheer range and depth of this extraordinary study throws new light on the construction of social, geographic, economic, and symbolic boundaries in ordinary lives.

Gender, Work and Space explores how social boundaries are constructed between women and men, and among women living in different places. Focusing on work, the segregation of men and women into different occupations, and variations in women's work experiences in different parts of the city, the authors argue that these differences are grounded, constituted in and through, space, place, and situated social networks.The sheer range and depth of this extraordinary study throws new light on the construction of social, geographic, economic, and symbolic boundaries in ordinary lives.