Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia

Today, the Philippines has become one of the largest exporters of medical workers in the world, with nursing in particular offering many the hope of a lucrative and stable career abroad. This timely volume narrates their stories in a multi-sited ethnography that follows aspiring migrants from Manila’s vibrant nursing schools where they dream of glamorous, cosmopolitan lives abroad but find a different reality in Singapore’s multicultural hospitals and nursing homes. It also tracks their private lives in shopping malls and churches, and online, as they search for future jobs elsewhere, in places like Texas, Ontario or northern England, and connect with friends and family around the world; finally bringing them back home on a visit to a Filipino village. In so doing, the book offers anthropological insights on the lives and expectations of Filipino medical workers who care for strangers in another Asian city and the everyday encounters, anxieties and boundaries they face. It locates their stories within wider debates on migration, labour, care, gender and citizenship, while contributing a new and distinctive perspective to the scholarship on labour migration in Asia.