Forging Futures in Mobilities: Young People's Imagination and Labor in Transnationally Linked Villages in the Northern Philippines

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Cultivating Global-Local Connections in the Curriculum of Places

Abstract

This ethnographic work in a public high school in the Cordillera Mountains, Northern Philippines looks into how “mobilities” and labour become sites for the work of the imagination among young people. Imagination is understood not as the cognitive and liminal phenomenon of fantasy, but as the unpredictable and inflective ways of consuming global/ local forces. This paper argues that affective labour that children of overseas workers (mostly domestic helpers) go through and their engagement in wage-labour become the context for their tactical ways of “making-do” of global and local resources in the forging of their aspirations which are neither mere duplication nor negation of available village exemplars but as distinct ways of thinking about and anticipating their futures.

Author

• Elizer Jay Yague de los Reyes, The University of Melbourne