Hans J. Ladegaard's Migrant workers’ narratives of return: Alienation and identity transformations is a moving account of the searing pains of working abroad and the tribulations of coming home as recalled mostly by returning migrant domestic workers. Addressing the paucity of sociolinguistic studies on migrant worker returnees, Ladegaard's monograph centers on the narratives of Filipino and Indonesian returnees about their past experiences as migrant workers, their present conditions at home, and their future (migration) prospects. It comes with a compelling call to action for academics to speak up and actively get involved in the pursuit of tackling social injustices. The book's structure leads through a progression covering background information and frameworks (chapters 1 & 2), emerging themes within the narrative data (chapters 3–6), and a call to action for researchers invested in exploring analogous social issues (chapters 7 & 8).
The first chapter explains the motivations behind the work. It is the offshoot of sharing sessions among migrant workers-in-distress conducted in a church shelter in Hong Kong where the author served as a volunteer. The second chapter outlines its theoretical and methodological anchoring to narrative analysis and narrative therapy, and its alignment with the action-oriented approach of migration linguistics to addressing language and migration issues. Borlongan (Reference Borlongan2023) introduces migration linguistics as more than a theoretical exploration of language and migration. It is envisioned as a multi-sectoral, interdisciplinary, and advocacy-driven linguistic subdiscipline that actively seeks to instigate tangible social change, prioritizing the well-being of migrants. Ladegaard supports this approach, seeing it as an apt framework for understanding migrants’ experiences in the pursuit of trying to make a change in the lives of migrant workers marked by systemic injustices.
The succeeding four chapters delve into the narrative data, organized into themes that cut across the informants’ migration journey. Chapter 3 recounts predominantly Indonesian returnees’ stories of homecoming fraught with painful struggles to find their place back in the family and their respective communities. The narratives in chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate complementary recollections of experiences between Indonesian returnees in Java and Filipino returnees in Bohol. Narratives centering on fear, false accusations, sexual assault, humiliation, and othering were predominantly told by Indonesian returnees, who are said to attribute such experiences to sheer misfortune. Narratives of resistance against abuse are noted to have mostly come from Filipino returnees. The accounts from Filipino returnees detail how they would fight back against victimization by drawing strength from their Christian faith, education, proficiency in English, and the desire to enhance the life prospects of their children. Chapter 6 offers a summary and reflections about participants’ past migration experiences informing their present lives in their home communities as well as plans (or non-thereof) for work migration in the future. The penultimate chapter (chapter 7) provides a powerful reflexive account of the author's positionalities and realizations, illustrating what he learned and what the readers can also learn from what he went through in the research process. By way of a concluding remark in chapter 8, Ladegaard ends the book with a call for researchers of similar social issues to embrace a socially engaged research agenda that could ‘give voice to migrants who are often marginalized and silenced to allow them to be heard, cherished, and valued for the diversity they bring to the world’ (138).
The stories substantially speak of exploitation and abuse based on gender, class, age, and race. Migrant women from a Global-South-to-North work migration trajectory have gone through more unfortunate experiences both in the host and home countries. While acknowledging that fewer narratives from returning migrant men were collected due to their unexpected presence and participation at sessions primarily designed for returning women migrants, it is noted that the men shared more positive stories compared to their female counterparts. More educated, English-speaking migrants have more positive experiences than less-educated and non-English proficient ones. The older, more mature migrants tend to be more assertive and empowered than the younger ones. Filipino participants are said to generally have had relatively more uplifting stories to tell, attributing it to their English proficiency, maturity to fight back abuse and exploitation, resilience rooted in their Christian faith, and tenacity to improve the life conditions and prospects of their children back home. The narratives of Indonesian returnees, by contrast, depict their susceptibility to exploitation and abuse because of ill-preparation for work migration at a very young age, instances of coerced migration by families, pains of husbands' infidelity, and the subsequent societal stigma attached to being abandoned by a husband or having a child abroad outside of marriage. These experiences accordingly make Filipino returnees open to leaving to work abroad again or to promote work migration among relatives more than their Indonesian counterparts.
The accounts described in the monograph may no longer be strange or new to many since they corroborate studies of a similar nature on migrants in precarious work conditions, which span a few decades back and across various disciplines. But the fact that they continue to be told in such depressing consistency indicates that violations against the basic human rights of transnational migrant domestic workers remain largely unresolved and worsened by the ever-growing disparity in the distribution of wealth and opportunities worldwide. Some scholars would question whether academic research is the right platform for raising such issues owing to its limited readership and, by extension, the much-desired immediate transformative impact. But Ladegaard rightfully contends that, as academics, we are in a position of power to speak up: that we carry on our shoulders the moral obligation to act in whatever possible way we can (see pp. 125 ff.).
Readers who have had experience eliciting similar stories and who come from similar sociocultural conditions might find some of the accounts and interpretations cringe-worthy for failing to account for some of the cultural nuances that could have better enriched the interpretation (e.g. the pervasive use of ‘sir’ by the participants with the researcher or the use of rhetorical questions of participants to elicit sympathy rather than answers). Nevertheless, they can be treated as a product of the interactional dynamics uniquely co-produced by all participants in the sharing sessions.
Eliciting narratives that eventually lead to informants sharing traumatic and intimate experiences, often leading to crying, is never an easy task as vividly observable in the extracts and as demonstrated by the author in the discussion. Yet, though the book attempts to explore narrative therapy as a method for group sharing, the supposed therapeutic effect seems to have been largely assumed rather than empirically determined. Due to the volatility of human emotions and psychological states in such sharing sessions, a discussion on the involvement of a psychologist or psychotherapist, or at least, training done by fieldworkers to professionally handle such delicate situations, could have better addressed skeptical readers’ concerns on our perceived professional limitations as language researchers. After all, as researchers advocating for social justice, we do not wish to rub salt into the scar of a wound that participants may have long nursed to heal.
The strength of the book lies in the author's complete transparency in what he did and could have done during the entire research process. It is never easy for a scholar of the author's caliber to admit to his failures, yet he respectably demonstrates how a truly socially sensitive and responsive study of people in vulnerable situations could be done responsibly. We are not only provided stories of migrant return, however significant they are, but in a sort of stream-of-consciousness approach, we are propelled by the author to his own stories of return to the ‘drawing board’ as he processes the dataset he collected and the actions he did while he was there. As such, this book stands as more than just as a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the injustices committed against migrants in precarious work conditions, but also as a definitive guide for young and senior researchers alike who are committed to researching and advocating for social justice.
