In Care Activism, Tungohan maps out the political landscape that migrant care workers and migrant care activists traverse and inhabit; the book argues that this topography is shaped by factors that include state sovereignty, the specificities of national culture, the influence of nongovernmental organizations and, most importantly, by migrant care workers themselves. It is a comprehensive, academic examination of the activism that migrant workers have performed for other migrant workers, as well as a thoughtful exploration and engagement with the conflicts that can arise between organizations espousing a diversity of beliefs.
Tungohan provides an extensive history of migrant care workers in Canada, which serves to highlight the often tense connections between the past and contemporary demand for migrants who can provide care work, its racialized and gendered nature, and the state's power to determine which groups of labour migrants can gain access to permanent residency and citizenship. The book introduces the concept of care activism as the means for scholars to deeply engage with and understand the nature of the activism of migrant care workers. In addition, Tungohan calls attention to the affective relationships that bind generations of care activists together. The generational nature of care activism—its intent to honour the past, improve the present and actively imagine a better future collectively—is foundational and is thus woven throughout the book. Each chapter opens with excerpts from interviews conducted by the author; Care Activism makes a decisive choice to situate the voices of migrant care activists front and centre, which grounds the subsequent analysis within the political and socio-cultural locations that migrant care workers and the organizations at hand occupy.
The ideological differences between the organizations examined in this book are multifarious, but it is a complexity that Tungohan does not avoid engaging with. Rather, Tungohan is persuasive in the argument that it is care activism that unites disparate organizations together, often despite their competing ideological and methodological approaches to the problems faced by migrant care workers; it is the organizations’ objectives to care for migrant workers that serve to bind them together. The rich histories of activism and advocacy work that span Canada, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Singapore are clear and well documented, further contextualized by interviews and ethnographic reflections. The book makes a persuasive argument for the importance of care activism as a framework, with an impressive analytical scope that is transnational and multiscalar in nature. Care activism is a point that unifies disagreeing groups, as Tungohan describes in the final chapter of the book that discusses the lingering effect of COVID-19 on migrant care workers; she argues that the pandemic was a period of crisis that served to amplify, not diminish, acts of care activism.
The ramifications of the Philippines’ investment in labour brokerage are shown in the book as affecting not only the intimate spaces occupied by families of labour migrants but also public spaces such as the halls of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the streets of host nations where protest actions are taken by migrant care organizations. Moments of victory that migrant care activism have achieved are covered in the book. They range from political acts of lobbying Canadian policy makers by organizations such as Intercede that won migrant workers the right to apply for Canadian citizenship in 1982, to the ratification of the ILO's Convention 189 Decent Work for Domestic Workers that symbolically recognized domestic work as real work, to the winner of the Miss Caregiver beauty pageant being granted a meeting with then immigration minister Jason Kenney to speak about the experiences of care workers in Canada. Through these examples, Tungohan illustrates the political power that is held by migrant care workers and migrant care worker organizations.
In subsequent work, the concept of care activism could be used to further explore how care activism carries through from past generations to present generations of migrant activists. It could also be utilized to investigate how particular choices that organizations make regarding manifestations of care—for instance, actively lobbying politicians for concessions that benefit labour migrants, as opposed to programs that focus on providing migrants with the skills to become financially stable—affects Canadian politics and the politics of the Filipino diaspora. Ultimately, Care Activism is a robust argument for the recognition of the strong impact that political participation by migrant care workers carries in Canada, citizenship status notwithstanding.
