Mediated Diasporas: Philippine Studies in a globalised world

This volume has three aims. First, it brings new work on Filipinos and the Philippines from an emerging generation of scholars into dialogue with contributions from more established UK-based scholars. Our contributors thus include Filipinist academics partly trained in the UK and UK scholars who have recently begun to work on Filipino themes. Second, though not exclusively focused on that country, the volume highlights the increasing importance of the UK as a destination for a variety of Filipinos. Doing so foregrounds the diversity of a global diaspora that has come to be associated with particular host countries and regions and with migrants stereotypically identified as impoverished and hyper exploited domestic and care workers. Contributors to this volume draw on research and encounters with Filipinos who are variously living, working, studying or passing through the United Kingdom as immigrants, migrant workers, students, and sailors, and with contacts in their wider Filipino networks. Though one of the essays concerns Filipinos in Israel, it is about a shared culture of faith and celebrity that links the Philippines to the diaspora as familiar among Filipinos East London as it is in Tel Aviv or Manila. Third and more substantively, as part of an attempt to move beyond an exclusive focus on labour relations that characterize much of the recent writing about Filipino migration, the volume attends to the important ways that media shapes a variety of migrant experiences and diasporic situations.