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Dr. Claudia Liebelt

associated Ph.D. student
Dissertation defense: 28.04.2008
Predicate: summa cum laude

Caring for the Holy Land: Transnational Filipina Domestic Workers in the Israeli Migration Regime

Concepts of transnational migration have shown that, in the age of a technological as well as 'mental' time and space compression unprecedented in scale, migrants develop multiple spatial, social, intellectual, and identiary references that cross national borders (Harvey, Glick-Schiller). My aim is to demontrate, what the notion of transnationality means in everyday life, by which factors its experience is influenced and how it is structured in a specific, historically shaped context, that of Filipina 'transmigrants' in Israel.
As my research shows, recent changes in the legal, economic and political structuring of migration in Israel had a decisive impact not only on how migrants structure their everyday life, but also on how they act upon, feel and talk about their belonging to the spaces of 'here', 'there' and 'elsewhere'. Since the de jure state of 'illegality' in Israel had become a de facto state of deportability especially for those Filipina women, who had transgressed the limits of the migration regime through 'overstaying', forming a family, finding another than the ascribed job or other practices of 'homing', strategies and techniques of getting away to even 'greener pastures' had become of utmost importance, thus 'transnationalising' their existence. The project thus seeks to rethink the relation between migration, gender, and space by illuminating the relation between changing political, legal and economic structures and subjective experiences, practices and narratives of migrant women.

Curriculum Vitae

geboren 1976 in Köln

Study Day Contributions

• When “Labor Diaspora” meets Homed “Victim Diaspora”... Filipinas Caring for Jewish Immigrants in Israel and What “Diaspora” has got to do with it

Current Project

"Sociality, Caring and the Religious Imagination in the Filipino Diaspora" - this is a major two year AHRC funded research project that is concerned with the experiences of Filipino care givers living and working in the Middle East.
www.hull.ac.uk/socsci/research/projects/footsteps/index.html   

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