Title:
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Belonging beyond nationhood : the everyday experiences of Filipino migrant workers in Israel
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My thesis examines how belonging (and not-belonging) is expressed amongst
Filipino migrant workers resident in Israel: an ethno-national settler state with no
general mechanisms for non-Jewish migrant naturalisation and incorporation. While
nationhood and ethnicity have been exaggerated in past social research with
migrants, I question proposals to expunge them entirely in favour of the study of
other migrant identities linked primarily to public life. Instead, I aim to document
and understand the emergence of varied forms of belonging, national and otherwise,
in the analysis of 52 narrative interviews and other everyday events with Filipino
participants. I employ the intersectional heuristic of "translocational positionality"
(Anthias 2002, 2006, 2007, 2008), in doing so adopting a distinctive methodology to
avoid the analytic privileging of anyone category of social analysis. This
methodology ensures that migrants who are not organizationally involved are
included in the sample, and limits recruitment from any single source. Secondly,
categories of relevance to belonging are not pre-determined but are allowed to arise
in interviews.
I find that politicised nationhood and ethnicity are relatively rare referents for
narrative positionalities amongst participants in this study. The Israeli-Philippine
migration context generally downplays the revision and reinforcement of political
Filipino nationalist or ethnic sentiment. Yet, other positionalities of belonging (and
not-belonging) arise for particular people. These express specific kinds of national,
class, gendered and religious themes that are complex, co-existent and overlapping.
These motifs contextually inflect and are inflected by one another. Such
positionalities are regularly linked to factors located in everyday life in Israel to
which participants may give particular weight in the context of structural
biographies, despite exclusion from and mistreatment in other Israeli social domains.
Positionalities are often contradictory both within individual narratives and across
them as a whole. The thesis concludes that to address the over-ethnicisation of
migrant lives in social research requires moving away from the study of narrow
identities and to recognise that no forms of belonging can be privileged or ruled out
in advance of analysis
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