Deirdre Mckay
Biographic Data
| ID | 78178 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Deirdre Mckay |
| GIVEN NAMES | Deirdre |
| FAMILY NAME | Mckay |
| SIGNATURE | MCKAY D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9019-2207 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 600 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Towards framing the global in global development: Prospects for development geography
This paper examines data in the public sphere on the global scope of geography’s UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) projects. Building on decolonial critiques of development research, I argue that geography should frame “the global” of global research as a sphere of ethical choices in research design and practice. The distribution of funded projects in the UKRI Gateway data suggests geographers succeed where …
On Global Plasticity: Framing the Global Through Affective Materiality
As a pervasive, material element of the global, plastics raise potent social and environmental questions. More than merely the “stuff” of potential global prosperity, plastics are substances that people inscribe with varied cultural meanings. Deploying four conceptual “entry points” for global research, we explore how global plastics have become not only a site of an emergent socioecological crisis but themselves a point of leverage for a more hu…
Decorated Duterte: Digital Objects and the Crisis of Martial Law History in the Philippines
Much of the contemporary crisis in coming to terms with the past may have digital origins. We can see this crisis as engineered or assembled through a new series of historical actors: memes and posts on social media and, behind them, the work of trolls and paid influencers. These actors do not travel with first-person accounts of events so much as accumulate in the digital ephemera of daily lives and are then archived as the currency of digital c…
Ambient Surveillance: How Care-for-control Emerges across Diasporic Social Media
This article demonstrates how social control in the Filipino diaspora now works through social media surveillance, brokering exchanges of care between activists, on the one hand, and migrants, on the other. Taking care as the 'pursuit of connections' (Yates-Doerr, Emily. Care: Provocation. Cultural Anthropology, Fieldnotes: Care. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/497-care-provocation, March 17, 2014), I outline the history of care-for-control excha…
Citizen aid, social media and brokerage after disaster
In a crisis, aid providers deliver humanitarian relief across a hierarchy of organisations where influence and capacity map to their scale of operations. On the front lines of crises, ‘citizen aid’ is what small, local and informal groups offer to fellow citizens. These citizen aid groups are well-networked in place and tend to work through longstanding personal relationships. In the Philippines, citizen aid groups frequently support their activi…
Sent home: Mapping the Absent Child Into Migration Through Polymedia
Migrants and their transnational families document their children and child-rearing practices on social networking sites (SNS) to enhance their social mobility. In this article, I identify a new group of migrant children, namely those sent home to their parents' countries of origin for an imagined 'good childhood'. I demonstrate that polymedia - SNS and other platforms - sustain these children and create new norms of publicness and visibility in …
Plastic masculinity: How everyday objects in plastic suggest men could be otherwise
Material things always make statements about people's identities. For indigenous Filipino men, making baskets asserts identities rich in culture and in non-market values. This article examines basketry backpacks that were part of the pre-colonial material culture of ethnic groups known as Igorot. When made from rattan, these baskets are recognized as tribal art or heritage items. When made from plastic by contemporary artisans, they are problemat…
An Archipelago of Care: Filipino Migrants and Global Networks
An archipelago of care: Filipino migrants and global networks
Focusing on the experience of Filipino caregivers in London, some of whom are living and working illegally in their host country, Deirdre McKay considers what migrant workers must do to navigate their way in a global marketplace. She draws on interviews and participant observations, her own long-term fieldwork in communities in the Philippines, and digital ethnography to present an intricate consideration of how these caregivers create stability …
Global Filipinos: Migrants’ Lives in the Virtual Village
Global Filipinos: Migrants' Lives in the Virtual Village
Changes and continuities produced by globalization
Rethinking Locality in Ifugao: Tribes, Domains, and Colonial Histories
In the context of lfugao municipalities applying for ancestral domain, a review of the oral histories collected within a community of precolonial migrants allows this article to locate an indigenous group on quite a different terrain, one with no concrete locality or authentic identity to begin with. Instead, this locality is forged through the resources provided by colonial histories, and is spreading out into different nodes, in an at- tempt to…
Sacred journeys, diasporic lives: Sociality and the religious imagination among Filipinos in the Middle East
A Transnational Pig: Reconstituting Kinship Among Filipinos in Hong Kong
Migration may offer Filipinos abroad new ways to practice religious faith and opportunities to extend social networks, but many must at the same time sustain and renegotiate kinship ties at home. The obligations of kinship can mean declarations of faith are not always what we may think. Rather than being the good converts or diligent congregation members of their self-descriptions, migrants may continue to be drawn into village ritual at home. Th…
Rethinking the dynamics of rural transformation: Performing different development pathways in a Philippine municipality
Rural communities all over South East Asia are facing major challenges as they try to shape their economic futures in ways that will increase wellbeing for all. This paper argues that researchers who describe and explain rural change play a powerful role in shaping imagined futures and the practices of local development. We foreground the theoretical choices made in representing rural change and call for a rethinking of the dynamics of transforma…
On the Face of Facebook: Historical Images and Personhood in Filipino Social Networking
Exchanging and manipulating digital images on social networking sites offers people new ways to renegotiate a wide variety of relationships. This paper examines how interactions on Facebook transform personhood and norms for relationships and belongings among a particular group of Filipino users. By tracking historical images that index users' profiles, the argument charts the simultaneous modes in which digital photographs act in online social n…
Performing economy differently: Exploring economic personhood and local economic diversity
Many popular conceptions of economy now delimit what counts as the ‘real’ economy by capitalist enterprises, market transactions and wage labour. Anthropologists describe such ideas of economy as abstract, dis-embedded (Polanyi 1957a, b) or virtual (Carrier and Miller 1998), arguing that these conceptions are not adequate to the empirical realities of lived experience. Beyond anthropology, there is a growing literature that theorises the ways aca…
Ghosts of Futures Present: Photographs in the Filipino Migrant Archive
This article explores the role of photographs in shaping the social selves of Filipino temporary labor migrants. Examining the production of photographic self-images by Filipino migrants in Hong Kong and their reception in the Philippines, I show how people deploy photography as a technology to bring into being their desired future selves. By making present ghosts of the future, photographs of the self shape distinctive translocal subjectivities
Sending Dollars Shows Feeling' - Emotions and Economies in Filipino Migration
This paper analyses the conceptualization of gender, relationships, and emotions that underpin 'care chains' approaches to Filipino labour migration. In a case study of long-distance intimacy and economic transfers in an extended Filipino family, I show how contextualizing migration within local understandings of emotion fractures expectations created by care chains accounts. This case instead reveals agency, diversity, and new forms of global su…
Translocal Subjectivities: Mobility, Connection, Emotion
When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time. It moves as it feels, and it feels itself moving. C
Rethinking Indigenous Place: Igorot Identity and Locality in the Philippines
Spanish and American colonisers ascribed the identity ‘Igorot’ to the peoples of the northern Philippine mountains, positioning them in the ‘tribal slot’, somewhere between ordinary peasants and ‘backward’ primitives. From this marginal position, contemporary Igorot communities have been comparatively successful in formalising their entitlements to land and resources in their dealings with the Philippine State. This success depends on a discourse…
Translocal Circulation: Place and Subjectivity in an Extended Filipino Community
As migration and mobility produce new subject positions, they transform and extend locality and create both new subjective experiences of place and new subjectivities. This paper explores the culture of circulation that emerges between a migrant sending village in the Philippines and Hong Kong, as it is created through the mobility of female contract workers
Introduction: Finding 'the Field': the Problem of Locality in a Mobile World
Place is usually considered the backdrop for motion—the ‘where’ that people move to or from. Yet contemporary processes of migration and circulation produce increasingly porous and even mobile places. Mobility offers us new ways to perceive distance—in time, space, society and culture—through what Trouillot calls a ‘fragmented globality’. How can anthropologists theorise this fragmented globality without taking static forms of place as the necess…
Practices of place-making: Globalisation and locality in the Philippines
Global flows of people and information in the Asia–Pacific region are creating new forms of place that stretch across national boundaries and rural–urban distinctions. These new mobile forms of place link long-inhabited rural areas to cities, national centres, and to rural frontiers within the nation. Here, we describe new forms of place that are being produced by contemporary migration and economic change, using data from the Philippines and app…
Reading remittance landscapes: Female migration and agricultural transition in the Philippines
Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1):89–99, 2005In the Philippines, female migration for overseas contract work is transforming local agricultural landscapes. Yet the changes in land, labour, crops and cropping patterns that are occurring may not reflect local ecology or economic opportunity as much as they represent gendered versions of local modernity, envisioned at a new global scale. This study links local agricultural ch…
Translocal Subjectivities: Mobility, Connection, Emotion
When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time. It moves as it feels, and it feels itself moving. C
Sending Dollars Shows Feeling' - Emotions and Economies in Filipino Migration
This paper analyses the conceptualization of gender, relationships, and emotions that underpin 'care chains' approaches to Filipino labour migration. In a case study of long-distance intimacy and economic transfers in an extended Filipino family, I show how contextualizing migration within local understandings of emotion fractures expectations created by care chains accounts. This case instead reveals agency, diversity, and new forms of global su…
Beyond Heroes and Victims: Filipina Contract Migrants, Economic Activism and Class Transformations
This article employs anti-essentialist Marxist analysis to shed light on the diverse economic activities that Filipina contract migrants are engaged in at home and overseas. We point to the limitations of dominant representations of these women as 'heroes' of national development or 'victims' of a global capitalist economy, which tend to foreclose a discussion of multiple class processes engendered by transnational labour migration. In drawing on…
Reading remittance landscapes: Female migration and agricultural transition in the Philippines
Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1):89–99, 2005In the Philippines, female migration for overseas contract work is transforming local agricultural landscapes. Yet the changes in land, labour, crops and cropping patterns that are occurring may not reflect local ecology or economic opportunity as much as they represent gendered versions of local modernity, envisioned at a new global scale. This study links local agricultural ch…
Rethinking the dynamics of rural transformation: Performing different development pathways in a Philippine municipality
Rural communities all over South East Asia are facing major challenges as they try to shape their economic futures in ways that will increase wellbeing for all. This paper argues that researchers who describe and explain rural change play a powerful role in shaping imagined futures and the practices of local development. We foreground the theoretical choices made in representing rural change and call for a rethinking of the dynamics of transforma…
Migration and the Sensuous Geographies of Re-emplacement in the Philippines
This paper explores migrant returns to homeplaces, examining affective understandings of place and subjectivity in an intercultural context. Drawing on data gathered in migrant sending communities in the Philippines, it examines how local 'structures of feeling' (after Williams 1973) and migrant habitus (Bourdieu 1980) interact with place in the experiences of return for Filipina migrant workers. Practices of re-emplacement are explored in an int…
Global Filipinos: Migrants’ Lives in the Virtual Village
On the Face of Facebook: Historical Images and Personhood in Filipino Social Networking
Exchanging and manipulating digital images on social networking sites offers people new ways to renegotiate a wide variety of relationships. This paper examines how interactions on Facebook transform personhood and norms for relationships and belongings among a particular group of Filipino users. By tracking historical images that index users' profiles, the argument charts the simultaneous modes in which digital photographs act in online social n…
Translocal Circulation: Place and Subjectivity in an Extended Filipino Community
As migration and mobility produce new subject positions, they transform and extend locality and create both new subjective experiences of place and new subjectivities. This paper explores the culture of circulation that emerges between a migrant sending village in the Philippines and Hong Kong, as it is created through the mobility of female contract workers
Cultivating New Local Futures: Remittance Economies and Land-use Patterns in Ifugao, Philippines
In the Philippines, female migration for contract domestic work transforms the local landscape. The changes in land, labour, crops and cropping patterns that are occurring may not reflect local ecology or economic opportunity as much as they represent gendered versions of new local futures, envisioned on a new global scale
Geopolitics of the Visible: Essays on Philippine Film Cultures
An anthology of essays about Philippine cinema which seeks to illuminate issues of transparency of power and power relations. It lays bare the geopolitics of the visible in order to render the almost invisible working operation that makes both visibility and invisibility possible
Practices of place-making: Globalisation and locality in the Philippines
Global flows of people and information in the Asia–Pacific region are creating new forms of place that stretch across national boundaries and rural–urban distinctions. These new mobile forms of place link long-inhabited rural areas to cities, national centres, and to rural frontiers within the nation. Here, we describe new forms of place that are being produced by contemporary migration and economic change, using data from the Philippines and app…
Ambient Surveillance: How Care-for-control Emerges across Diasporic Social Media
This article demonstrates how social control in the Filipino diaspora now works through social media surveillance, brokering exchanges of care between activists, on the one hand, and migrants, on the other. Taking care as the 'pursuit of connections' (Yates-Doerr, Emily. Care: Provocation. Cultural Anthropology, Fieldnotes: Care. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/497-care-provocation, March 17, 2014), I outline the history of care-for-control excha…
Citizen aid, social media and brokerage after disaster
In a crisis, aid providers deliver humanitarian relief across a hierarchy of organisations where influence and capacity map to their scale of operations. On the front lines of crises, ‘citizen aid’ is what small, local and informal groups offer to fellow citizens. These citizen aid groups are well-networked in place and tend to work through longstanding personal relationships. In the Philippines, citizen aid groups frequently support their activi…
Ghosts of Futures Present: Photographs in the Filipino Migrant Archive
This article explores the role of photographs in shaping the social selves of Filipino temporary labor migrants. Examining the production of photographic self-images by Filipino migrants in Hong Kong and their reception in the Philippines, I show how people deploy photography as a technology to bring into being their desired future selves. By making present ghosts of the future, photographs of the self shape distinctive translocal subjectivities
Plastic masculinity: How everyday objects in plastic suggest men could be otherwise
Material things always make statements about people's identities. For indigenous Filipino men, making baskets asserts identities rich in culture and in non-market values. This article examines basketry backpacks that were part of the pre-colonial material culture of ethnic groups known as Igorot. When made from rattan, these baskets are recognized as tribal art or heritage items. When made from plastic by contemporary artisans, they are problemat…
Introduction: Finding 'the Field': the Problem of Locality in a Mobile World
Place is usually considered the backdrop for motion—the ‘where’ that people move to or from. Yet contemporary processes of migration and circulation produce increasingly porous and even mobile places. Mobility offers us new ways to perceive distance—in time, space, society and culture—through what Trouillot calls a ‘fragmented globality’. How can anthropologists theorise this fragmented globality without taking static forms of place as the necess…
Sent home: Mapping the Absent Child Into Migration Through Polymedia
Migrants and their transnational families document their children and child-rearing practices on social networking sites (SNS) to enhance their social mobility. In this article, I identify a new group of migrant children, namely those sent home to their parents' countries of origin for an imagined 'good childhood'. I demonstrate that polymedia - SNS and other platforms - sustain these children and create new norms of publicness and visibility in …
Towards framing the global in global development: Prospects for development geography
This paper examines data in the public sphere on the global scope of geography’s UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) projects. Building on decolonial critiques of development research, I argue that geography should frame “the global” of global research as a sphere of ethical choices in research design and practice. The distribution of funded projects in the UKRI Gateway data suggests geographers succeed where …
Decorated Duterte: Digital Objects and the Crisis of Martial Law History in the Philippines
Much of the contemporary crisis in coming to terms with the past may have digital origins. We can see this crisis as engineered or assembled through a new series of historical actors: memes and posts on social media and, behind them, the work of trolls and paid influencers. These actors do not travel with first-person accounts of events so much as accumulate in the digital ephemera of daily lives and are then archived as the currency of digital c…
Trans‐ Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia
Modern Rice Technology and Income Distribution in Asia
Reason and Passion: Representations of Gender in Malay Society
Inventing a Hero: The Posthumous Re-Creation of Andres Bonifacio
Beyond Heroes and Victims: Filipina Contract Migrants, Economic Activism and Class Transformations
This article employs anti-essentialist Marxist analysis to shed light on the diverse economic activities that Filipina contract migrants are engaged in at home and overseas. We point to the limitations of dominant representations of these women as 'heroes' of national development or 'victims' of a global capitalist economy, which tend to foreclose a discussion of multiple class processes engendered by transnational labour migration. In drawing on…
Raiding, Trading and Feasting: The Political Economy of Philippine Chiefdoms
This text presents a comprehensive analysis of how participation in the trade network through the South China Sea, the Melaka Straits and into the Indian Ocean related to broader changes in the political economy of the Philippine island societies. By combining archaeological evidence with historical sources, the author offers an examination of the nature and evolution of Philippine maritime trading chiefdoms. Most importantly, she demonstrates th…
Geopolitics of the Visible: Essays on Philippine Film Cultures
An anthology of essays about Philippine cinema which seeks to illuminate issues of transparency of power and power relations. It lays bare the geopolitics of the visible in order to render the almost invisible working operation that makes both visibility and invisibility possible
Cultivating New Local Futures: Remittance Economies and Land-use Patterns in Ifugao, Philippines
In the Philippines, female migration for contract domestic work transforms the local landscape. The changes in land, labour, crops and cropping patterns that are occurring may not reflect local ecology or economic opportunity as much as they represent gendered versions of new local futures, envisioned on a new global scale
Trans‐ Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia
Practices of place-making: Globalisation and locality in the Philippines
Global flows of people and information in the Asia–Pacific region are creating new forms of place that stretch across national boundaries and rural–urban distinctions. These new mobile forms of place link long-inhabited rural areas to cities, national centres, and to rural frontiers within the nation. Here, we describe new forms of place that are being produced by contemporary migration and economic change, using data from the Philippines and app…
Reading remittance landscapes: Female migration and agricultural transition in the Philippines
Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1):89–99, 2005In the Philippines, female migration for overseas contract work is transforming local agricultural landscapes. Yet the changes in land, labour, crops and cropping patterns that are occurring may not reflect local ecology or economic opportunity as much as they represent gendered versions of local modernity, envisioned at a new global scale. This study links local agricultural ch…
Migration and the Sensuous Geographies of Re-emplacement in the Philippines
This paper explores migrant returns to homeplaces, examining affective understandings of place and subjectivity in an intercultural context. Drawing on data gathered in migrant sending communities in the Philippines, it examines how local 'structures of feeling' (after Williams 1973) and migrant habitus (Bourdieu 1980) interact with place in the experiences of return for Filipina migrant workers. Practices of re-emplacement are explored in an int…
Rethinking Indigenous Place: Igorot Identity and Locality in the Philippines
Spanish and American colonisers ascribed the identity ‘Igorot’ to the peoples of the northern Philippine mountains, positioning them in the ‘tribal slot’, somewhere between ordinary peasants and ‘backward’ primitives. From this marginal position, contemporary Igorot communities have been comparatively successful in formalising their entitlements to land and resources in their dealings with the Philippine State. This success depends on a discourse…
Translocal Circulation: Place and Subjectivity in an Extended Filipino Community
As migration and mobility produce new subject positions, they transform and extend locality and create both new subjective experiences of place and new subjectivities. This paper explores the culture of circulation that emerges between a migrant sending village in the Philippines and Hong Kong, as it is created through the mobility of female contract workers
Introduction: Finding 'the Field': the Problem of Locality in a Mobile World
Place is usually considered the backdrop for motion—the ‘where’ that people move to or from. Yet contemporary processes of migration and circulation produce increasingly porous and even mobile places. Mobility offers us new ways to perceive distance—in time, space, society and culture—through what Trouillot calls a ‘fragmented globality’. How can anthropologists theorise this fragmented globality without taking static forms of place as the necess…
Sending Dollars Shows Feeling' - Emotions and Economies in Filipino Migration
This paper analyses the conceptualization of gender, relationships, and emotions that underpin 'care chains' approaches to Filipino labour migration. In a case study of long-distance intimacy and economic transfers in an extended Filipino family, I show how contextualizing migration within local understandings of emotion fractures expectations created by care chains accounts. This case instead reveals agency, diversity, and new forms of global su…
Translocal Subjectivities: Mobility, Connection, Emotion
When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time. It moves as it feels, and it feels itself moving. C
Ghosts of Futures Present: Photographs in the Filipino Migrant Archive
This article explores the role of photographs in shaping the social selves of Filipino temporary labor migrants. Examining the production of photographic self-images by Filipino migrants in Hong Kong and their reception in the Philippines, I show how people deploy photography as a technology to bring into being their desired future selves. By making present ghosts of the future, photographs of the self shape distinctive translocal subjectivities
Performing economy differently: Exploring economic personhood and local economic diversity
Many popular conceptions of economy now delimit what counts as the ‘real’ economy by capitalist enterprises, market transactions and wage labour. Anthropologists describe such ideas of economy as abstract, dis-embedded (Polanyi 1957a, b) or virtual (Carrier and Miller 1998), arguing that these conceptions are not adequate to the empirical realities of lived experience. Beyond anthropology, there is a growing literature that theorises the ways aca…
Sacred journeys, diasporic lives: Sociality and the religious imagination among Filipinos in the Middle East
A Transnational Pig: Reconstituting Kinship Among Filipinos in Hong Kong
Migration may offer Filipinos abroad new ways to practice religious faith and opportunities to extend social networks, but many must at the same time sustain and renegotiate kinship ties at home. The obligations of kinship can mean declarations of faith are not always what we may think. Rather than being the good converts or diligent congregation members of their self-descriptions, migrants may continue to be drawn into village ritual at home. Th…
Rethinking the dynamics of rural transformation: Performing different development pathways in a Philippine municipality
Rural communities all over South East Asia are facing major challenges as they try to shape their economic futures in ways that will increase wellbeing for all. This paper argues that researchers who describe and explain rural change play a powerful role in shaping imagined futures and the practices of local development. We foreground the theoretical choices made in representing rural change and call for a rethinking of the dynamics of transforma…
On the Face of Facebook: Historical Images and Personhood in Filipino Social Networking
Exchanging and manipulating digital images on social networking sites offers people new ways to renegotiate a wide variety of relationships. This paper examines how interactions on Facebook transform personhood and norms for relationships and belongings among a particular group of Filipino users. By tracking historical images that index users' profiles, the argument charts the simultaneous modes in which digital photographs act in online social n…
Global Filipinos: Migrants' Lives in the Virtual Village
Changes and continuities produced by globalization
Rethinking Locality in Ifugao: Tribes, Domains, and Colonial Histories
In the context of lfugao municipalities applying for ancestral domain, a review of the oral histories collected within a community of precolonial migrants allows this article to locate an indigenous group on quite a different terrain, one with no concrete locality or authentic identity to begin with. Instead, this locality is forged through the resources provided by colonial histories, and is spreading out into different nodes, in an at- tempt to…
Global Filipinos: Migrants’ Lives in the Virtual Village
Sociology (20 works) · Political science (18 works) · Geography (15 works) · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy (15 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (12 works) · Economics (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (10 works) · History (8 works)