Exploring the stories of migrant medical workers

  • March 6, 2017
Exploring the stories of migrant medical workers

Megha Amrith publishes first ethnography book on migrant medical workers in today's Southeast Asia.

The stories of migrants have always been inspiring to me, and I wanted to focus my doctoral work on better understanding their everyday lives and aspirations.

Megha Amrith

A Gates Cambridge Alumna has just published the first book-length ethnography of migrant medical workers in contemporary Southeast Asia.

Megha Amrith's book, Caring for strangers: Filipino medical workers in Asia, tells the personal stories of Filipino medical workers living and working in Singapore.  It tracks them from Manila’s nursing schools, where they dream of glamorous, cosmopolitan lives abroad, to a different reality in Singapore’s multicultural hospitals and nursing homes. It also describes nurses’ off-duty activities in shopping malls and churches and their online lives, where they connect with friends and family around the world and search for future opportunities. It then follows them back home on a visit to a Filipino village.

The Philippines has become one of the largest exporters of medical workers in the world, with nursing in particular offering many the hope of a lucrative and stable career abroad.

Megha's book explores the globalisation of medical care and its ethical, political and cultural implications, offering anthropological insights into the everyday experiences, anxieties and expectations of Filipino medical workers who care for strangers in a global Asian city.

The book's publisher Nias Press says that "it locates their stories within wider debates on migration, labour, care, gender and citizenship, while contributing a new and distinctive perspective to the scholarship on labour migration in Asia".

It is based on Megha's PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.

Megha [2007] says: "The stories of migrants have always been inspiring to me, and I wanted to focus my doctoral work on better understanding their everyday lives and aspirations. I was particularly curious to learn more about the experiences of migrants working in medical and care institutions. In many places around the world, these institutions hold within them a great degree of cultural diversity and I was eager to explore, from an anthropological perspective, how intercultural encounters take shape in these intimate spaces of care – the misunderstandings that arise but also the positive transformations in terms of how people transcend divisions between self and other. I also wanted to understand what this labour of care means to the migrants who perform it, given the persistent cultural and gender-based stereotypes in this sector and specifically among migrants from the Philippines who have an important presence in this sector globally."

She says her PhD research motivated her to widen her exploration of migration and diversity to include other regions beyond Asia. For her postdoctoral research, she conducted new fieldwork on these themes in South America and Europe. Since then she has been working with both academic and policy communities as a Research Fellow at the United Nations University in Barcelona on globalisation, culture and mobility. "I am keen to find ways to bring the rich findings and debates in academic scholarship to broader audiences, from policy-makers to civil society groups and the general public," she says.

*Caring for strangers: Filipino medical workers in Asia is published by NIAS Press, price £18.99 [paperback].

Megha Amrith

Megha Amrith

  • Alumni
  • Singapore
  • 2007 PhD Social Anthropology
  • Wolfson College

My PhD research is about contemporary migration within Southeast Asia – my particular focus is on the migration of Filipino medical workers to Singapore. Through the lives of mobile medical workers, I will explore the globalisation of medical care and its ethical, political and cultural implications. I have just returned to Cambridge after a year of ethnographic fieldwork and I look forward to working with a diverse and dynamic graduate community in the year ahead.

Latest News

What does it mean to see the world as a zero-sum competition?

It’s an age-old question: Why don’t people cooperate even when it is in their best interest to do so? It’s also an urgent question as we face huge global challenges mired in conflict and polarisation. A new paper in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology offers fresh psychological insights into this question through the lens […]

Breaking through the health boundaries

Ghufran Al Sayed was beginning her clinical work as a medical student in Manchester when Covid hit. Like many medical students at the time, she was redeployed onto Covid wards and the experience was hugely challenging. It also made her rethink what she wanted from a career in medicine. Ghufran’s parents had raised her with […]

New thinking for education leaders

A Gates Cambridge Scholar has co-authored a new book which is being described by leading educationalists as transforming the way schools think about change. The Pruning Principle offers a new approach to educational leadership, drawing inspiration from horticulture to address the chronic issues of overwork and inefficiency in schools. The authors, Gates Cambridge Scholar Dr Simon […]

A passion for biotech innovation in Africa

Taryn Adams has long been interested in bridging the gap between science and business in order to ensure science has practical, useful applications. Coming from South Africa, she says the innovation that results from linking science and business, particularly in biotech, is still in its early stages, but she feels there is room to make […]