Dr. Laura Lamas-Abraira, Spanish National Research Council
The AnthroMob network is delighted to announce the 12th lecture in our Moving Mobilities Online (MoMO) series, on May 7th, 2026 at 4:00pm CEST.
This special hybrid installment of the Moving Mobilities Online lecture series is hosted by the KU Leuven Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology’s Midweek Seminar series in collaboration with Dr. Tilmann Heil’s “Culture, Mobility, and Migration” course and the ERC COLLAB project.
This ethnographically grounded graphic presentation examines female led migration from the Philippines to other countries for domestic work, illuminating the global racialized labor regimes and multi layered migration infrastructures that shape the everyday conditions and possibilities of these women’s lives. It adopts both a transnational perspective and a local focus on Hong Kong as a key destination and stepping stone within the wider migration landscape.
Foreign domestic workers are vital to Hong Kong’s economy and to the city’s systems of social reproduction. Yet they frequently endure harsh living and working conditions, often marked by abuse. Their relationship to the city and to urban space—both physical and symbolic—is shaped by the power (dis)continuities that cut across the private and public spheres.
Read alongside contemporary debates on cosmopolitanism, their diasporic, vernacular, and situated ways of inhabiting the global city stand in contrast to elite forms of mobility or universalist imaginaries. Emerging from the margins, these practices speak to the experiences of those who are structurally excluded yet deeply entangled—both physically and aspirationally—in global processes. Their presence and activities within public space reveal a dynamic interplay of agency and vulnerability, capturing the deep ambivalence of lives shaped by precarious urban inhabitation, discipline, and continuous monitoring, but also by the creative possibilities for living beyond mere survival through collective appearance.