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This paper examines care as a contested bio‐political arena defining the daily lives of live‐in domestic care migrants in Hong Kong. It asks what roles migration infrastructures and mundane city landscapes play in mediating associated everyday care dynamics. Empirically, it examines two sets of care‐related infrastructures in the city that intimately mediate the population's everyday experience of care. The paper first examines the ways the regulatory infrastructures of the city state, whose operational logics are aligned with the production of 'permanent temporariness' and disposability, systematically deny migrants' access to institutional care for themselves. Second, the papers examine the ways care migrants improvise with the city's situational urban geographies and their human bodies as infrastructure resources during regular work‐bound urban outings to elaborate provisional, localised and informal care infrastructures. While not without challenges, these improvised informal care infrastructures essentially allow the migrant care‐labor population to live with their institu‐tionalised precarity. Overall, the paper makes three contributions. First, it reconceptualises live‐in domestic care migrants as urban actors capable of both navigating and crafting their own care infrastructures in the city, even during workdays. Second, it foregrounds 'care' as an urban and socio‐technical construct in relation to both bio‐political control and interpersonal coping. Third, it employs the ideas of precarity, provisionality and robustness to unpack the bio‐political systems that shape migrants' experiences of care. The findings are based on an analysis of the city's migration regulations and the actual urban work‐life stories of a small group of live‐in domestic care migrants based on participants' personal diaries and interviews with the participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Health communication in the COVID-19 pandemic can be effectively implemented if all members of the populations, including marginalized population such as migrant domestic workers (MDWs), have good eHealth literacy. Lessons learned during this critical period may help improve planning and mitigation of the impacts of future health crises. Methods: This study aimed to examine and explore the eHealth literacy levels of the MDWs in Hong Kong during the COVID-19 pandemic by using a convergent mixed methods research design. A total of 1156 Hong Kong MDWs participated in a paper-based survey using a multistage cluster random sampling design for the quantitative component. eHealth literacy was measured using an eHealth literacy Scale (eHEALS). For the qualitative component, a purposive sampling of 19 MDWs participated in face-to-face, semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Descriptive statistics and multiple regression analyses were used to carry out the quantitative analysis, while thematic analysis was used for the qualitative analysis. Both quantitative and qualitative data were merged and integrated for mixed-methods analysis. Results: The meta-inferences of the quantitative and qualitative results mainly confirmed that MDWs in Hong Kong had good levels of eHealth literacy. The use of Instagram, YouTube and WhatsApp as the COVID-19 information sources, in addition to having an interest in the topic of the current spread of COVID-19 together with the Hong Kong government's policies related to COVID-19, were found to be associated with eHealth literacy. Conclusions: The eHealth literacy level of MDWs in Hong Kong was shown to be good and it was influenced by the use of popular social media platforms including Instagram, YouTube, and WhatsApp. It is realistic to suggest that such platforms should be harnessed for health communication during the pandemic. Yet, regulations to combat false information on these media are also urgently needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discursive othering deals with the many ways in which language is used to express prejudice against minorities, and it outlines the processes and conditions that promote group-based inequality and marginalization. This article focuses on online othering, and it analyzes a corpus of 615 comments posted by Hong Kong employers of domestic migrant workers (DMWs) on social media. First, a quantitative analysis of the corpus outlines the content categories found in the posts, and second, a discourse analysis of representative excerpts illustrates the claims made about DMWs. Employers engage in othering of their helpers, and the analysis shows how demeaning racist comments function to publicly shame them and warn others not to employ them. The article uses Language and Social Psychology frameworks to analyze the posts, and it discusses the functions of using racist derogatory language. The paper concludes by discussing how research may be used to address pressing social issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on ethnographic data about Filipino migrant domestic workers' perceptions of and responses to the use of surveillance cameras in the home to intervene in recent debates about surveillance, care and social control. On the one hand, our participants disclose what we refer to as the gendered ironies of care and control. Digital surveillance practices in the home not only produce tactics for evading control but also reduce the capacity of migrant workers to deliver the best possible care that is ostensibly the basis for the deployment of new forms of watching. On the other hand, the responses we document here speak to critiques of the Foucauldian vision of surveillance derived from the panopticon that are 'abstract, disembodied and distrustful'. In contrast to the Benthamite reading of God's all seeing eye, Filipino migrant workers invoke a relational vision which speaks to connectedness, trust and the possibility of mutual concern. While the use of covert surveillance cameras especially was perceived as undermining the trust necessary for care relationships, some respondents used the devices to provoke face to face encounters deemed necessary to re-establish relations of trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much media and scholarly attention has been paid to the growing tension between Hong Kong people and Indonesian foreign domestic workers, the underlying reasons of cultural difference are largely ignored as an explanation for the challenges Indonesian domestic workers face in Hong Kong. Most often, Islam is one of the primary cultural differences that Hong Kong people overlook. This paper begins with an overview of the significance of Indonesian Muslim foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong society and the domestic sphere. Then, the paper suggests that the Indonesian Muslim domestic helpers have been politically weak, struggling and accommodating to the mainstream Chinese culture. Generally speaking, Indonesian Muslim domestic workers in Hong Kong have been powerless under the global labor market and the local socio-cultural forces of Chinese society. Nevertheless, there has been an emerging visibility of Islam through their re-assertion of Islamic piety in Hong Kong everyday life via, for example, veiling, practicing daily prayer, and seeking to follow ahalaldiet. Visibility, however, does not mean accommodation and understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the effects of live-in foreign domestic workers (FDWs) on school children's educational outcomes using samples from two population censuses and a survey data set. The evidence consistently points to Filipino FDWs improving the educational outcomes of school children by decreasing their probability of late schooling or increasing their scores of core academic subjects. English-speaking ability and maturity are shown to be the most important assets of the Filipino FDW in improving children's educational outcomes. These findings suggest that FDWs provide an important childrearing service. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Filipina Christians pack their religion as they migrate overseas for work. And although Filipinas in search of work overseas do not list religious freedom and tolerance as one of their considerations for a destination country, once they have settled, religion functions as a coping mechanism in dealing with the migration process and serves to link migrants with their homeland. This paper explores this overlooked area in the research on Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong. It examines Filipina domestic workers' religious beliefs and practices, and how these practices compare to those in their country of origin. It also examines how they make use of their religiosity as a survival and adaptive strategy in a city-state that has no state religion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the purported negative influence of foreign domestic helpers (FDHs) on child second language acquisition (SLA) by studying Hong Kong Cantonese children's listening ability in second language (L2) English. 31 kindergarten third graders aged 4;6 to 6, and 29 first year secondary students aged 11-14 who have had a Filipino domestic helper at home took part in the study. In addition, 34 youngsters (20 in kindergarten, 14 in secondary) who did not have a Filipino helper participated as controls. Results from two listening tasks (picture choosing task, sound discrimination task) suggest that informants do not differ from the control in their abilities to listen to American-, British-, and Hong Kong English, and that they are better at listening to Filipino-accented English than the control. These findings cast doubts on the anecdotal belief of the harmful effect FDHs have on children's language acquisition including an L2. Moreover, the additional effect of being familiar with another variety of English is arguably a desirable outcome given that English is used as a lingua franca among non-native speakers on a daily basis in this highly globalised world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing countries are increasingly facilitating migration as a way of generating remittances for the home economy. The Philippines serves as a paradigmatic example, inaugurating a labour export scheme in 1973 that has grown each year and resulted in nearly 25 per cent of the labour force working abroad. The institutionalization of this labour export policy, along with changes in citizenship and voting laws, has led to the increasing deterritorialization of the Philippines state, with concomitant implications for democracy and democratization. This deterritorialization presents both opportunities and challenges for the state. Among them are the possibility of securing sustained remittances and the necessity of securing democratic legitimacy from a globalized polity. This paper traces the evolution of this labour export policy and analyzes the effects of state discursive strategies designed to secure democratic legitimacy. To further this analysis I present the results of a survey conducted among Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong (n=691). The responses indicate the discursive strategy of 'national heroes' has been effective in that majorities of OFWs view themselves as 'heroes of the nation.' However, OFWs also view themselves as making sacrifices for the nation and have concerns about government commitments to protect the rights and interests of OFWs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the choices married women in Hong kong make concerning their employment status. We attempt to relate such choices to wives' role constraints in the family. It is hypothesized that, given their primary responsibilities for child care and domestic labor, married women are likely to choose an employment status that best accommodates their familial obligations. The analysis of recent census data supports this expectation. Waged employment and self-employment are found to be in conflict with women's domestic responsibilities, whereas outworking and unpaid work in family enterprises are not. The last two employment statuses are characterized by a higher degree of work flexibility and, thus, working wives are in abetter position to balance the demands of family and paid work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]