Liberty Chee

Hello, and welcome to my portfolio site. Here you will find information about my research, teaching, and work in the non-profit and non-academic sectors.

Work in Progress

The Problem of Domestic Work at the International Labour Organization

This paper examines the processes of attempting to set standards for one of the largest labour sectors in the world that employs women. It demonstrates how “domestic work” came to be understood as a problem that demanded responses and solutions in the context of the International Labour Organization. It does so through the lenses of problematization, a mode of analysis that makes it possible for something to become an object of thought. While the emerging literature on problematization in IR illustrates how these processes may be contingent, or a result of outright power struggles, this paper rather demonstrates how problematization may be characterised as one of iteration. It shows the repetition and progression in thinking about the problem of domestic work, the changes in solutions offered, and the conceptual and theoretical innovations to understand elements of domestic work. Through the iterative actions of various actors, which eventually included domestic workers themselves, the phenomenon of domestic work increased in comprehensibility and tractability, from a “non-problem” to a problem of the global economy.

Read and download the working draft here.

Hard numbers and “velvet triangles”: Mobilising statistics for the ILO Convention on Domestic Work

Abstract

After nearly half a century, domestic workers were again tabled on the agenda of the International Labour Conference in 2008. Three short years later, Conference delegates voted to establish the International Labour Organization's Convention on Domestic Work (C189). This article builds on the insight that the campaign to push for C189 was taken up by a feminist “velvet triangle”. These networks are usually comprised of women in social movements, femocrats, and academics. The informality of these alliances is due, in part, to the gendered marginality of an issue area, allowing for improvisation and agile coalitions. The article traces the origins of this triangle to bottom-up calls to develop measurement methodologies to make women's labour “visible” in the UN Conferences on Women, and later in discussions about informality, and domestic work. It then examines the relations among femocrats in various international institutions, academics, and the global trade unions in the co-production of knowledge about women's activities that were not counted and did not count in the “economy”. The article demonstrates how the demand for the valorisation of cooking, cleaning and caring, expressed itself through calls for the production of statistics. It attends to the under-explored effects of the “power of cognitive resources” in the literature. Finally, the article shows that the explicitly political project of the women's movements yielded not only a normative labour instrument, but advances in different fields of study. This case shows that the production of scientific knowledge, while still an overwhelmingly elite endeavour, need not always cater to elite demands.

Read here.

September 16, 2024

In recent years, there have been ongoing conversations about the importance of care in societies in the context of what has been called a “global care crisis”. Caring labour comprises personal and relational care activities as well as indirect care, such as cooking and cleaning. These are activities that have historically been devalued in many societies worldwide. This roundtable discussion will explore the experiences of women’s labour movements in putting domestic and caring labour on the global agenda. It will reflect on what has been accomplished in the past, as well as current and future challenges to advancing workers’ interests in an emerging care economy.

(Recorded: September 9, 2024)

Speakers:

Fish Ip, Asia Regional Coordinator, International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF, Hong Kong)

Vicky Kanyoka, Assistant General Secretary, IDWF (Tanzania)

Ida Le Blanc, General Secretary, National Union of Domestic Employees (Trinidad & Tobago)

Grace Papa, Political Secretary, Domestic Work Sector, European Federation of Food, Agriculture and Tourism Trade Unions (Belgium)

Chair: Prof. Sabrina Marchetti

Coordinator: Dr. Liberty Chee

Abstract

This paper examines how migrant domestic workers subvert domination, exploitation and subjection through performances in TikTok videos. Through this medium, workers exercise autonomy in severely restrictive employment and living conditions, where collective action may not only be improbable but also illegal. I argue that these videos demonstrate Foucauldian counter-conduct or the “art of not being governed so much”. Counter-conduct is a form of resistance distinct to those who have limited access to the public sphere, due in part to the gendered nature of cooking, cleaning and caring. Domestic work is not normally included in labour laws, and the place of employment are private homes. This makes it difficult to organise or make rights claims. I build on literatures of everyday resistance to examine the practices and subjectivities by migrant domestic workers in Gulf countries. In so doing, so-called “modern slaves”, enact freedom, already present, as subjects of ethics and politics.

Read and download here.

Play and Counter-Conduct: Migrant Domestic Workers on TikTok (Open Access)

Being of Use: Diffraction and an Ethics of Truth-Telling in Post-Cartesian IR (open access)

Abstract

This paper presents an ethics premised on a post-Cartesian ontology: that what we know is how we know and vice versa. The acknowledgment of the international relations (IR) scholar's constitutive relation to the world she seeks to describe, and of which she is a part, entails an ethics that is also a practice and an agency. I build on Karen Barad's quantum theory and on Michel Foucault's notion of parrhesia to address two problems in IR theory, namely that reflexivity and the pragmatist call for praxis pay insufficient attention to how power conditions knowledge production. Barad offers an “ethico-onto-epistemology” as a nonrepresentationalist methodology, which attends to the material difference knowledge can make rather than the accuracy of our representations. Parrhesia, in turn, problematizes our relationship with the activity of knowing itself. In the pragmatist sense, we are asked not only to be of use to our communities, but also to be mindful of who we are and what kind of subject we become in our phenomenal inscriptions of reality. This quantum ethic allows us to better realize the pragmatist ideal of a democratic social science by allowing us to resist the centripetal force of epistemic sovereignty and the cooptation of scientific authority.

Read and download here.

March 24, 2022

Some professional news. I have been awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship to be taken up at Ca'Foscari University in Venice. #KnowingDOM will investigate how various actors engage the International Labour Organization in making knowledge claims about domestic work. This project will draw from notions of civic epistemology and the sociality of knowledge production in feminist science studies. The latter attend to different sources of epistemic authority, including voices 'from below.' The project will analyze the discourses, practices and actions culminating in the ILO's Convention on Domestic Work (C189) and inquire into how the ILO's norm-setting activities diffuse to and from a regional organization (the European Union).

'SUPERMAIDS': Hyper-resilient subjects in neoliberal migration governance (OPEN ACCESS)

Abstract

Resilience is a concept in world politics that emerged as a way to respond to the impossibility of guaranteeing security in an era of complexity. Without a central authority to provide security, risk is devolved to the individual. Those who cannot secure themselves are enjoined to constantly adapt to the unknown. Where control over complex systems is now thought to be impossible, the path to managing risks is through self-control. This paper demonstrates how such a subject is produced, and indeed whose production, I argue, is crucial to the functioning of a global labor market that is governed “without government.” Migrant domestic workers acutely instantiate the kind of human subjectivity called forth by neoliberalism—a “resilient subject.” The paper describes how this ideal worker is produced through resilience training in various stages of the migration trajectory—during recruitment, training prior to deployment, and while on their overseas residency. This paper demonstrates how managing the insecurities of migrant domestic work means working on the “self” rather than addressing gaps in legal or regulatory mechanisms. In resilience training, the worker becomes the necessary component of neoliberalism as a governmental rationality, one that is enjoined to transform risk into opportunity.

Read here.

ASEAN 0n Migrant Rights: Making Process, Not Progress

I was invited by 9Dashline to write a commentary on the state of migrant workers' rights in ASEAN.

Read here.

Women in natural disasters: indicative findings in unraveling gender in institutional responses

An ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) Thematic Study.

A project undertaken with colleagues at the Department of Political Science, Ateneo de Manila University.

Read here.

Bigkis ng Lahi (Ties that Bind)

A documentary on the impact of large-scale mining on indigenous peoples of Mindoro island. A project for Non-Timber Forest Products Exchange Programme for South and Southeast Asia, funded by Dutch foundation CordAid. Co-production with director and cinematographer Butch Maddul.

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