In a new book by Dr Ella Parry-Davies, Lecturer in Theatre, Performance and Critical Theory in the Department of English, migrant domestic workers contradict expectations by voicing their own lived experiences.
Intimate Inequalities: Performing Domestic Work breaks with prevalent popular and scholarly depictions of migrant domestic workers as voiceless and victimised, instead celebrating the creative expertise that they deploy in navigating the intimate inequalities of their everyday lives - without minimising the challenges faced by domestic workers by systems stacked towards their exploitation.
This book is the work of many people I'm grateful to, foremost the migrant domestic workers who I was in conversation and collaboration with while researching and writing it. I learnt from them that although domestic workers face severe struggles against global 'labour brokerage' economies, exploitative employers, and violent border regimes, 'struggle' also comes to mean a form of expertise and solidarity in many of their lives.
Dr Ella Parry-Davies, Lecturer in Theatre, Performance and Critical Theory
Creative performance is both a practical method and analytic lens in the book. Dr Parry-Davies analyses a collection of soundwalks recorded and co-edited by migrant domestic workers, which form the primary archive of the book.
To make a soundwalk, a collaborator would invite Dr Parry-Davies to a memorable or meaningful place for them. Together, they would go for a walk and audio-record a conversation before editing it into a shorter track.
Listeners can download these soundwalks from the project website and return to the location of the recording to retrace the initial walk, while listening to a domestic worker explain what this place means to them.
The soundwalks were also accompanied by a creative prompt that listeners could follow instead of visiting the place it was recorded, to make the soundwalks accessible in relation to disability and for listeners around the world.
Rather than treating domestic workers' lives as 'raw material' for analysis, this archive is already expertly curated by the makers themselves, centring their own decisions about how to represent their experiences and perspectives.
Dr Ella Parry-Davies, Lecturer in Theatre, Performance and Critical Theory
One soundwalk, we are not slaves, takes place in Hyde Park, where its maker Phoebe escaped from abusive employers and now returns to support other domestic workers there who are facing exploitation.
Dr Parry-Davies is continuing this work through Survivor Futures, a project building on her partnership with one of the domestic worker-led groups involved in research for the book. This project dives into the role that experiences of trafficking plays in domestic workers lives both in the UK and on their return to the Philippines.
I hope that this book manages to represent the multiple ways migrant domestic workers navigate intimate inequality, taking up the practice and theory of performance as a way of attending to their everyday creative expertise.
Dr Ella Parry-Davies, Lecturer in Theatre, Performance and Critical Theory
