Reimagining Care: Health, Aging, and Neoliberal Governance in the Philippines

Edward Nadurata
Global and International Studies
UC Irvine

This project examines the evolving dynamics around care, aging, and retirement amidst sustained labor migration, globalization, and the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines. “Reimagining Care: Aging, Retirement and Neoliberal Governance in the Philippines” asks: If Filipinos are caring for the world, then how is the Philippines dealing with its own care crisis––who is to take care of elders who are left at home? Through a combination of oral histories, participant observation, autoethnography, and discursive analyses of legislation and government welfare programs, this project highlights an emerging eldercare economy and the lives of older Filipinos globally as they deal with the demands of aging and retirement to answer urgent questions around care that have only been exacerbated by the pandemic. In doing so, this project interrogates not only how those left in a labor-sending nation such as the Philippines deal with predicaments around care, but also connects it to a global regime of carelessness, organization, and valuation rooted in racial capitalist logics and organized abandonment.