Book Review: Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement-Building, and Communities of Care by Ethel Tungohan

In Care Activism, Ethel Tungohan theorizes on the praxis of care activism.By focusing on acts of care and communities of care in local, national, and transnational migrant care workers' organizing, she challenges conventional knowledge of social movements and the sociopolitical location of migrant care workers, primarily women, in unequal global structures.Her work establishes a novel way of analyzing the functioning and success of social movements by expanding the focus from whether and how the group achieves policy goals intended to affect material conditions to how they attend to their care needs.Care, in Tungohan's conception, aims to rehumanize the dehumanized through interconnecting cultural, economic, political, and social actions.Tungohan does not refute that some organizations may pursue specific policy goals like most social movements.Indeed, several of the organizations in the book actively interact with the state as an advocating body, such as Migrante, albeit in unconventional ways sometimes.Instead, their main objective is to provide networks and spaces for themselves, their fellow migrant care workers, and their families to feel joy, be loved, and remain supported in a time of extended deprivation, isolation, and separation. 1 Employing extensive ethnographic and feminist methods and fruitfully bridging conversations on migrant labour, democratic engagements, and social movements, Care Activism contends that the affective dimension of activism (i.e., an activism of care) and its sites of resistance should not be dismissed as mere "'distractions' from the larger fight," as mainstream academic analyses would often do in favour of more discursive-oriented and politically-engaged organizing. 2 For Tungohan, this narrow focus on the political side of activism neglects the group's internal dynamics as a community.She aims to illuminate the centrality of relationality in the form of attending to the needs of, and being responsible to, others in migrant organizing, specifically, and social movements, more generally.