 So once again, welcome everyone to the FTGS Global Voices Seminar Series. This series of events with incredible early career scholars is designed to showcase and amplify the expertise and research of members of the feminist theory and gender studies section of the ISA. It's also in partnership with King's College London. Our events are recorded and are going to be available on YouTube. You can also see our past events. So make sure to follow our social media. I'll send the links later on so you can get, you can get the links and you can follow what we're doing there too. The series is, has been organized and is hosted by Dr. Amanda Shisham, a senior lecturing security studies and researcher in gender security at King's College London, who could not be here with us today, unfortunately. However, I'm also the series, the series co-host. I'm Lua Thomas. I'm a PhD student currently researching feminist movements in South America in a historical perspective. The Global Voices Seminar aimed to promote global conversation on issues pertaining to feminism, gender and international relations. And for today, we are pleased to welcome as our speaker, Dr. Maria Tanya, who is currently a fellow and senior lecturer at the Department of International Relations at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. Her discussion today, which is titled, Who Cares for the Cares? We'll address feminist explanations for the depletion of care in times of crisis by drawing on pandemic experiences in the Philippines. To discuss Dr. Tanya's research, we are honored to have Dr. Elizabeth Proul, professor of international relations and director of the Gender Center at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Thank you so much, both of you, for being with us today. And once again, people can ask questions in the chat, and I'll leave the floor to you, Tanya. I'm going to share here the screen. Great. Thank you so much, Lua. While we're setting up, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you and Professor Proul for being here today. But of course, also to FTGS and King's College, largely through the work of Amanda, Dr. Amanda Chisholm, and putting the seminar series together. It's absolutely a huge honor to be part of this seminar series because I know from the previous seminars that it's been really an amazing showcase of research and community that we are building. So my paper is in its very early stages, and I'd like to begin by acknowledging how difficult the past two years have been. And speaking in a relative privilege position of being based in Australia, but of course, Filipino, and watching the pandemic unfold with all my relatives and families and friends in the Philippines. It was very hard. It was very hard to think and write as bodies were piling up. And so this paper is an attempt now that we are in a relative position of reflecting and trying to really make sense of what has happened then and what is still ongoing. I hope to actually use this seminar as an opportunity to really challenge and develop this work further. In line with that, I'd like to also acknowledge that this research has received funding from the Japan International Cooperation Agency. And I'm very grateful that I've been invited to be part of their Human Security and Practices of Empowerment in East Asia, through which I was able to also gain the support of my research assistants. So I'd like to thank Ezekiel Benedicto and Marielle Kioge for their support, because again, if not for them, this project would not have been possible. So what is this paper about? I think I started it because at the height of the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic, health workers and women's rights service providers worldwide clearly experienced severe depletion and mortality. Globally, health and social care workers, 70% of which are women, are dealing with a whole host of adverse impacts from depression, PTSD, chronic stress and fatigue, to disproportionate exposure to the health risk of COVID-19, including that. So one study pointed out that it was estimated that between 80,000 to 180,000 health and care workers may have died from COVID-19 from January 2020 to May 2021 alone. One study which drew on worldwide data at the start of the pandemic suggests that the cases of health care workers infected were, of course, predominantly female. Within the profession, nurses were the largest group infected, while doctors constituted the majority of deaths. The study also shows where data on ethnicity is available, such as in countries like Australia, France and the UK, these deaths tended to be for people of color. However, data collection and reporting challenges, especially in developing countries with pre-existing structural barriers to health care service delivery, mean that many cases of harms and deaths born by health and social workers are invisible and unaccounted for. According to the World Health Organization, the number of COVID-19 deaths and infection cases among health care workers is expected to be greater than officially reported. So workers in these sectors which constitute the paid care economy were also universally recognized as essential to the backbone of or in the frontline of pandemic response. However, being essential and on the front lines of the pandemic meant that they were also faced with intensified risks to personal safety and direct threats to life. Paid cares have been crises shock absorbers, such that in many cases they were on the direct receiving end of blame for failures in pandemic response. For instance, there have been reports of health care workers, particularly those in low income and middle income countries for which Philippines is part of, that these workers have been subjected to discrimination, abuse, and even vilified by their own governments and local communities. The mental and emotional strains they continue to bear in their workplaces are further compounded by violence and exclusions within their own homes, communities and the state. These cause way heavily on the psychosocial and mental well being of service providers and compounds the pressures on health systems to cope. Indeed, such an environment created conditions for these workers to be unwilling and unable to report to work there by further deepening gaps in the pandemic response. And so for me seeing all of these unfold and again how it was strongly experiencing the Philippine case where I'm originally from one of the most striking paradoxes of the pandemic was that why at a time when our collective need for care is most profound and most intense that the very sources and providers of care were not a greggously neglected and violated, but it was also assumed as unlimited self renewing and bottomless. So while clearly a global phenomenon, as I mentioned this paradox is even more perplexing in the case of the Philippines, a country whose competitive edge in the global labor market is filled on nationalist quality of care. Tracing global care circuits for instance reveal that the costs of the pandemic for Filipino paid care workers are both gendered and racialized. For example, there have been reports that the debt call among healthcare workers in California and in New York, global cities severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic were heavily impacted heavily impacted Filipino Americans who represented 20% of the nursing workforce. This is corroborated by a time magazine feature article citing research on the disproportionate impacts of the pandemic on nurses. According to data gathered by the National Nurses United. Filipinos constituted 4% of registered nurses in the US, yet they accounted for 26.4% of the total number of nurses who died from COVID-19 and related complications. This debt toll amounted to almost half of the nurses who that nurses of color who died in the US. Meanwhile, back in the Philippines, Filipino health workers have called out the mismanagement of the pandemic and have demanded long overdue compensation and financial support from the government. There have been nationwide problems in the availability of personal protective equipment, ventilators, beds and diagnostic equipment and supplies. Next slide please. This is an image of at the height of the pandemic, how because of extreme shortages in the supply of PPEs, health workers, especially community health workers have had to improvise. And as graphic as this might look like it was definitely something widely reported in my own data collection. So here for those who are not able to see health workers improvise using garbage bags and layering garbage bags and imagine again that they were using this for extended periods of time and the compounded health risk on that is clearly and visibly evident. So many of the Filipino health workers who have, you know, even had to improvise their PPEs and use personal resources to procure supplies were also very much reliant on private donations and a lot of these community debt initiatives. However, at the same time, health workers face stigma from their own communities and reportedly immediately in the month in the months of the pandemic, many were told to vacate their homes. Many were denied public transport or refused services by local businesses. By September 2021, the country's own Department of Health reported that there have been at least 104 health workers who died from COVID-19. Not surprising therefore that many Filipino health workers protested the government's ban, preventing them from seeking jobs overseas while they continue to receive inadequate support as part of the national response. While the overseas employment ban was eventually lifted, the government has put a limit allowing only 5000 healthcare workers per year can go abroad. Significantly less compared to the typical annual rate of 13,000 workers per annum. The profound hardship they face is such that Filipino carers, paid carers were risking working for pandemic responses abroad, where they will also face heightened mortality in exchange for perceived better conditions compared to working in health systems where they and their families have also had to deal with either dying from COVID-19 or from hunger. So this paper charts feminist explanations for the depletion of care in times of crisis by drawing on the gendered politics of care for carers in the Philippines. I would argue that the depletion of cares is not incidental, but rather integral to the crisis driven reinvention of state and global economy. Consequently, I seek to unsettle prevailing narratives that frame these harms as unavoidable occupational health issues in normal times, as collateral damage during the pandemic. This research presents preliminary evidence from an online survey and key informant interviews with health workers and women's rights service providers from the National Capital Region of the Philippines where Manila is based is the largest urban area. And this region, the National Capital Region, is also where approximately 41% of the total number of confirmed cases and 39% of deaths for the whole country is located. Manila, the capital, has also been reported to have had one of the longest lockdowns in the world. And while the country as a whole has been ranked the worst place during the pandemic. The survey consisted of 89 anonymous respondents in total with 51 identifying as health workers and 38 as women's rights service providers. Key informant interviews were conducted with 10 representatives from organizations all and for health workers and women's rights service providers. I'm also drawing on secondary sources including the COVID-19 monitoring reports produced in the country to corroborate this data. So in trying to make sense of the depletion in times of crisis, I build on already existing and very vibrant feminist scholarship in security studies and political economy, and particularly on the depletion framework, depletion through social reproduction framework. And I can explain that further in the Q&A. But the pandemic impacts on the health and well-being of paid carers, particularly in this project, I look at health workers and social welfare, particularly women's rights welfare providers have been predominantly viewed through biomedical and workplace hazard explanations. They tend to focus on infectious disease outbreaks as soon generis, or particularly that these infectious disease outbreaks are unique in unique form of crisis. By contrast, I argue that feminist perspectives alert us to the ways in which the pandemic is structurally and discursively connected with other forms of global crisis from armed conflicts, disasters and climate or environmental risk, and of course economic crisis. For instance, across these forms of crisis, we know that feminist scholarship have shown that the lack of women's participation and leadership in decision-making processes has been a constant thread across all forms of crisis. Despite women comprising the overwhelming majority of healthcare workers globally, they represented 25% of COVID-19 task forces in 36 conflict and post-conflict countries where data was available. So her the default has been to double down on militarism and unprecedented insecurity posed by the overlapping of COVID-19 to climate change. In the 2021 UN Security General's annual report to the Security Council on Women, Peace and Security, it was pointed out that during the pandemic, military spending as a share of gross domestic product in fact even reach a global average of 2.4%. The largest increase since the global financial crisis. This increase amounted to $2 trillion in 2020, reflecting therefore a significant disparity compared to pandemic related health spending worldwide. So as I mentioned, I'm very much drawing on trying to learn from the vast feminist scholarship that have looked at depletion in context of conflicts, disasters and increasingly in climate change and economic crises. And to understand that over and over and across different types of crises, we see that women in paid and unpaid care, bear the brunt of this constant privileging of warfare over welfare. Especially in times of crises, security is re-embedded in state-centric and militarized logics that govern the distributions of resources and authority. Moreover, the societal harms we are witnessing today have their roots in the global crises in social reproduction, which have been cyclical and underway prior to the pandemic. Nancy Fraser situates the crisis in social reproduction in terms of this inherent contradiction or crisis tendency of capitalism. As she points out, on the one hand, social reproduction is a condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation. On the other hand, capitalism's orientation to unlimited accumulation tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies. And it's further that periods of crisis are in fact defined by boundary struggles, which refer to the historical and contextualized modes of struggle over the boundaries delimiting economy from society, production from reproduction and work from family. The conceptualized session of crisis, I interpret the depletion of carers during the pandemic within such ongoing and cumulative boundary struggles that feature in the contemporary contradictions of our patriarchal and racialized global economy. Fundamentally, as I argue in this paper, we are witnessing boundary struggles over who is old care, when, how, and why. And so in my research and drawing on the interviews and key inform, sorry, interviews and online survey, I map out three of these boundary struggles. First is the economic devaluing of social reproduction. Second is the cultural valuing of social reproduction. And finally, the security misvaluing of social reproduction. So briefly explain what this means and how a lot of this is very much informed and engaged with the experiences of carers on the ground. I also argue that these three interconnected boundary struggles allows to understand and really point out that crises are multi cited and expressed in relation to contextualized material in discursive processes. They emerge and endure following particular crisis specific or crisis in these logics. And again, I'll explain that a bit further. So first is on the economic devaluing of social reproduction as the first arena, through which we see these depletion processes occurring. One of the contestations that research participants of this project raised is the categorization of, of course, essential labor and which workers deserve special entitlements. So as part of the Philippine response and as in many other countries emergency laws and policies were enacted to mobilize tremendous resources in the service of the pandemic response. My key informant stated that despite the dispersive representation of health care workers as essential economic distribution of release relief assistance, proper pay and risk compensation reflected artificial divides between public and private health workers, and in those supposedly directly responsible in treating covenanting patients and the rest who are not these differentiations were unhelpful and did not reflect realities of care relations on the ground. Within the Philippine state, one and by any number two, these are the emergency measures and law passed by the government and women's right service providers who have long been filling the gaps of health care service delivery in the country were excluded. As one informant explained, private institutions were left out, no hazard pay, no incentive pay, but the risk was there too, even if we weren't treating actual COVID patients. Community health care workers such as those at the barangay or village level, who have long subsidized health systems in the Philippines, especially in remote and rural areas have been further disadvantaged too. Research studies have shown that even prior to the pandemic, these barangay health workers have been poorly paid and typically kept voluntary, such that even they such that they end up even subsidizing community health through their own out of pocket expenses and again very similar to the image you're seeing in the slide. Thus, the largely women led barangay health force has been heavily mobilized in local pandemic responses, yet these workers were not entitled to the same benefits as other health workers. Worse, they were often left out in distribution of PPEs and have had to procure their own and therefore help explain why COVID infection cases among health workers were predominantly female. The responses from the survey corroborates how economically valuing shapes, which actors are seen as providing care for carers. In my survey I asked health workers and women's rights service providers to assess or reflect on the level of satisfaction they have for the support they receive from employers, local government, national government, and from their family, friends and community. Next slide please. The results were, perhaps for me, very interesting. So in this table you see results of that data where I asked for them to rate the level of trust in the ability of the following groups to provide the care and support they needed. Among health care workers, they positively rated family, friends and communities, and as we move from employer to local government to the national government, we see a pattern of declining confidence or trust in the ability of these institutions or actors to provide care and support. In my survey, health workers' rights service providers similarly, 92 was the average score in terms of zero to 100, 92 was the average score that they gave for family, friends and community, and as we move from the relationships of care from direct to indirect, as the scale of caring relationships change, we see a decline, and in particular you see a strong contrast between the 92 score for family, friends and community to 50 for national government and 87 among health care workers, family, friends and community, and 60 due to the national government. So very low compared to the very strong belief that they get better support from family, friends and communities. So for me this is very interesting and again allows us to make sense of what is happening in terms of the experiences of carers. In the Philippine context, what we are seeing here is really reflective of the national government. So I was writing and working on this at a time when President Duterte, former President Duterte was still the president, and the approach that the government has taken was as other studies have shown or emerging studies have shown was very much military led in the sense that the decision making body in charge of the pandemic was led by military personnel, but also that a lot of the framings of the response and the justifications of interventions, emergency interventions deployed used war like framing. So again, like other countries that they refer to it as battlefront, or the virus as the enemy and so on, distinctly in the Philippines, as well, that these processes reflected economic devaluing was very much in intersection with pervasive corruption. So tremendous resources accessed by the state for the pandemic are now unaccounted for approximately $1 billion worth of COVID-19 pandemic funds. These are now, there are now ongoing Congress inquiries on cases associated with overpriced deals, purportedly for purchasing PPEs. However, at the same time, this has meant that two years since the pandemic, many health care workers still have not received proper compensation. With respect to ongoing delays in gross milk miscalculation of hazard pace and benefits, one of my informants stated, so long been a rat, but at Navarra. Is that the cause of their suffering? And here for those who speak Spanish is very much the same influence. Barak means or Barato means to devalue or cheapen the actual work. And so there was a strong sense of how their work, their suffering was very much cheapened by the government. So the second boundary struggle refers to the cultural valuing of social reproduction. And here I'm looking at precisely how cultural values, beliefs and practices are made to complement this economic devaluing. That is, the absence of material influence to care for carers is at best mitigated by and at worst normalized through cultural valoration, valorization. Paid carers, especially at the height of the pandemic were widely heralded as modern day heroes and were valorized for their selflessness and altruism. Such discursive strategies have long been employed by the Philippine state in sustaining its remittance driven economy and export of care workers globally. It allows the state to harness care labor without the corresponding influence to replenish and when you care. This is also very much gendered because in the country. Good femininity is often framed as selflessness self sacrificing suffering in silence and so on. So it was unsurprising that when the pandemic, when the COVID-19 broke out, paid carers were made to feel grateful and obliged into bottomless service through similar techniques of cultural or non material rewards. These include and indeed something more globally. All the honoring from clapping to the labeling of them as heroes and the tributes that they received from their patients and communities. I'm not saying that these tributes and forms of appreciation are bad and indeed a lot of my informants shared how much it made a big difference. In the context of the suffering and the economic devaluing that they were experiencing, it actually helped significantly. However, it is also important to question because when health care workers are paid care is transgress these cultural expectations such as in deciding to quit and seek employment overseas. They were disciplined and framed as unpatriotic. As one informant pointed out when the government issued a deployment ban. They said, we are being told we can't leave because we have to serve first and be nationalist. This is too hurtful when in fact many have volunteered without salary or are working for small salaries. But this is now about food security for our family. If they can't go out or if you can't go out of the country, they have no other income. She further described that in effect this policy made them prison nurses or in prison nurses prison nurses. And there are other forms of the some social cultural safety needs that we're indirectly relied on, for instance by a knee hand or what we, which refers to mutual aid practices among communities were valorized as again, improving Filipino spirit of community and resilience, but they march out of desperation and necessity. In the absence of state assistance, what was left for health workers and women's right service providers is to resort to forms of self help, or what my informants said as Saril and Sica, and an over reliance on Filipino cultural values of or volunteerism. Several programs and initiatives were indeed developed by networks of health workers and women's right service providers to care for their own so they even had to be the frontline responders to the frontline responders. So for me, these social networks are vital because not everyone was able to benefit from close knit family and community. Indeed, however, the pandemic has reinforced how the safety nets are neither elastic, nor always reliable. A number of key informants reported that, especially with the spread of misinformation on COVID-19. And there are many groups of health Filipino health care workers who are not accepted back by their families and communities and so organizations even have had to step up by providing them temporary dorms, so that they have a place to stay, and even provided them with counseling. And so here is the private sector that stepped in to fill in tremendous gaps in care. Next slide please. I also asked care workers paid care workers about their trust in their capacity for self care during the pandemic. And this is the result of that survey. The responses affirm that paid carers did not expect much care to come from the national government as we've seen in that in table one. However, that is in strong contrast to their overwhelming belief in self care and self reliance as shown in figure one health workers and women's right service providers express trust in their ability to take care of their own health and well being existing So many studies of course have long shown that women in the paid and unpaid care economy are faced with multiple burdens of care, but do not necessarily benefit from or receive care themselves, especially from others because they themselves feel they are not entitled to care. And gender cultural expectations of course play a strong role in these through language of maternal love and sacrifice, which shaped the influence to sustain paid and unpaid care labor. In the Philippines these responses need to be interpreted in relation to as I've mentioned cultural expectations around suffering in silence and so on, especially for women they are assumed to bear hardships for love and submission to family community Expectations on feminized martyrdom can intensify in crisis settings. In effect, the state benefits from paid carers individualized strategies to absorb the pandemic and self renew their labor. Therefore, rather than see this as entirely positive, this response that we are seeing here, I argue that what it actually reveals to us is a symbiotic relationship between a government that parasites from a strong sense of self care among health care workers and women's service rights providers in order to survive a crisis. Finally, and this interested in getting feedback on because it actually also caught me off guard. According to several key informants, the culture of human rights, which sets a binary between Judy bearers and right holders rights holders is also contributing to the lack of care for human rights, particularly for social workers and women's NGOs, they are seen as Judy bearers in providing relief and assistance, even before the pandemic, right. However, within this framing, they never thought of their own entitlements and did not even seek to ask help from the government, especially at the height of the pandemic. One informant stated that as someone working for an NGO delivering services at the community level. Many people assume that because we chose to do these, we don't need care. But the reality is that there is compassion for deep boundary struggles over human rights based frameworks reveal, I argue, long standing critiques of feminist scholars who caution about the dangers of treating individuals as atoms situated outside of a re on webs of caring relations. Moreover, that a human rights framework such as shown within the neoliberal governance is inadequate in capturing the full cost of care. So, with my remaining time I'll talk about security misvaluing of social reproduction. This is one that I'm also developing. So for me, the third arena boundary struggles refer to how social reproduction is misvalue in relation to security. The preeminence of militarism as a guiding principle in framing problems, prescribing appropriate courses of action in crisis response, and for prioritizing state security comes at the cost of engaging with other guiding principles that can we are again crisis responses away from hierarchical and competitive modes of thinking on the relationship between state and society and within society. Militarized crisis responses are surgical interventions that target symptoms rather than root causes militarized pandemic response in the COVID-19 pandemic shows how security approach stratifies health issues, rather than view them holistically as an instrument of resourcing social reproduction. More importantly, what boundary struggles over miniaturized pandemic responses entail disrupting the myth that disease outbreaks are exceptional or crisis specific and therefore separate from everyday health inequalities. A good example of this is how a lot of my respondents themselves actually said that the government's response removed care at all, and that care is not the core competence of this government, that government be under deterred. Another informant described that the response was not Makatau, which in English would translate to that it did not put people's needs at the heart of crisis response. And worse, and this is the most difficult part, many of the health workers were even especially those working in rural communities servicing indigenous peoples were even targeted for human rights violations. A number of doctors have been arrested. Most recently in February 2022, a high profile case was reported nationally after a female doctor, Dr. Nathie Castro, who has been serving Lumad or indigenous communities for years were arrested on the accusation that she is a communist, and that the work that she's doing is challenging the government. I don't know why we can talk about that later. One key informant expressed how despite these threats to their life, still we continue to risk our lives. And these accounts of violence, targeted violence against paid care workers show how they are caught between a rock and hard place, abandon their posts and face cultural sanctions, or continue to be essential to the pandemic, but face severely limited economic rewards. Worse, they face state violence and reprisal, should they seek to unsettle the security logics by demanding that they be cared for. So I'll end with showing the last slide because it's very relevant. Because, and I'm sure many of you might know that in December 2020, a woman in her nineties became the first person in the UK and the world to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. This vaccine was administered, in fact, by a Filipino nurse, Mae Parsons, in an interview she stated, obviously in the Filipino community and in the Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, we have had the highest deaths, but we are still here. We haven't stopped working. Symbolically and materially Filipino care workers have been shock absorbers of global crisis. In our lives, I argue, reveal what is at stake, should crises be realized as junctures to shift, if not altogether transform the boundaries to how social reproduction is valued. Thank you. And I think I went a bit over time, but I hope I can speak more and address questions later. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Teniak for an amazing talk and very, very sad and difficult to hear too. Dr. Prugil, how the floor is yours. Yes, thank you, Lua. So let me just first say how happy I was to be able to read this paper and be part of this event this afternoon. Thanks, Maria. I followed your work for some time and it's great to finally see you face to face. This is wonderful. I would also actually especially thank you for writing this paper and for doing the research that was associated with this because this paper does a number of important things, I think. The first thing that I think it does that's important is that it provides a perspective of caring during the pandemic from the perspective of a country in the south. And I'm obviously speaking here from the perspective of somebody who sits in Europe, and who has, you know, followed what's going on with the discussion around care and, and the pandemic somewhat. It's actually very little that we know in these international circles or Anglophone literature, whatever you want to call it about what is happening in the south. And so having this particular perspective from the Philippines, I thought was absolutely fascinating because everybody knows that the Philippines is all about caring right and the state kind of, you know, has branded itself as the the the exporter of carers to so to see these other aspects here of the of the hero discourse which we had here also but it just takes on a very different meaning in the in the in the Philippine context where carers have been heroes for for some time right so to see that was really fascinating also I really liked understanding the way you're dealing with patriarchal culture with feminine martyrdom through care being a Catholic myself that just totally resonated. I think the other thing that is really interesting about this paper is that it relates caring in the pandemic to larger phenomena so you resist this idea of okay now we're seeing the carers we've never seen them. And it's a new thing because it is the pandemic instead you're saying this is part of a larger political economy and and I find that also interesting. It is part of security issue right it is embedded structurally in militarism. In any capitalist tendencies to destroy social reproduction even though it builds on social reproduction and needs that. So you're making the pandemic unexceptional, which is of course something that that feminists like to do as we like to do with war and so on so so it. It, even though it's obvious it should be obvious to me as a feminist, it wasn't and so you told me that like, yes, of course right this is how we need to think about that so thanks for that. There's a third element that I find really innovative about this paper, which is it doesn't just focus on social reproduction, but it asks the question of who cares for carers so it's actually about social reproduction within social reproduction. If you will. And I think that that actually opens up some really interesting venues for theorizing. And I'm going to spell this out a little bit and I'm going to stick my neck out and be semi critical and I wonder what you think about that. And you know my starting point as I was thinking through this was actually the question of can this be, can this be applied, is it applicable beyond the Philippines, you know, is the Philippines such a. It is a special case obviously right and I tripped in particular the warfare over welfare formulation because immediately I was thinking to myself well you know but the northern governments and they have done all these massive investments for rebuilding after the pandemic and there's a lot of money that came out of that and you could even say you know the US military, I mean they should send the hospital ships in order to care for people that were infected and so on. So there was that and then, and then I was, I was actually surprised about that egregious neglect of carers that you describe, you know the violations of their basic rights basically in these many, many ways. And especially then also if you just oppose it the way in which the international community has now picked up the theme of developing a care economy so the ILO is working on this it was in Davos at the World Economic Forum. And so, you know, developing a care economy has become kind of a fashionable thing. And so, so, you know, sometimes I said to myself well, you know, do I actually really believe this you know maybe this is just the Philippines. And, you know, in the end, at the end of the paper saying well, you know, maybe I'm just not being curious enough here. So, so let me spin out a few things here. I think I think you're introducing two key concepts. One is the concept of boundary struggles, which you follow Fraser on this. So the boundary here is between economy society between production reproduction between work, work family and that is that is being negotiated here. Other than you also link boundaries and I think that's actually not what Fraser does but that's something I'd like to discuss actually the strong focus on values and valuing right. And, and the question do you ask here is who is owed care right so who is being valued in in when you ask that question. And my sense is that the notion of boundaries actually gets somewhat lost in this. So there's these three modes of caring which I thought was really, really interesting, very interesting formulations right so you have the economic devaluing and they're the boundary because it's still clear right it's it's kind of this this content, contestation between the private voluntary community workers on the one hand and then you have I guess the public paid healthcare workers on the other. One is more public. The other is more private. I guess that's the boundary there that was being negotiated. And then you have, you know, in addition to the this economic devaluing that happens as actually a cultural valuing that happens, which is based on, you know, these ideas of selflessness altruism mutual aid confident that that you can take care of yourself. You don't really need anybody else. But here was asking myself, you know, what is the boundary that is being contested here. And I would like to suggest to you that in a way, the topic becomes a different one, because precisely because of that innovative question that you ask about who cares for the state. And so then the focus becomes really the identity of these carers is who are they, can they trust the state. And I would go so far and this is what I'm going to play with you now and I'm not sure this is going to make any sense, but I'll play with it anyway. Are they not actually part of the state. And what I'm what actually got me onto that was your discussion of duty bearers and sitting in the capital of human rights. It just really bothered me that, you know, that duty bearer that actually that first of all I said to myself well, you know an individual is not a duty bearer actually by human rights discourse that that's not it. The state is a duty bearer and then you have, you know, maybe companies as duty bearers and things like that, but you wouldn't actually normally say an individual is a duty bearer. But then on the other hand, maybe they are because if they're part of the state. You know, they become agents of the state and so they are duty bearers. And so I was asking myself well isn't this focus on the care economy that exists not international discourse. Is that not an effort ultimately to promote caring as a public purpose so that caring becomes part of the state. And then we go to the to the third step here which is the security miss valuing. I did that you had, you had that formulation, which you know you formulate as the disease outbreak is not exceptional. And there you talk about the continuum. And, and we have these these formulations with which are really kind of striking in terms of thinking of carers as collateral damage. Caring also carers also as you know, taking risks for the nation, risking death. You know becoming kind of almost like I mean I was trying to relate this also to the way in which we talk about the police or the military. And risking lives that collateral damage having to serve. I mean these are all, you know, agents of the state that are called on to do certain things. And, you know, and then the security miss valuing, you know, is the issue here. Again, what's the boundary that's negotiated here, and, and is the issue not. And it's specifically Philippine that this was a military led led response but I think in all countries. There, there was, I see that right I can totally see what you're saying that right that there was kind of this idea of needing to intervene targeted surgical intervention and securing the population and you know this the similarity between the security and the sector and the health sector and discursively I mean there's something that the people have of course talked about and so so there's a there's certainly a military element element to this. And I'm wondering whether the nurses are not the lot are the nurses really the logical other of the military. You know to the extent that they're both part of the state. Is this about nurses finding their space in the state I find it also kind of interesting in the, in the statistics that you provided that the private health care providers are actually less trusting of the state than the nurses. And it's, you know, it's marginal, your right to point out that mostly they trust the families and communities and so on. But there is this differentiation that you haven't, and, you know, I don't know whether we can make anything out of that to also see how some are more part of the state I guess, than others and so that boundary contestation that is going on maybe also a boundary contestation over. You talk about the state changing its meaning and I think that's exactly what's going on and like who is, who is entering the state in which way who wants to claim to enter in the state so. So in a way I guess what I'm landing on is, is to suggest that maybe this crisis driven re intervention of the states that you talk about. Maybe it involves care workers actually as a kind of contradictory figure right that that clearly has no status right or not not sufficient status anywhere. You're struggling for status I mean you talk about you know they should be changing joining the task forces and you know in some of like that difference between the trust of the health workers, as opposed to the women's right service providers I think it's also striking So maybe that, you know the carers are actually there are an exploited figure on the one hand but they're also a heroin. You have that tension but then they're an agent of the state but they're very marginalized agent of the state so it strikes me that there is a kind of a contestation. And I think there's something going on that I think it's necessary to acknowledge and in particular, you know, as this agenda of creating a care economy is moving forward, because I think implicitly what that's going to produce is is a making caring and social reproduction bringing that into some kind of formal arrangements or more valued arrangements or whatever you want to call it but there's, there's something happening here. And you're right to focus on struggles and contestations I think I think that's absolutely correct. The nurse may be more inside the state already then maybe you give it credence in this paper. So that's, you know, me sticking out my neck not knowing anything about the Philippines I'm really curious to hear what you think about that. Thank you so much. Do you want me to just Yeah, just if anyone has any questions please feel free to to ask in the chat. I mean we are a little bit tight on time so I want to give the floor back to to Maria to to respond. But also if I can if I can ask a few one question just about like your, your, your personal motivation to research this theme how how did you get to this topic. You know, like you're doing your research pre pandemic and then the pandemic hits and then you start seeing these things and how did you your personal motivation to to get this topic and how did you start doing that research. Thank you. Really excellent question I think it's really part of feminist work that we account for why we do things and and really it's been a long standing interest. Families, you know, are very much care paid care workers to my mom and my brother works in the hospital and have cousins who work in, you know, as nurses so it's both as you know it's cliche but it's very personal and political. And I grew up and I talk about this a lot in the past that, you know, I think as Filipinos so hard to think almost everyone would have had a migrant worker in the family and I am part of that sort of family you know when these sort of complex caring relationships as in a transnational household or family and so it was always is rooted in that strong understanding and and finding the language and the concepts to explain what I see in everyday life and through my own intimate relationships have been very empowering as well so I do it in part to make sense of what is happening in my, you know, immediate caring relationships. But it also because of a strong commitment that we actually gain so much knowledge about global politics by starting from the lives of people who have long born crises or conflicts or disasters and starting from the lives you are able to see these as Lisa pointed out these, these are global, definitely global phenomena, a larger structural indiscursive processes. So I am, it's and it's hard to because of that it's very hard. I think I've always started working on this this year. You know, been following in the bookmarking and the emotional toll toll of it, you know, seeing, seeing the, you know, the cases and the debts and so on and so it is very much an act of self care to that, you know, I kind of waited and and a lot of things that aren't making sense yet. I know I have to do this to to actually also in the hope that we make it better because crises like this will happen even more and if we look at climate change reports, we're in for more of these with greater frequency and intensity and I just feel for to what extent can our care economy shock absorb when the time period for them to recover and build resilience is getting shorter and shorter with each one. And if you look at again these acute cases where, and I talk about this briefly in the Philippines and perhaps in other parts of, you know, that are experiencing compounded insecurities. And since the pandemic there were two mega disasters that have happened and that was just in the last year alone and they're still ongoing conflicts still ongoing killing so human rights defenders and so on so it's really for me pressing and it's but I really am grateful if I may just add that Lisa because I haven't thought about, of course, it's actually quite paradoxical to because care economy is so much. It's a big war now right in development spaces, and yet when the pandemic happened, it's a safe people. You know, we're only just aware of the care economy and in that. Yes, sadly, I've been looking at the reports in terms of so definitely Philippines not an isolated case where, and a few in Europe as well where healthcare workers were targeted with discrimination and violence, because of the misinformation around COVID-19 and resistance around if you know the pandemic wasn't being contained and so it's because of them, you know, even some governments saying that they're not doing their own jobs or, you know, even in the UK with all the shopping and so on. The issue around hazard pay and compensation is still very much ongoing and really how sustainable are our healthcare systems. When we actually put that all of those against this strong interest and, you know, emphasis on transforming care economies it's really makes this question. This is also again a redux of, you know, gender equality of smart economics and, you know, that sort of work. I really think maybe there's something there to learn from as well. Thank you so much. I have a lot now to think about. And I really appreciate this. This is the first time I've talked about this. So I'm very happy and appreciate that you've actually pushed pushed and stuck your neck out. As you said, because I really need that sort of feedback. Good. And so, once you have have have it ready, you should submit it to the IFJP. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much. Maria, would you like to share maybe your email with in the chat so maybe the audience can contact you if they have any further questions. Yes. Okay, thank everyone, especially Dr. Tanag and Dr. Prugal. Our next Global Voices seminar series is going to be on July 6. We're going to be talking about the concept of borders. So it's it's more of a theoretical presentation but certainly it's going to be very interesting. Thank you so much for everyone who who is here who came to watch Dr. Tanag and this amazing presentation. Thank you for the work that you're doing and for everybody's time. You all have a great evening, night, day, whatever it is. Thank you so much. Thank you for a great chair. Thank you. Bye bye.