Just Times? Temporalities and Uncertainties for Marginalised Groups in Cities

This project will advance knowledge on how cities contribute to the production of time of marginalized groups.

Cities are key nodes in the production of social inequalities of time, as places where national and global processes locate and where many precarious groups reside and their uncertainties are strongly reflected.

This project analyses time of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong and critically examines the role of the city in the production of time for this marginalized group.

The study will reveal the spatio-temporal causes of urban marginalized migrants and its broader implications for research on time in Urban Sociology.

The objectives are (O1) to analyse the temporalities at play in the lives of the migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, (O2) to analyse the lived experiences of time in the migration trajectories of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong and retired migrant domestic workers in Metro Manila and (O3) to draw implications and develop a conceptual framework for the study of time of marginalized groups in Urban Sociology and publish this in high-impact journals.

These objectives will be achieved using qualitative research among policy-makers, NGOs and other agencies, as well as Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong and retired domestic workers in Metro Manila.The project establishes a valuable exchange of knowledge and skills between the researcher and the Institute for Housing and Urban Research (IBF) at Uppsala University.

The supervisor, Prof. Miguel A.

Martínez, is a leading scholar in urban sociology and has worked on topics including migrant workers, citizenship and the production of urban space, while the researcher brings considerable complementary knowledge of the social theory of time in cities and everyday life.

IBF provides an excellent multidisciplinary research environment, where the researcher will be able to gain skills and experience relevant to her career goal to obtain a position at a first-rate university in the EU.