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Abstract

As transnational mobilities for health in the Southeast Asian region intensify, this article investigates the everyday socialites that take shape in spaces of medical care. Told through the narratives of Filipino medical workers and caregivers in Singapore, this paper examines the socialities among migrants and locals who work together, and who care for patients in fast-paced public hospitals, as well as nursing homes on the margins of the city. It considers how care and control are simultaneously contested and reinforced through negotiations of authority, profession and hierarchies, as well as through the micro-political and affective interactions and intimacies of the workplace. These transcultural mobilities critically disrupt naturalised and normative assumptions about the region and its ‘values’, and about the locations and substance of care, while also provoking among migrants new ethical articulations and aspirations on the meanings of kinship, faith, home, and life itself.