Mediations of Care: Brokering Labour in the Age of Robotics
Anna Romina Guevarra
University of Illinois, Chicago, USA
Pacific Affairs is pleased to announce that the fifteenth William L. Holland Prize for the best article published in Volume 91 (2018) of Pacific Affairs has been awarded to Anna Romina Guevarra for her article published in Volume 91, No. 4 (December 2018).
What does it mean that numbers of children in South Korea are taught English by teachers who are in the Philippines, through the medium of a penguin-shaped robot named Engkey that has the face of a blond-haired, presumably American young woman? What are the implications of this kind of roboticization, and of the ways this technology acts as a broker, mediating the organization of labour? These are questions addressed by the winner of the Holland Prize for the best paper published in Pacific Affairs in 2018, Anna Romina Guevarra, in her article, “Mediations of Care: Brokering Labour in the Age of Robotics.” Guevarra’s article offers a compelling analysis that brings a number of different themes into dialogue with one another—the human-technology interface, labour, migration and barriers to transnational movement—in a very creative way. In Holland Prize deliberations by the Pacific Affairs Editorial Board, her paper was described as “a truly innovative and exciting piece that redefines the infrastructure of migration and care,” and complimented for the novelty of the data it presents, from both South Korea and the Philippines, as well for its refreshing theoretical arguments.
Anna Romina Guevarra is the founding director and associate professor of the Global Asian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Guevarra’s scholarly, creative, and teaching interests focus on immigrant and transnational labour, the geopolitics of care work, and critical diaspora studies. Email address: guevarra@uic.edu
2018 Shortlist
Fighting Illiberalism with Illiberalism: Islamist Populism and Democratic Deconsolidation in Indonesia
Marcus Meitzner
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
The Rise of China’s New-Type Think Tanks and the Internationalization of the State
Jane Hayward
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China and London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom