Language, Migration, and the Lives of Filipino Au Pairs
Postdoctoral project by Raymund Vitorio, Junior Investigator.
Raymund Vitorio’s research explores the mediatization of emotions, lived experiences, and precarity among Filipino au pairs in Denmark. Bringing together sociolinguistics, narrative analysis, film studies, and ethnographic interviewing, he examines how Filipino au pairs are represented in public discourse, how they narrate their own experiences, and how language shapes everyday life within systems of migration and care.
“My scholarship attempts to listen to the voices of those who have been marginalized and minoritized by the asymmetrical, and often oppressive, material conditions surrounding them,” Raymund explains.
I am especially interested in exploring emancipatory ways of applying sociolinguistic theories and methods to our understanding of contemporary life.
Raymund works with a wide range of material, including news coverage, online forums, films and television, social media content produced by au pairs themselves, and ethnographic interviews and observations. At the center of the project is an interest in metacommunication: how people describe, interpret, and evaluate communicative experiences in everyday life.
His interest in migration and inequality was shaped in part by his years living in Singapore during his graduate studies. “It was there that I experienced what it meant to be an immigrant: the good, the bad, and the ugly,” he says. Living there also gave him insight into the globalized care and labor economy and its unequal structures, experiences that deepened his commitment to research on language, migration, and mobility.
An important turning point for the project came during fellowships in Germany, where Raymund first began engaging closely with Filipino au pairs and their stories. “Their stories of struggle, success, survival, steadfastness, and solidarity reminded me of what sociolinguistic research should be at its heart: a practice rooted in the desire to promote the welfare and betterment of people.”
At TRANSITION, Raymund’s work contributes to ongoing discussions about mobility, precarity, and lived experiences across rural and urban contexts. By foregrounding the perspectives of Filipino au pairs, his project explores how language and communication shape experiences of migration and inequality – even within societies often understood as egalitarian.