Doctoral Thesis Review – Anmeldelse av doktoravhandling

Abstract

In her thesis, Aslaug Gotehus traces the decisions, experiences and practices of Filipino nurses in Norway. Despite the growing need for nurses in the country, labour and migration policies in Norway make it very difficult for Filipino nurses to work as registered nurses, with many having to take up work as au pairs or as auxiliary health care workers first, often for many years, before they are accepted as registered nurses. Gotehus focuses on the microdimensions of everyday human lives alongside the macrostructural factors that shape nurses’ migration. She argues that ‘individual and family events and concerns in Filipino nurses lives are entangled with the policies, regulations and labour markets in more than one country’ and that ‘migration needs to be understood as a process across time rather than a single act of mobility at one point in time’. Adopting a transnational approach, the thesis further explores the other side of migration: the case of non-migrant nurses in the Philippines who stay, despite overwhelming pressure in the Philippine context for nurses to go abroad in search of better opportunities and higher salaries. Gotehus traces Norwegian nurses’ networks back to the Philippines in order to further her understanding of the transnational context framing their migration. Drawing on strong qualitative empirical research, Gotehus offers rich insights into the little-known experiences of Filipino nurses in Norway. There is not much on the Norwegian case in the wider literature on Filipino nurses’ migration. The thesis examines the Norwegian context for the integration of internationally educated nurses. There, we learn that because of professional regulations and the challenges encountered in the process of getting authorized as a nurse in Norway, which became stricter in 2017 due to new regulations, many nurses educated in the Philippines end up working as health care workers in Norway. This occupational segmentation between cadres with different status, scope of practice, and compensation is an important feature of migrants’ labour market segmentation experience in Norway. The thesis makes an original contribution to the scholarship on care, migration, agency, and temporality. It allows us to understand the ambivalent experiences of Filipino nurse migrants in Norway, the complex textures of transnational and local care networks, responses to deskilling and waiting, and experiences of staying, all of which shed light on the different ways of moving and not moving in a globalized world. Part I of the thesis is an overarching foundation chapter comprising six sections: (1) an introduction, (2) contextual overview of nursing, migration and the labour market in the Philippines and Norway, (3) discussion of the guiding theoretical approaches on transnational families, agency and temporality, (4) methodological summary, (5) a presentation of the four articles that form part of the thesis, and finally (6) a concluding section summarizing the thesis’s main findings. The key research questions are: