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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong use digital spaces to share experiences of polarisation, build sisterhood networks, and transform vulnerability into collective resilience and empowerment through online interaction.

Paper long abstract

Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong experience multiple forms of vulnerability, both in liberal and ontological terms, which profoundly shape their everyday lives and social relations. These vulnerabilities are reflected and intensified in the digital spaces they inhabit, which become crucial sites where polarisation is narrated, discussed, and collectively reworked.

Drawing on participant observation in Hong Kong (repeated stays between 1998 and 2013) and digital ethnography conducted from 2019 to the present, and guided by an ethical framework based on informed consent, privacy protection, and respect for socio-cultural contexts, this paper examines how these workers use online interactions to navigate and address such vulnerabilities.

Within digital spaces, polarisation between workers and employing families emerges forcefully, manifesting in experiences of abuse, exclusion, as well as intimacy and well-being. The sharing of these experiences fosters identity-based networks grounded in a strong sense of sisterhood, providing emotional support and strengthening communal ties. Online platforms thus become arenas in which oppositions are not only reproduced but also actively challenged, enabling the collective development of strategies of response. In this sense, the digital realm emerges as a generative space in which polarisation is transformed into a resource for empowerment, resilience, and agency.