Description
We argue that grassroots participation in multilateral negotiations over norm-setting is important because grassroots discourses communicate knowledge which emerges from embodied experiences of marginalization, and therefore differs from the knowledge codified in the norms of multilateral organizations. To compare the two types of knowledge, we use sociolinguistic theories that link material experience, discourse and epistemology to analyze discourses about domestic work from the International Labour Organization (ILO) and a grassroots organization of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, the Asian Migrants Coordinating Body (AMCB). Applying ethnographically situated discourse analytic and corpus methods to these institutional texts, our analysis reveals that the AMCB’s consistent orientation to the material conditions of migrant domestic workers makes their discourses on “decent work for domestic workers” more intersectional, substantive and explicitly critical than the discourses of the ILO. This case study illustrates that even in cases where the overarching norms appear to be the ‘same’, the discourses of grassroots and multilateral organizations still offer fundamentally different images of what constitutes “decent work” and what is required to achieve it.| Period | 8 Dec 2023 |
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| Held at | The Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies (HCLS), City University of Hong Kong, Unknown |
| Degree of Recognition | Regional |