Rechronotopization and distributed agency: Redefining empowerment for migrant women.

Critical feminist scholars have highlighted how dominant global discourses of empowerment mobilize grassroots women for development initiatives – often by promoting their migration – without addressing the structural issues that marginalize them to begin with (Batliwala 2015; see also APMM 2015). While some of these scholars bemoan the co-optation of “empowerment” in neoliberal discourses that frame women’s agency as an individual phenomenon, others call for a continued feminist struggle to reclaim collective and structural understandings of empowerment (Cornwall 2018). In this paper, I examine how such forms of empowerment inform the work of a small shelter serving migrant women, and I use the notions of rechronotopization and distributed agency to illustrate how the shelter’s use of space and material provisions to migrants constitute empowerment.
The shelter provides free housing and food to migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong who are in crisis who no longer have a place to stay. The study draws on interviews with former shelter residents and those who maintain the shelter, and close ethnographic observations of one migrant’s journey through the shelter. These materials are used to understand this community’s approach to empowerment in discourse and practice. The analysis reveals that for the participants, empowerment is linked to concrete material provisions given to the migrants’ during their time in the shelter (i.e. food, a place to sleep, money for transportation) as well as the interactions with other migrants and migrant-led organizations which are facilitated through shared use of the space of the shelter.
I find the notions of rechronotopization and distributed agency provide a useful theoretical framing for understanding how these provisions and interactions constitute empowerment. Distributed agency refers to the ways that the flexibility and accountability associated with agency is imputed not only to the individual person, but also to groups, space-times and material objects within these space-times (Enfield & Kockelman 2017). Rechronotopization on the other hand, draws attention to the central role of constantly reconfigured space-time – and its constantly reconfigured relationship to other space-times – in shaping human experiences of materiality, processes of signification, and social imagination (Karimzad & Catedral 2022).
In the case of the data then, the participants locate empowerment not in the individual, but in their constantly reconfigured encounters with the space-time of the shelter, and its connections to other space-times. Within these space-times, agency is imputed not only to the individual women who stay in the shelter, but also to the collective groups of migrants who use the space of the shelter, and to the material provisions that sustain them. These accounts of empowerment highlight how the shelter reconfigures material structures to enable women to collectively engage both flexibility and accountability through their experiences of emplacement (see also Adams 2017). This stands in contrast to the ways that neoliberal discourses of empowerment demand women’s accountability through displacement (i.e. migration) without enhancing their flexibility through interventions to the material and structural aspects of the space-times in which these women are marginalized.