Never at work but always working: (Im)mobility, dis(empowerment)... - Nate Ming Curran @ SOAS 2026

Never at work but always working: (Im)mobility, dis(empowerment) and the paradoxes of online language tutoring in the Philippines Speaker(s): Nate Ming Curran Recorded Day 2 – Archipelagic Tongues: SOAS Philippine Studies Conference 2026, 2:45–3:45 (Room KLT) Session: Precarity, (E)motions, and (Im)mobilities: Language and Labor within and beyond the Archipelago Nate Ming Curran is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Communication at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He conducts research on platformization, with a particular focus on for-profit online language teaching. He also supervises PhD students working on this topic. Abstract: The Philippines has emerged as a crucial node in the globally distributed online English teaching industry (Imperial, 2025; Panaligan & Curran, 2022). Despite the crucial role Filipino tutors play in the provision of high-quality and low-priced English lessons for millions around the globe, Filipino teachers are recognised as facing discrimination on account of their linguistic, national, and racial identities (Imperial, 2025; Litman, 2022; Martinez, 2022). Addressing Filipino online tutors’ experiences from a gendered perspective, this paper examines how teachers’ identities as mothers, wives, and caretakers contour their motivations to work as online tutors, their experience teaching online, and their own aspirational identities. Interviews with 30 online language tutors reveal that female online tutors face several vexing paradoxes that are mediated by their gendered identities and gendered social expectations. Grounded in the panel’s interest in mobility, precarity, and affect, we theorise these paradoxes in terms of three ostensible contradictions in the women’s experiences teaching online: mobility/staticity, home/office, and autonomy/surveillance. We argue that the how women’s narratives reveal exploitation by platforms while also underscoring the women’s creativity and agency.