Conceptualizing grassroots empowerment for migrant women through distributed agency

In this paper, I explore the relationship between discourse, empowerment and material provisions through the ethnographic case of a shelter for migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. I use the theoretical notions of distributed agency and rechronotopization and argue that these theories illuminate how the discursive imaginations of this shelter, as well as the practices that sustain it, challenge neoliberal visions of empowerment. While neoliberal empowerment assumes agency resides primarily within the individual, the account presented here illustrates the distributed nature of the agency behind grassroots empowerment, and the importance of discursively and materially (re)configured space-time to this empowerment.