In Pursuit of Spatial, Life‐Course and Social Mobilities: Aspiring Filipino Seafarers Acquiring Migration Ability Through Servitude

ABSTRACT

This article examines aspiring Filipino seafarers' pursuit of the triple mobilities : spatial (migration), life course (education to work, youth to adulthood) and social. It focuses on those working as ‘utility cadets’ for manning agencies that supply seafarers to ship operators in exchange for a ship placement. Its aims are twofold. Based on long‐term research and drawing on interviews with utility cadets, successful seafarers who were once utility cadets, and parents or older siblings of utility cadets, it first conceptualises as ability acquisition how aspiring Filipino seafarers turn servitude into a strategy to accumulate the ability to migrate. Second, it shows how this spatial mobility enables their life‐course and social mobilities, and accounts for how these three mobilities are interconnected. The pace of life‐course mobility shaped and was shaped by the degree of the seafarers' contribution to their family's social mobility , and both constituted and were constituted by the seafarers' rank in the seafaring labour hierarchy, which determined their salary. The article further conceptualises the intertwinement of the triple mobilities by explaining their negotiation through processes of convergence and divergence .