COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES
Dr. Stephen J. Sills received his BA in Spanish from of the University of North Carolina Greensboro in 1991. His first career was teaching Spanish in NC and WA before leaving the country for adventure, travel, and work around the world: Guatemala, Costa Rica, Mexico, Taiwan, and other parts. In 1999, he returned the United States to study Sociology, receiving an MA and PhD from Arizona State University.
After a short time as Director of Evaluation Research in the Center for Urban Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, Sills returned to UNCG to take a position as Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department, teaching in the Global Social Problems concentration. Since 2006 he has received a UNCG Summer Excellence Award, a New Faculty Award, several Kohler International Travel awards, several grants from the Center for Creative Inquiry, and a Lloyd International Honors College New Course Development Award, and several grants from the City of Greensboro. He is the current organizer of the Human Rights Research Network (HRRN) and a research fellow with the Center for New North Carolinians (CNNC).
Over the past five years, Dr. Sills has published on the demographic economic, social, cultural, political, and social psychological aspects of Philippine to Taiwan labor migration. He has focused on how female labor migrants negotiate the impediments to their incorporation into a host society. In the case of Filipinas working in Taiwan, he has learned that they are highly skilled and highly educated women who have been commodified and essentialized by an abusive labor system, forced to accept low‐status positions with no advancement opportunities, and end up bearing the burdens that result from a globalized economy. These women must not only support their families back home, keep afloat their struggling economy and future economic development of the Philippines, but also produce cheap goods for mass consumption in the Global North. Moreover they must pay for the privilege to do this work in a system that can only be described as a modern form of indentured servitude.
The recent global economic downturn has led to a sudden drop in opportunities for employment in Taiwan. New job orders are down and just over 9,500 workers have been sent home from Taiwan as factories closed down or scaled back their operations. Those who are forced to return are often thought of as “failed” migrants. Returning Filipinas today are faced with the burden of debts they took on to go overseas and may be seen as a disappointment to their families who grew dependent upon their remittances.
This year Dr. Sills was awarded a Linda Arnold Carlisle Faculty Research Grant in Women’s and Gender Studies to conduct a study entitled “Impact of Global Downturn on Filipina Factory Workers.” He spent three weeks this summer in Taiwan and the Philippines interviewing factory workers, directors of NGO relief agencies, and officials in government agencies. He will be returning in January 2010 to continue this work.