Publications

War – destructive and bloody as it may be – has nevertheless been discursively framed as a valiant and noble deed by powerful state institutions and forces through political speeches and legislature. In recent years, however, the multimodal turn in critical discourse analysis saw the rise of war studies through the lens of war monuments and how these selectively frame war as a social practice. Using Abousnnouga and Machin’s three-dimensional social semiotics framework, this paper explores how semiotic resources employed in the Marawi Siege monument in the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Cemetery), Philippines, recontextualize the Marawi Siege by recontextualizing representations of government forces from violent contexts and situating them instead in sanitised contexts of humanitarian work – all the while (visually) silencing the plight of the Maranao people during the Siege. It further revealed that semiotic resources were used to weave a particular frame of narrative in the discourse of war through the celebratory, symbolic, and somewhat propagandistic narrative of the government and military, all of which may have been employed in order to support and provide evidence for its own institutional legitimacy and power.

Local literature on abstract landscapes has not only been cursory and sparse but has also drawn dominantly from abstraction’s tendency to underscore the modernist idea of the individual. As a result, these works have rarely been discussed in relation to matters beyond the self—such as others in society and ecology. This is striking, as literature on landscape painting in general often render the art historical category in relation to humanity’s links with nature and other human groups. In an effort to address these gaps, this study uses the concept of spirituality in examining Glenn Bautista’s abstraction, articulated through his delicate forms of landscapes. While spirituality is known to emphasize the person’s self-reflexivity, it shall serve as a lens in surfacing the role of the artist’s practice in his search for the sacred and his understanding of the entanglement of humanity and the environment, specifically in the context of ecological destruction through the theological notion of eschatology. In the process, this study will forward the concept of landscape not as a genre, but as a medium, employed by the artist to understand, construct, and present himself a human in relation with other humans, the Divine, and the planet.

This paper interrogates the notion of “correct English” in the Philippines by looking at its colonial genealogy and historical entrenchment and by situating it as an epistemic construct produced through American imperial education, specifically through one of the key tools of mass subjugation: the colonial English textbook. Focusing on English Fundamentals for Filipino Students (1932) by Jaranilla, Potts, and Manalo as a case study, I argue that such texts functioned as mechanisms of colonial control and social engineering (May, 1984), one that is mediated through “proper” language use and the subsequent naturalization of American English as the normative standard of English in the country. Furthermore, through a discourse-historical reading of this textbook, I also trace how categories of “correct” and “incorrect” English were mobilized to index and sustain colonially induced hierarchies of race, knowledge, and civility. Such pedagogical measures, in effect, revealed how the colonial English textbook operationalized systems of exclusion to codify the American variety as the legitimate and “correct” English, thereby demonstrating that “language correctness” in the Philippines is not merely a pedagogical convention but a colonial formation embedded in broader regimes of epistemic power.

Urban agriculture experiments in Asia's metropolises are often spontaneous assemblages that unfold with diverse trajectories. Rather than being confined to the laboratories and field sites of state and market institutions, many such experiments escape or exceed the knowledge production spaces of technocrats, scientific professionals, and planners. Instead, knowledge is co-produced within a network of agentic actors, which also includes fledgling gardeners, local government officials, non-profit organizations, experienced rural farmers, culinary professionals, and even nonhumans. Some emergent networks are unlikely alliances forged across class lines, rural-urban divides, and political spectra. Spontaneous, diffuse, and polycentric, urban agriculture experiments complicate our understanding of the governance of urban experiments and urban environments. This paper explores the polycentric governance of urban agriculture experiments in Metro Manila, a highly dense and fragmented megacity in Southeast Asia. Drawing on observations in urban agriculture spaces and in-depth interviews with urban farmers and representatives from state and non-state institutions, this paper illustrates how polycentric urban agriculture experiments in Metro Manila reflect the ambivalences—both the promises and struggles—of urban experimentation. On the one hand, the socio-material relations emerging from urban agriculture experiments demonstrate transformative promises. On the other hand, while creativity and innovation sprout out of the metropolis's cracks and fissures like tiny seedlings of hope, many of them are ultimately stunted by Metro Manila's adverse political and economic realities. Whether these experiments can eventually influence urban governance and planning to improve the lives of Manileños remains a question.

In Decoloniality and language scholarship – a critical intervention, Rambukwella and Zavala identify three emerging challenges in the ongoing theorization and application of the term ‘decoloniality’ in current language scholarship: the assertion of an alterity untouched by modernity, the creation of new binaries despite efforts to deconstruct them, and the decontextualization and depoliticization of decoloniality. In this response article, we look into how these challenges play out in the Philippine context. Examining our own engagements with decolonial thinking and practice in academic circles in the country with particular focus on the field of English language scholarship, we find the same problematic trends and tendencies, while also observing that there are specific iterations of these issues in Philippine academia and in contemporary decolonial campaigns initiated outside of the academe. It is important to note that while decolonial thinking and efforts are not new in Philippine academic conversations and in the popular imagination, it remains a new, or perhaps an under-studied or under-utilized, approach and practice in applied/sociolinguistic scholarship, especially as it concerns English. With this broad comparison in mind, our response to the article is divided into three sections. In the first section, we provide a brief historicization of the trajectory of decolonial thinking in the academe after the second world war, right after the Philippines was granted independence by the United States in 1946. In the second section, we focus on English language scholarship and trace the developments in the field, underscoring what we have observed as a movement from a postcolonial position towards a path that offers more possibilities for decolonization. In the third and final section, we end with the idea of wariness as a useful emotion and disposition with which to make sense of the present decolonial moment that we are experiencing. This wariness has allowed us to, first, examine our own fraught position as English teachers and scholars and the tensions this creates in our attempts at decolonizing English Studies in the country; and second, recognize possibilities of decolonial and decolonizing thought, acts, and practices that are not so named but do the work of such. We call these unnamed decolonialities. Overall, we believe that the decolonial project in the field of English language scholarship can only be an ever-continuing and ever-evolving one as the project of disrupting existing and emerging power structures associated with the teaching and study of English in the Philippines in the hope of replacing them with more equitable and socially just ones never ends.

This study unsettles and complicates our understanding of the language provisions stipulated in the 1987 Philippine Constitution, specifically Article XIV, sections 6–9, by looking underneath its surface and calling into question the unequal and racialized (post)colonial matrices and relations of power that had informed its drafting and development during the 1986 Philippine Constitutional Commission. Through a critical discursive and historiographical perspective, I argued that conditions of coloniality were articulated during the language provision deliberations of the Commission and were mobilized on two axes, namely, the racialization of language through imperial amnesia and the conflation of neoliberal and linguistic entrepreneurial discourses, both of which perpetuate the effects and legacies of colonialism on language policy-making, teaching, and education even after the period of formal colonization.

Under the banner of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7), governments, industry, and civil society organisations have supported many energy access projects since 2015. Notably, funding and investments allotted to renewable energy are regarded not only to provide ‘energy for all’ but also support the delivery of other SDGs related to climate change, food security, health, and poverty reduction, among others. With less than 10 years left to meet the SDG 7 targets, it is timely to take stock and examine how the provision of access to energy is driving development initiatives, impacting local communities, and influencing governance processes. This paper offers a critical review and analysis of the impact of access to energy projects based on empirical work from eight country case studies across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It interrogates how these projects contribute towards achieving SDG 7 and other sustainable development goals, highlights challenges, and then draws lessons for research, policy, and development practice. To advance SDGs, it recommends action in four areas: addressing rural-urban disparities, ensuring that energy is linked to sustainable outcomes, balancing top-down and bottom-up agendas, and appraising implications of techno-economic factors.

This article aims to explore how the staging of Papet Pasyon, a children’s play by Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio, a Philippine National Artist, impart and continues to communicate to the local younger audience an understanding of culture and an appreciation of the art of puppetry. This is then followed by the conceptualization of the actual staging of the play vis-à-vis her vision of a children’s theatre. Afterward, Papet Pasyon is asserted as a pedagogy for younger audiences. Results of the study show (1) how the pre-show conversation prepares the audience for the performance and how it provides an understanding of Filipino cultural traditions and an appreciation of the art of puppetry; (2) how the performance serves as a venue for experiential learning; (3) how the art of puppetry challenges one’s imagination in manipulating the puppet (in the case of the puppeteer) and in creating meanings from what they hear and see onstage (in the case of the audience); (4) cooperation and integration are made evident by the interactions between the puppet and the puppeteer and the puppet and puppeteer with the audience; and (5) that although puppetry is foreign to the audience, they have expressed appreciation of the art form by repeatedly watching the performance through the years.

This chapter explores various mechanisms of expressing and euphemizing linguistic constructs related to sex, sexuality, and gender in the Filipino/Tagalog translations of the Bible. Centuries of colonization in the Philippines have resulted in the sacralization of the Christian text, penetrating different aspects of life in the country—from drafting the Constitution to conducting everyday activities, observing important events, and prescribing various sets of norms. For this study, focus shall be given to how translations of certain passages in the Bible shape and at the same time reflect perspectives on gender, sex, and sexual behaviors. Data were gathered from passages found in the Filipino/Tagalog translation of the Bible, written and published in different versions. Although published at different times, these versions of the Filipino/Tagalog translation of the Bible will be examined synchronically, considering their wide use and circulation throughout the Philippines at present. Translation and interpretation choices shall then inform how Filipino/Tagalog translators of the Bible describe and document Christian sensibilities, values, and biases regarding sex, sexuality, and gender. A close examination reveals that while there are Christian knowledge systems and practices that have been imposed upon the subscribers of the faith, there are communities in the Philippines that negotiate expressions of their sexuality and performance of their gender roles by adhering to the (sexual) scripts in the Bible and simultaneously subscribing to local (sexual) practices observed in their communities.

Tunay na naging masalimuot ang mga talakayan hinggil sa pagdalumat, pag-iral, at kahihinatnan ng Filipino: una, bilang wikang pambansa at patakarang pangwika na ipinatupad sa isang bansang multilingguwal; at pangalawa at kapwa-mahalaga, bilang isang wikang masasabing lehitimo sang-ayon sa iba’t ibang akademiko at politikal na pamantayan. Ang papel na ito, kung gayon, ay nagtatangkang mag-ambag sa diskursong ito sa pamamagitan ng pagtalakay sa mga naging pag-unlad ng Filipino bilang disiplina, espesyalisasyon ng linggwistiks at bilang aralin sa wika. Tatalakayin ang kasaysayan at paglinang nito bilang isang wikang pambansa at ang naging papel ng dalawang institusyon, ang Departamento ng Linggwistiks at Departamento ng Filipino at Panitikan ng Pilipinas sa Unibersidad ng Pilipinas, sa pagtaguyod at pagsulong sa wikang Filipino bilang asignatura at bilang larangan.

The Ati-Atihan is a Philippine festival held every January in Kalibo, Aklan province on Panay Island, in honor of the town’s patron saint, the Santo Niño (The Child Jesus) and, at the same time, a commemoration of the original settlers of the island, the dark-skinned Atis. The festival is believed to predate Hispanic colonialism. However, Spanish missionaries gradually added Christian meanings to it. The festival’s origin is also linked to the epic Maragtas, which tells the story of Ten Bornean Datus (chieftains) led by Datu Puti, who fled Borneo in the thirteenth century and landed on the island of Panay. The Borneans purchased the island from the Ati people. Feasting and festivities followed soon after the transaction, including a traditional Ati dance, which was mimicked by the Borneans as an act of appreciation. Today, the festival consists of religious processions and street dancing, showcasing groups and individuals wearing colorful and elaborate costumes and marching drummers. The street dancing, sadsad, is improvised where the foot is momentarily dragged along the ground in tune with the drummers’ beat. The essay interrogates the Ati-atihan Festival through its three components—a dance-drama called Maragtas it Panay (The Barter of Panay), the sadsad, and the cultural dance competition. I argued that religion (Catholicism), cultural history (the Maragtas), and the series of performances during the weeklong merry-making complicate the festival’s ontology. Entangling these aspects, the festival is explored as a celebration and, at the same time, a repulsion of the foreign (colonial disposition), which leads toward an understanding of the festival as a concatenation of entanglements: devotion and entertainment, utopia and nostalgia, and history and mythmaking. In the end, the Ati-atihan invokes a communal identity, which may be asserted as a recuperation of a pre-contact collective identity that embodies a proposition signifying how the body remembers what the archives failed to record.

The study of Philippine cemeteries has been traditionally placed within the purview of archaeology, which, broadly speaking, places importance in its material cultures. To further broaden our knowledge about these sites, this paper explores how Philippine cemeteries, particularly Libingan ng mga Bayani (LNMB), generate meaning through their linguistic landscape (LL). Using place semiotics approach and indexicality, this study identifies seven communicative functions used in LNMB epitaphs: (1) affective, (2) associative, (3) celebrative, (4) memorative, (6) desiderative, and (7) summative. In doing so, this study not only treats public signs as communicative ‘actors’ which convey meaning and pragmatic function but it also analyzes the act of ‘engaging’ with epitaphs as a highly contextualised speech event. Finally, this study argues that epitaphs signify discourses of memory, remembrance, and patriotism and index sociocultural and political realities, all of which contribute to the creation of LNMB not only as a cemetery per se but also as a place of experience and embodiment.

The prevailing notion on the scholastic domains of English and Filipino is that the former is used for science, whereas the latter is reserved for the social sciences. Despite its questionable veracity, this domain dichotomy has nevertheless been adopted in Philippine education, particularly in the 1974 Bilingual Education Policy (Sibayan, 1978; Gonzalez, 1990). Using Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) concept of emplacement and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) information value as theoretical points of departure and Tupas’ (2008, 2015a) ‘Unequal Englishes’ paradigm as an analytical framework, this paper investigates whether this dichotomy has permeated into the Linguistic Landscapes of two national museums in Manila. It finds that there is a strong tendency for the natural history museum to privilege English in bilingual signs and the anthropological museum to privilege Filipino, thereby suggesting that this split has already been reified in language practices outside the realm of education policy making and politics.