Publications

The increase in harmful algal blooms (HABs) globally has been linked to climate change and anthropogenic activities such as agricultural runoff and urbanization. This study focused on analyzing the impact of these factors on HAB occurrences in the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea, identifying influential factors, and predicting future HAB events. For this study, random forest and numerical modeling were employed, with datasets encompassing physical and chemical properties of river water, seawater, and precipitation to assess the impact of discharge on HABs. Additionally, climate change scenarios derived from the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) were employed to predict future HAB occurrences, supported by a sensitivity analysis to identify influential factors affecting HAB occurrence. This study demonstrated that the growth rate and occurrence of HABs in the East China Sea (ECS) and Korean coastal waters (KCW) distinctively increased in July and November after the operation of the Three Gorges Dam (TGD). It is likely affected by the decreasing discharge from the Yangtze River (YR) owing to the operation of the TGD. Using the Random Forest model, future HAB events were predicted in good agreement with observations. The sensitivity results revealed that environmental properties, such as precipitation, water temperature, and salinity are major features affecting the HAB trends in both the KCW and YR basins. Moreover, based on the random forest model and climate change scenarios, HAB events were predicted to increase in frequency in July, September, and October. Therefore, the findings can contribute to preventing biological pollution of the ocean system in the ECS and KCW by supporting efficient environmental management.

This paper takes a modest step in sketching the history of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) from its Cold War origins to the present. Consolidating different sources to tell this narrative, this paper aims to fill in some gaps in the narrative of IRRI’s development, offer some additional details thereto, and extend it to cover IRRI under One CGIAR. The geopolitical rivalry between the United States of America (thereafter US) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (thereafter the Soviet Union) during the Cold War helped establish IRRI in the Philippines in 1960. This ushered the Green Revolution. Formed in the crucible of Cold War geopolitics, IRRI then underwent changes after 1991, such as: (1) formal recognition of IRRI as an International Agricultural Research Center (IARC); (2) stability, increase, and eventual decline of public spending in agriculture research post-2014 (Beintema and Echeverria 2020); (3) the post-Cold War involvement of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) in IRRI’s activities (Medina 2020); and (4) the expansion of BMGF’s corporate involvement, which was facilitated through the centralization of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) under One CGIAR. This paper offers some insights on the implications of post-Cold War develpments in IRRI for global food security, arguing what states, scholars, and/or members of civil society can and should do in light of these developments.

The study aims to analyze how journalism and culture of impunity affect each other, focusing on the situation in the Philippines which is said to be one of the freest presses in Asia but is, ironically, one of the most murderous places in the world to practice journalism. This is timely because almost 200 journalists and media workers in the Philippines have been killed in the line of duty since 1986 with the ouster of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Aside from the prospects of being killed for doing their jobs, they also face harassment and intimidation particularly from the government and its supporters. While there had been studies on journalism globally, there is a dearth of research on culture of impunity. There is also not much research on the alternative media (also called non-profit or independent media) especially in the Philippines. This study addresses the research gap by focusing on these under-researched aspects, mindful that journalism and culture of impunity should be analyzed in the context of both dominant media (also called corporate media) and alternative media. For this thesis, the researcher used a mixed-method approach composed of indepth interviews with and a nationwide survey of Filipino journalists. In analyzing journalism and culture of impunity in the Philippines, the thesis hopes to make sense of the reality and provide recommendations on what could be done to help end impunity. The results of the interviews and survey show that journalism and culture of impunity affect each other in several ways. Much as the chilling effect is apparent, there exists a culture of resistance where journalists and media workers fight back not just in seeking justice for their colleagues (especially those who were killed) but also in defending press freedom from those who repress the media. Harassment and intimidation are apparent, a major form of which is red-tagging where journalists, media workers and news media organizations are accused by government and its supporters of being communists or terrorists, thus endangering their safety and security. The study contributes to the discourse on journalism and culture of impunity by providing theoretical, empirical and normative bases for analyzing the prevailing reality. Its research model could be used in analyzing journalism and culture of impunity in other countries, particularly in areas where journalists and media workers are in danger.

Tupas and Lorente (2014. A ‘new’ politics of language in the Philippines: Bilingual education and the new challenge of the mother tongues. In Peter Sercombe & Ruanni Tupas (eds.), Language, education and nation-building: Assimilation and shift in Southeast Asia, 165–180. New York: Springer) contended that “the politics of language in the Philippines always featured the tension between English on the one hand and the vernacular languages on the other.” But how exactly does this language dynamic manifest itself in the linguistic landscapes (LL) of the Philippines? To explore this question, this paper conducted an exploratory LL analysis of Intramuros, the famed “Walled City” of Manila, using Scollon and Scollon’s (2003. Discourses in place: Language in the material world. London: Routledge) place semiotics and Ben-Rafael et al.’s (2006. Linguistic landscape as symbolic construction of the public space: The case of Israel. International Journal of Multilingualism 3(1). 7–30) top-down and bottom-up sign classification. It found that English-based signs are used to accommodate a global audience, i.e., foreign tourists, whereas Filipino-based signs are used to police and regulate the behavior of residents and, to a certain extent, local tourists. To conclude, it argued that by looking at its linguistic landscape, historical districts like Intramuros articulate beliefs and assumptions on language that, in turn, make them deeply political and ideological sites.

Linguistic landscapes, according to Backhaus (2009: 170), are “consciously shaped and controlled by official rules and regulations.” However, the current body of Philippine linguistic landscape research – under-studied as it already is – lacks a close examination of Philippine national laws governing the (re)production of public signage. This paper therefore investigates the linguistic and ideological underpinnings of select […] national sign laws by situating these not only within the context of their legal precedents, mandates, and history but also through an examination of 600 public signs collected from six diverse region centers in the Philippines. It examines how national laws prefer English in public signs over local and Indigenous languages, thereby perpetuating what Phillipson (1992) calls “English linguistic imperialism” and exacerbating the unequal power dynamics between those who speak English and those who do not in the Philippines.

In the Philippines, the COVID-19 pandemic was not just a medical crisis but also a political one. Itexposed “the weaknesses of state institutions, the exploitation of disaster for vested interests, andimbalanced central-local relations” (Calimbahin & Agojo, 2023, p. 42). Using critical metaphoranalysis, I therefore investigate how this sentiment is instantiated through PHILIPPINE GOVERNMENTmetaphors and metonymies in Philippine Daily Inquirer editorial cartoons. I ascertain how theinteraction between metaphors and metonymies brings about the critical standpoint of the cartoon,which comments on the Philippine government and its pandemic response; it, for example, wascommonly metaphorized in a negative light through the conceptual metonymy TURTLE FOR SLOWNESS,highlighting its sluggish and slow pandemic response. I conclude that analyzing the underlyingconceptual metaphor-metonymy system used in an editorial cartoon not only surfaces the meaning-making process behind their creation, but also the ideologies and sentiments that inform them.

Isa sa mga hamong kinahaharap ng komunidad ng UP Diliman ay ang nakakalulang dami ng estudyante at empleado ng Unibersidad na may pangangailangan sa kalusugang pang-isipan. Hindi sapat ang bilang ng mga psychosocial support specialist (PSS) ng UP Diliman Psychosocial Services (UPD PsycServ) sa dami ng mga nagpapatala para sa serbisyong sikolohikal, kung kaya’t kadalasan ay inaabot ng ilang linggo o isang buwan ang paghihintay bago magkaharap at magkausap ang isang estudyante at kaniyang nakatalagang PSS. Ang pangangailangan ng suportang sikososyal ay lalo lamang napalawak at napaigting ng pandemyang COVID-19. Kasabay ng ilang dagdag na balakid ay ang sunod-sunod na lockdown at pansamantalang pagbabawal sa harapang pakikipag-ugnayan.

Batid ng aming pag-aaral ang kagyat na pangangailangan ng  serbisyong evidence-based o nakaangkla sa ebidensiya upang tugunan ang mga hamon sa kalusugang pang-isipan ng Unibersidad. Bilang tugon sa pangangailangang ito ng komunidad ng UP Diliman, nagsagawa kami ng isang programang group psychotherapy na inaasahang pauna sa mga maisasagawang group psychotherapy sa kalaunan. Ang programang ito ay kilala bilang Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy o MBCT. Lumabas sa mga iba’t ibang pag-aaral na ang MBCT ay isang mabisang pamamaraan ng sikoterapi upang maiwasan ang paglala ng depresyon, pagkabalisa, at stress (MacKenzie & Kocovski, 2016; Sipe & Eisendrath, 2012). Kaya, nilayon ng aming pag-aaral na magamit ang group psychotherapy sa pamamagitan ng MBCT upang makapagbigay ng suporta at ginhawa sa mas nakararami. Magagamit din ang mga resulta ng pag-aaral sa pagbuo at pagsasagawa ng mga serbisyong sikolohikal na naaayon sa konteksto at karanasan ng indibidwal, grupo, at komunidad.

Sa kabanatang ito, ilalahad ang ilan sa mga obserbasyon at pagtatanto, maging ang mga puna at pangunahing natuklasan ng aming pag-aaral tungkol sa gamit o husay ng MBCT at kung paano napabubuti ng mga serbisyong sikolohikal ang kakayanan at kasanayan ng mga kliyenteng mag-aaral na harapin ang mga pagsubok sa buhay.

The field of historical linguistics in the Philippines has seen significant developments since its early beginnings in the 1900s, but several questions regarding the relationships among the languages remain unresolved. Current findings indicate a more complex scenario, which involves not only traditional genetic relationship, but also intense and sustained contact among the communities at different scales and time depths.

In this paper, we emphasize an integrated approach for historical linguistics, which considers small-scale contexts, layers of histories, and more fine-grained analyses of data to inform our linguistic reconstructions more fully. Case studies in Ibatan, Porohanon, and the Southwestern and Southeastern Mindanao languages are presented to illustrate how linguistic histories are inextricably tied to complex community histories.

Such a context-dependent approach yields mosaics of micro-histories that are sensitive to “complex geography, ecological disasters, history of migrations and settlement” (Klamer, 2019, p. 19), which can potentially address long overdue questions on the nature of linguistic relationships, points of dispersal of populations, the agents of change, and the spread of innovations across speakers. This pro-
posed future direction for the field of historical linguistics in the Philippines is one which is approached from below—localized and richly informed by fine-grained and on-the-ground case studies led by local scholars in close collaboration with members of the communities in consideration.

The resurgent interest in environmental questions in political geography has brought into focus its existing and potential intersections with related fields, including political ecology. Both fields share the core concerns of investigating state, territory, power, and political action around environmental resources; and both draw from a diversity of approaches and methods. In this chapter, I explore the convergences between political geography and political ecology through the vantage point of the urban, surveying two approaches to urban environmental change in urban political ecology and affiliated fields. The first tracks metabolic circulation, extended urbanization, and the state-resource-territory nexus through broadly neo-Marxian framings of the uneven production of urban spaces and environments. The second reviews a range of embodied and situated approaches from feminist, postcolonial, and Southern urbanist scholarship to demonstrate how diverse everyday practices reshape the politics of urban environments. I provide selected empirical examples for both approaches, including my own research on the urbanizing environments of Manila.

Hydrometric data poverty compounds the challenge of accounting for uncertainties in non-stationary stage–discharge relationships. This paper builds on three methods to explore the integration of a dynamic approach to rating curve assessment and a physically based Bayesian framework for quantifying discharge amid geomorphologically induced rating shifts in a sparsely gauged alluvial river. The Modified GesDyn–FlowAM–BaRatin method entails sequentially segmenting gaugings according to residual indicators of riverbed instability and channel conveyance variability, leveraging cross-sectional surveys to augment calibration data, and eliciting hydraulic priors for probabilistic rating curve estimation. This method is applied to a Philippine watershed, where quarrying near the gauging station has ostensibly caused morphodynamic adjustments. Time-variable credible intervals for discharge are computed. The optimal estimates (RMSE = 2.96 m3/s) from maximum a posteriori rating curves outperform the hydrographer’s benchmark (RMSE = 5.00 m3/s), whose systematic errors from the gauged flows arise from lapses in shift detection.

Presentation was an abridged version of a term paper for a master's class. The paper is currently being edited for possible submission in journals.

The COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented global crisis, pushing health agencies and ministries to formulate new strategies for crisis management. One of the primary solutions to curb new infections was the COVID-19 vaccine, which became controversial due to disinformation and public hesitancy. In light of this, information campaigns were launched to promote and advertise the vaccine to the public. Campaigns like these have historically made use of persuasion tactics to deliver a message to target audiences. Using semiotics, this paper examines the application of COVID-19 vaccination campaigns launched by the Philippines’ Department of Health and Singapore’s Ministry of Health through selected digital infographics and posters. The paper utilized four (4) artifacts, two (2) from each country.

In this paper, we examine how our notion of solidarity is utilized, according to the circumstances of our communities. Through an observation of how solidarity was called forth during the Covid-19 pandemic and an analysis of how the term is used in immigrant discourse, our research will show that the definition of the term solidarity changes and that throughout the history of philosophical thought it can be understood in various ways. However, we seem to treat it as if it is based on something concrete such as national belonging, shared history, same language, and the like. While this may be true, the wielding of the concept of solidarity is so much more complex and nebulous than the ideas, with which it was built upon.

In this paper, we present how solidarity was a buzzword during the pandemic, but there are several ways with which it can be interpreted both in words and in deeds. In migration studies, solidarity undergoes alterations because of shifting spaces, loyalties, and experiences. We will use the theoretical framework of Rahel Jaeggi in her work on this theme but we will peruse the works of other philosophers as well to show solidarity is an ethical concept, not just a political one. From Durkheim to Honneth, we will show novel ways with which we can have a deeper appreciation of the term. Jaeggi herself was influenced by Durkheim as she applies the idea of solidarity in the debate on welfarism and the healthcare system.  Examples of how Japan called for solidarity during the pandemic and how the Filipino concept of bayanihan is used when they move abroad grounds these discusssions.

Our usual notions of solidarity as a moral sentiment is founded on belongingness to a community is not as straightforward as we think. The phenomena of immigration and the pandemic has weakened this argument but there is a more expansive perspective which enriches the discourse on solidarity.

http://dx.doi.org/10.6667/interface.24.2024.230

This paper focuses on the degradation of water quality in the Mananga River and aims to analyze spatial changes for the recommendation for rehabilitation. The use of ArcGIS and JMP software allows for the assessment of water quality and the identification of the causes of the contaminants coming from probable sources that are near the river. These activities are mainly rural areas and businesses that could have affected the degradation of the quality of the water in the river. By generating spatial distribution maps and conducting rapid profiling, this paper provides recommendations for rehabilitation. The significance of this paper lies in contributing to decision-making processes and the formulation of protective laws that can help in stop the degradation of the water quality of the river. Limitation includes the quarterly frequency of the water monitoring of the river. The results of this paper suggest that the Mananga River does not meet the requirements for DENR Administrative Order 2016-08 for type A rivers. The spatial distribution maps generated were able to visualize and identify the anthropogenic activities that may be affecting the water quality of the river. The DO showed a value from 0.0011 mg/L – 18.800 mg/L, BOD has a value ranging from 1.000 mg/L to 81.500 mg/L, 4.000 mg/L – 325.980 mg/L for TSS, and pH showed values from 7.400 to 8.800. These findings emphasize the need for government intervention and the development of automated river monitoring systems to facilitate testing and rehabilitation efforts.