Publications

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.

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.