Publications

In Manila proponents of smart urbanism offer solutions to daunting urban problems in the form of remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and digital mass communication. This article puts these proposals into theoretical and historical context and asks what it means to be a “smart city” amid a resurgence of authoritarianism in the Philippines and around the world. By putting the principles of science and technology studies in dialogue with those of critical urban geography, our analysis foregrounds the tensions between the generative potentials of “patuloy na pag-unlad” (continuous development) and the panoptic impulses of authoritarian capitalism.

Ever since the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, we have treated metaphor not so much a literary phenomenon as a cognitive one. Recently, however, metaphor studies have taken a multimodal turn, analyzing how metaphors are visually manifested in advertisements (Forceville, 1996; Urios-Aparisi, 2009) and editorial cartoons (El Refaie, 2009; Teng, 2009). Although such studies are prevalent, these have fallen short on conceptualizing an explicit procedure for visual metaphor identification that does not assume visual elements to already be in a metaphoric relationship. One recent procedure which does provide an explicit methodology is Šorm and Steen’s Visual Metaphor Identification Procedure (VISMIP) (2018). Despite the differences between verbal and visual metaphors, VISMIP considers cross-domain-ness as one common point of analysis between target and source, characterizing such relationships as either cross-domain or not (Šorm and Steen, 2018, p. 73). Using VISMIP to analyze three editorial cartoons, this paper builds on the binary conception of cross-domain-ness and, in turn, argues for a spectral approach in which target-and-source comparisons occur on varying levels of cross-domain-ness vis-à-vis the presence of an overlapping hypernym and their relative semantic relationship with it. As a result, this study proposes four degrees of cross-domain-ness: (1) absolute cross-domain-ness, where the target and source are totally distinct; (2) superior cross-domain-ness, where the target is semantically closer to the overlapping hypernym than the source; (3) inferior cross-domain-ness, where the target is semantically farther to the overlapping hypernym than the source; and (4) cohyponymic cross-domain-ness, where the target and source fall under the same hypernym and semantic layer. Ultimately, this paper also explores how VISMIP, being a recent development in the area of multimodal metaphor, shows a lot of promise in furthering studies on Philippine media; the dearth of which proves appealing to future language researchers and metaphor analysts alike.

In this essay we map out the development of linguistic research on Tagalog, a major Philippine-type Austronesian language indigenous to the Philippines, by providing a historical overview of studies done on Tagalog. The first part is an overview of the works done as well as the motivations and implications of studying Tagalog during the colonial period. It will also discuss how Tagalog has become the basis for the formation of a national language, an imposed prerequisite for sovereignty shared with other postcolonial Southeast Asian countries in the earlier part of the 20th century. The second part of the essay looks at how Tagalog has led scholars to debate on and challenge theoretical notions, specifically on grammatical categories and subjecthood. This paper ultimately aims to consolidate major Tagalog linguistic studies and to systematically present them as an integrated body of knowledge in order to review what has been accomplished and what possible research directions can be taken in the future.

In this essay we map out the development of linguistic research on Tagalog, a major Philippine-type Austronesian language indigenous to the Philippines, by providing a historical overview of studies done on Tagalog. The first part is an overview of the works done as well as the motivations and implications of studying Tagalog during the colonial period. It will also discuss how Tagalog has become the basis for the formation of a national language, an imposed prerequisite for sovereignty shared with other postcolonial Southeast Asian countries in the earlier part of the 20th century. The second part of the essay looks at how Tagalog has led scholars to debate on and challenge theoretical notions, specifically on grammatical categories and subjecthood. This paper ultimately aims to consolidate major Tagalog linguistic studies and to systematically present them as an integrated body of knowledge in order to review what has been accomplished and what possible research directions can be taken in the future.

Monolingual dictionaries are usually forgiven for not providing more grammatical information because their main target users are native speakers or highly-advanced learners, who likely do not have much need to look up the meaning and usage of, say, high-frequency function words. Dictionaries, however, also serve as encyclopaedias of linguistic information which reflect what we know and understand of the language (Hoekstra, 2010). The objective of this paper is to investigate the treatment of selected function words in MFDs at the microstructure level. We particularly focus on function words that are usually labelled as pantukoy or pang-ukol in dictionaries and Filipino grammar books. In the linguistics literature, these words have been variably called articles, determiners, prepositions, nominal markers, among others. From the wide range of terms used to label these function words, we can immediately surmise that there are some incongruence in the analyses of these words. In comparing the information provided by the MFDs, this study aims to discover the extent to which they match analyses in the linguistics literature and whether or not we would find a consensus among lexicographers where none has so far been reached among syntacticians. Recommendations on the treatment of these words will also be provided.

Land use dilemmas brought about by rapid urban growth present complex challenges in urban governance toward sustainable and inclusive cities. To this end, urban farming has been promoted as a way to improve food security, livelihoods, well-being, and ecological resilience in cities. Yet, it remains largely invisible in urban planning and policymaking on land use and urban development in the Philippines. This chapter takes the case of urban farming to illustrate how urban development, land use, sustainability, equity, and governance intersect in Metro Manila. In discussing current challenges in initiating, maintaining, and governing urban farming activities, it proposes ways to make urban decision-making regarding a fundamentally land use problem more inclusive and equitable. It argues for the need to incorporate urban farming into the sustainable urban development agenda to strengthen its place in urban governance, while emphasizing grassroots access and participation at various stages of decision-making.

Negative attitudes towards lesbian women and gay men continue to exist in Southeast Asian countries. This study identified predictors of homonegativity that are generally consistent across the countries in the region. Using data from the seventh round of World Values Survey, we obtained parsimonious country-level logistic regression models for six of the 11 Southeast Asian countries: Indonesia (n = 3,200), Malaysia (n = 1,313), Myanmar (n = 1,200), the Philippines (n = 1,200), Thailand (n = 1,500), and Vietnam (n = 1,200). Results suggest that four values and one demographic variable are consistent predictors of homonegativity in Southeast Asia. Endorsements of equality, choice, and agnosticism were found to be consistent predictors of lower levels of homonegative attitudes, while the opposite was observed for endorsement of relativism and older people. That there are some consistent cultural predictors of lower levels of homonegativity may suggest a common emancipative logic in Southeast Asia. On the whole, however, the findings suggest that there may be no uniform (Southeast) Asian values system that constitutes sexual prejudice. This foregrounds the need for more contextually-sensitive and culturally-informed models of homonegativity to understand why negative attitudes persist in some countries but not in others, and to also guide the crafting of interventions that are more relevant to each country.

As coastal communities across the Global South confront the multiple challenges of climate change, overfishing, poverty and other socio-environmental pressures, there is an increasing need to understand diverse coastal governance responses and livelihood trajectories from a comparative perspective. This paper presents a holistic investigation of the pressures coastal communities face in four countries and examines possible meeting points between bottom-up initiatives and top-down policies. We compare the experiences of eight fishing areas in Ghana, Tanzania, Thailand and the Philippines and ask how small-scale fishing communities perceive overfishing and other socio-environmental pressures; what factors determine the success and failure of coastal governance initiatives; and how different initiatives can be made congruent to improve coastal, rural development outcomes. Results from an extensive survey of 835 fisherfolk and semi-structured interviews with 196 key informants show that overfishing remains a significant driver of livelihood trajectories in the communities and that fisherfolk respond through informal mechanisms of collective action. Drawing from these diverse experiences, we propose viewing coastal livelihood trajectories through the integrated dimensions of socio-environmental relationships and coastal governance options and discuss implications that address institutional scalar flexibility, illegal fishing, and persistent marginalisation.

Infrastructure and the spatial practices that coalesce around them come to matter in multiple ways. Building on the legacy of splintering urbanism and subsequent appraisals, we explore the paradoxes of infrastructural spaces in a Global South city. In Manila, urban infrastructure plays a central role in enabling evictions in city spaces marked as “danger zones,” and in inhabiting “death zones” in the peripheries where evictees are resettled. This piece employs a relational view of the tensions between the dispossessive and sustaining work of infrastructure to extend the spatial metaphors of urban infrastructure and to illuminate political possibilities built around connections.