PPE: Recent Episodes
Valerie Francisco-Menchavez
A series curated by the Critical Filipina/x/o Studies Collective on all things Philippines, Filipino America and beyond.
This critical conversation, which took place in summer 2023, brings together three brilliant Filipina Canadian scholars, discussing the field of Filipina/x/o Canadian Studies!
Song featured in this podcast episode: K!MMORTAL stop business as usual
Conely de Leon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her current work focuses on the need to hold space for collective grief, collective care, and collective healing in migrant justice work. This work has led her to pursue further training and certification in trauma-informed care, and grief education. Recently, she co-founded the Pahinga Collective with Filipinx-identified graduate students, community organizers, and service providers representing migrant, queer, and feminist grassroots organizations in Tkaronto. The Pahinga Collective's hope is to contribute to more embodied understandings of rest as a form of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist resistance, and healing justice.
Dani Magsumbol is currently completing her doctoral degree at the Department of Politics at York University. She was awarded a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS-D award for her research, which examines affective relationships of citizen/ships & nation/alisms and the political economy of emotions, with a focus on the Filipino labour diaspora in Canada.
Jann Tracee C. Ko Din (she/siya) is a graduate of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Master of Arts program in Immigration and Settlement Studies. Her research focuses on collecting and collectivizing critical Filipinx resources and making them more accessible to those in andoutside of academia. Alongside Dr. Conely de Leon, Jhona Binos, Jessica Loyola, Joelle Navarro, Mycah Panjaitan, and Mauriene Tolentino, Jann co-founded the Pahinga Collective. Their work builds upon emergent collective care praxes and contributes to radical, anti-oppressive, and embodied understandings of rest as a form of resistance, refusal, and healing justice. Jann is rooted in her responsibilities as the kin to peoples from the Philippine Islands; as an immigrant and racialized settler on Turtle Island; as the bunso of her family; and as a descendant of her ancestors.
CFSC celebrates a new publication from Dr. Rose Ann Gutierrez, Hazel Piñon and Trisha Valmocena.
Gutierrez, R. A. E., Piñon, H., & Valmocena, M. T. (2023).Co-creating knowledge with undocumented Filipino students: Kuwentuhan as research method. New Directions for Higher Education, 2023(203), 77-92. http://doi.org/10.1002/he.20478
This conversation features the authors in conversation about their article and Kuwentuhan as a method of data collection. Their bios are below:
Rose Ann Rico Eborda Gutierrez is an assistant professor atthe University of Nevada, Reno. Her research is informed by a Pinayepistemology and positionality as a 1.5-generation immigrant, first-generation college student, and the only daughter of working-class Pilipino immigrants. Her critical analytical lens as a race scholar in higher education undergird her resolve to improve the conditions and opportunities of historically oppressed communities across the lifespan through educational research and practice. Her broader research agenda examines the relationship between knowledge, race, and social transformation in higher education contexts. Sheseeks to understand how racial inequities in education are reserved at the intersection of and in relationship with other systems of oppression, how students navigate these systems using embodied epistemologies, and what the role higher education institutions play in shaping student pathways and outcomes across P-20. She focuses on low-income, immigrant, immigrant-origin, undocumented, and first-generation Students of Color, and more specifically, Asian American and Pacific Islander students. Her interdisciplinary research about racial equity in higher education and intersectional justice is anchored by critical theories and critical qualitative methodologies.
This episode brings together Filipina/o/x trained in history talking through the importance of history, historians and the archive for a Critical Filipinx Studies.
Dr. Stef Lira received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Irvine in Latin American History where she completed her dissertation “Mercurial Masculinities: Indigenous and Chinese Laborers in the Early Modern Philippines.” Dr. Lira’s research focused on the impact of Spanish colonization on the Philippines, particularly the formation of racial and gendered ideologies within colonial labor sites. Her work traced the relationship between racial and gendered ideas and racist labor exploitation via local laws and punitive expulsion orders. She is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Long Beach City College. Outside of the college, Dr. Lira works with non-profits and grassroots Filipino organizations that work to protect the rights of working class Filipino communities in Southern California. She is the Education Officer for Gabriela South Bay, a Filipino women's organization that fights for the rights and welfare of Filipino women and families. Through her community work, she further grounds her pedagogical principles in her teachings: History is not made by great men, but by the efforts and struggles of everyday people.
Dr. Bernard James Remollino is a 1.5-generation undocumented Filipinx American from Manila. He earned his Ph.D. in U.S. History from UCLA in 2022 for his research on histories of Filipinx American popular culture, labor, and migration in the early 20th century. Dr. Remollino is an Associate Professor of Asian and Pacific American History at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, CA, where he mentors AAPI students as part of the college’s Empowering Positive Initiatives for Change (EPIC) program. He is also currently engaged in a book project examining transpacific interwar Filipinx popular cultures and their influence on U.S. politics, society, and empire from the 1910s to the 1950s. He is a Managing Editor and Senior Staff Writer for Mahalaya newspaper, a free monthly print news publication based in San Francisco sharing Filipinx American stories through solidarity journalism. Dr. Remollino lives in San Francisco and enjoys teaching Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, getting tattooed, and riding motorcycles in his spare time.
Abby Gayle Reynoso Principe is a first-generation Filipina American born and raised in Vallejo, California. Abby received her AA-T in History from Napa Valley College and her BA in History from UC Davis with minors in Education and Asian American Studies. She is now an incoming PhD student in History at UC Riverside, with the desire to center her research around preserving kwentuhans (the art of storytelling), especially within the Filipino farm labor movement in the 1960s. Abby is a former lead intern for the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies from 2019 to early 2020. Her undergraduate research can be found under the Bulosan Center Working Paper series titled, “The World is Watching: the Meeting that Ended a Movement and Sparked a Revolution.” Since graduating from UC Davis, Principe is implementing kwentuhans, community, and her love for coffee to run Masaya Kapé, a coffee pop-up that celebrates these pillars instilled in her through the work of the Bulosan Center and Filipina/o/x Studies.
Today, you’ll hear a conversation between Dr. Amanda Solomon Amorao, Associate Professor at UC San Diego, Dr. Joy Sales at CSU Los Angeles and a founding member, Dr. Robyn Magalit Rodriguez. They reflect on a CFSC praxis and the impact their involvement has made on their personal, political and academic careers.
The audio is from a hybrid event we held with the UC Davis Bulosan Center in May of 2023 facilitated by Dr. Mike Viola, and myself, with the support of doctoral candidate Wayne Jopanda.
This moving and frank conversation between three amazing scholars dives into how life informs research and dissertating while Filipina/x.
Veronica B. Salcedo (she/siya) is a 5th year PhDcandidate in Sociology at Georgia State University and researchesracialized, gendered, and classed experiences of cisgender Pinays, or cis womenof partial or full Filipino descent, who are romantically attracted to otherwomen. She utilizes critical race feminism and Peminism/Pinayism torecognize sexually nonconforming (SNC) Pinay cultural contributions as richsources of knowledge. In her dissertation, Veronica incorporates this knowledgewith semi-structured interview data to better understand how SNC Pinays come torecognize their authentic selves and navigate systems of power impacting theirfamilies of origin and choice. She hopes to build on this study throughcommunity based research with SNC Pinays in the Philippines. Veronica earned her master's in Sociology at GSU,where she was recognized as an outstanding graduate student instructor. You canfind her at local dessert spots, especially if ube is somewhere on the menu.
Jackie Colting-Stol(she/her) a 4th year PhD Candidate in the School of Social Workat McGill University in Tiohtià:ke or Montreal, Quebec. Herdissertation uses Photovoice and Kuwentuhan participatory methods to explorethe community-building, advocacy and solidarities of LGBTQ+ Filipino/a/x of thediaspora, especially the relationships between gender identity, sexuality anddiasporic experiences. She has worked in a wide range of community and socialservice roles in immigration, community health and youth sectors, and has beeninvolved in Filipino/a/x youth and migrant justice organizing in the pastseveral years. She is also interested in funding and governance structures ofnon-profits and grassroots organizations in the area of more sustainable,transformative and decolonial approaches that tie to broadermovement-building. In the past few years, she has been engaged with artsand cultural approaches to gathering, re-sharing and archiving stories ofcommunity, queerness and migration, alongside her community fam, kapwa andkin. Personally, she's a chosen fam Tita, a newbie kickboxer, and acycling fan.
Katherine Nasol is a earned her doctorate degree at UC Davis inCultural Studies, finishing up her dissertation in Spring of 2023. Her researchfocuses on theorizing care and care work as it relates to racial capitalism andcritical immigration studies, especially through the lives of immigrant womenand women of color who perform paid and unpaid care labor. Beyond her scholarlywork, she is a community organizer and educator at heart, organizing aroundimmigrant and housing justice for the past decade. She was the former Directorof Policy and Community Engagement at the Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studiesand currently, she is a Senior Research Coordinator at AAPI Women Lead whereshe leads national community-led research programs around how Asian and PacificIslander communities experience & heal from racial and gender basedviolence. She is also an auntie to two babies, a partner, & an avid loverof all things boba and the outdoors!
Dr. Tracy Lachica Buenavista a Professor of Asian American Studies at Cal State Northridge and a core faculty member in the Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership. She also serves as the co-principal investigator for the CSUN DREAM Center, Asian American Studies Pathways Project, and Ethnic Studies Education Pathways Project; and is a member of the Project Rebound Community Advisory Committee. Professor Buenavista teaches courses on race and racism, immigration, and research methods, and in her research uses critical race theory to examine how education, immigration and carcerality shape the contemporary experiences of Filipino/a/x and other People of Color in the U.S. She is originally from the Bay Area, and loves to read, run, and jump rope.
Dr. Michael Castañeda is Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies in Fairhaven College at Western Washington University (WWU). He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently completing his book manuscript, No Separate Peace: Multiracial Struggles Against Racial Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest. This study examines the parallel and overlapping activist traditions and grassroots organizing practices of Filipino cannery workers in Alaska and Black construction workers in Seattle between the 1970s and the early 2000s. His teaching interests include critical/comparative ethnic studies, anti-racist social movements, histories of racial capitalism, Asian American/Native Pacific Studies, and the Black Radical Tradition.
Dr. Gina Velasco is an Assistant Professor in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Gettysburg College. She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Dr. Velasco's research and teaching explores how gender and queer sexuality inform notions of nation, diaspora, and transnational belonging in a contemporary context of globalization. She is the author of Queering the Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalisms in the Filipina/o Diaspora(University of Illinois Press 2020).
On this episode, Drs. Mike Viola and Valerie Francisco-Menchavez talk with Dr. Iyko Day an Associate Professor of English and Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College and Faculty Member in the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. Her research focuses on Asian North American literature and visual culture; settler colonialism and racial capitalism; Marxist theory and queer of color critique. She is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke, 2016).
You can find her book here: https://www.dukeupress.edu/alien-capital
Dr. Steven Osuna is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at California State University, Long Beach. As a professor, activist-intellectual, and mentor, Dr. Osuna teaches courses on immigration, critical criminology, social theory and his research are centered in a preferential option for the poor, social justice, and critical thinking. He is also a member of grassroots organizations that seek to make social change in the world to improve the conditions that many face such as the Human Rights Alliance for Child Refugees and Families (HRA), International Migrants Alliance (IMA) and the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP).
Music for this podcast was provided by Alan Dizon.
Dr. Lorenzo Perillo is an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Hawai at Manoa. His new book, Choreographing in Color: Filipinos, Hip-hop, and the Cultural Politics of Euphemism (Oxford University Press 2020) features interviews from over 80 key artists and organizers and utilizes bilingual ethnography, choreographic analysis, and community engagement to examine Black cultural expression in relation to Filipino racialization.
Visit his website to buy the book: www.choreographingincolor.com
Music for this podcast was provided by Alan Dizon.
This episode features the Philippine sociologist, activist, writer and scholar, Professor Sarah Raymundo, a full-time faculty at the University of the Philippines-Center for International Studies (UP-CIS Diliman). She is a member of the National Executive Board of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) and currently the External Vice Chair of the Philppine Anti-Imperialist Studies (PAIS). She is currently working on a project entitled, “Making space for Indigenous knowledge, sustainabilities and futures” with years of field work with Lumad communities in Mindanao and Aetas in Pampanga and Zambales.
Music for this podcast was provided by Alan Dizon.
This is a podcast series curated by Critical Filipina/x/o Studies Collective to highlight and uplift action and scholarship that is anti-imperialist, committed to movement-building about the Philippines and the Filipino diaspora.
This podcast is named PPE in honor of all the Filipinos/as working on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic all over the world, and their continuing fight to work safely and with dignity.
Today’s episode is a conversation with Dr. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, Dr. Michael Viola highlighting the biography and work of Dr. Joy Sales.
Music for this podcast was provided by Alan Dizon.
In this episode, Valerie Francisco-Menchavez talks with Dr. Mike Viola and Dr. Joy Sales about the need for Filipinx Studies to be critical.
Michael Joseph Viola is Associate Professor at Saint Marys College of California in the Justice, Community & Leadership (JCL) program and affiliate faculty in the Ethnic Studies program. He earned a Ph.D. in Education with an emphasis in urban schooling from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is currently working on a book project that examines Filipino/a American activism and solidarities from 1965 to present.
Joy Sales is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at Cal State LA. Her research interests include Filipino/a/x studies, Asian American studies, ethnic studies, U.S. in the world, U.S. empire, social movements, and gender studies. She is working on a book manuscript, "We Are Revolution: Empire, Diaspora, and Transpacific Filipino Activism." I focus on Filipino American activists and their involvement in homeland politics after the watershed 1965 Immigration Act and during an era of military dictatorship in the Philippines under Ferdinand E. Marcos (1965-1986).
Episode Art Cover by Favianna Rodriguez