Of mobile phones and mother-fathers: Calls, texts, and conjugal power relations of mother-away Filipino families

This article examines how the mobile phone might matter in the exercise of conjugal power relations between left-behind fathers and migrant mothers in transnational Filipino families. Drawing on in-depth interviews of ten pairs of fathers and children from mother-away families, it reveals that the mobile phone provides parents avenues to both expand and hold on to their traditionally gender-differentiated roles. This means that while the technology mitigates some of the effects of migration, it also complicates the already complex relationships between these fathers and mothers. Unfortunately, this situation tends to amplify the tremendous difficulties of having to deal with two opposing forces: the changed realities in a transnational Filipino family and the traditional expectations of Philippine society. So while the mobile phone can lead to increasing cooperation between left-behind fathers and migrant mothers, it has mostly resulted in exacerbating the already tremendous chasms that divide them

Migrant narratives as photo stories: On the properties of photography and the mediation of migrant voices

This article examines how the properties of photography might mediate voice, defined as the capacity to speak and to be heard speaking about one’s life and the social conditions in which one’s life is embedded (Couldry, 2010). It focuses on the affordances that the image provides for migrant cultural minorities to articulate such a voice within the context of collaborative research. I look at the case of Shutter Stories, a collaborative photography exhibition featuring the photo stories of Indian and Korean migrants from Manila, The Philippines. Using participant observation data, I show that it was photography’s ability to be all at once indexical, iconic, and symbolic that became important in voice as ‘speaking’ (see Scott, 1999). It allowed migrants to tell rich, multimodal narratives about their lives, albeit with some key limitations. I also show that it was photography’s inability to fix meanings with finality that mattered in voice as ‘being heard’ (see Messaris, 1997). Although the locals who visited the exhibition engaged with the photo stories in an overwhelmingly positive manner, they often did not completely grasp the migrants’ complex narratives. All this data indicate that collaborative photography exhibition projects should not just be about how migrants speak and are heard. They should also be about how migrants can listen, so that they can adjust what they say to how they are being heard. This is a valuable reminder that in conceptualising photography and migrant cultural minority voices, we also need to take into account the broader process of multicultural dialogue

The Philippines

Although the Philippines is a plural nation with more than 180 indigenous ethnic groups, about 90 percent of its 90 million people share in a so-called Christianized lowland culture. Within this milieu, social networks are often understood as personal alliance systems founded in real kinship, ritual kinship, friendship, and patron-client ties. This article shows that although this presently dominant perspective about social ties is rooted in the Philippines’ pre-colonial era, it is also significantly influenced by the country’s colonial past the under Spanish Empire (from 1521 to 1898) and the United States of America (from 1898 to 1946)

Information and communication technologies and migrant intimacies: the case of Punjabi youth in Manila

This article examines how South–South migrants use information and communication technologies (ICTs) in negotiating their encounters with traditional cultural imaginaries of intimacy. It focuses on second-generation Punjabi Indian youth in the Philippine capital of Manila. Through an ethnographic approach, it unpacks how these migrants harness technologies to steer through two particular ideals about the end-goal of intimate relationships: the Punjabi notion of arranged marriage and the Filipino notion of love marriage. I characterise how the young Punjabis use ICTs to enact what I call a ‘temporarily resolution’ to their migrant double consciousness about intimacy. I also describe how this temporary resolution continues to be entwined with the wider dynamics of multicultural relations in the Philippines. Ultimately, I aim to better understand the role of ICTs in migrant intimacies, especially within the realities of multiculturalism in a postcolonial city in the Global South

Bridging the gap: Journalists' role orientation and role performance on Twitter

Combining a content analysis of 760 tweets and a survey of journalists who tweeted them, this study revisits the questioned assumption that journalists’ conception of their roles manifests in their journalistic outputs. Studies that have tested this assumption instead found a gap between role orientation and performance, possibly explained by how journalistic outputs are organizational products. Thus, this study focused on role performance as observed in journalists’ individual posts on Twitter, a social media platform that has been normalized and now embedded in news routines. If tweets are personal outputs, they should bear the imprint of the journalists who posted them. The findings of this study lend support to this claim

Multicultural mediations, developing world realities: Indians, Koreans and Manila’s entertainment media

In this article, I examine the mediation of multiculturalism in the developing world city of Manila, the Philippines. Drawing on both a thematic analysis of the Manila-centric Philippine entertainment media and six focus group discussions with the city’s local Filipinos, I reveal that this instance of mediation is entangled with the broader discourses of the Philippine postcolonial nationalist project. For one, the mediation of multiculturalism in Manila tends to symbolically marginalize the city’s Indians and Koreans and, in so doing, reinforces existing negative discourses about them. I contend that this is linked to the locals’ preoccupation with establishing a unifying cultural identity that tends to make them elide the issue of their own internal cultural diversity, as well as of the increasing diasporic population of the city. Second, the said mediation also tends to valorize the lighter-skinned Koreans over the darker-skinned Indians. I posit that this is related to how the locals’ discourse of cultural homogeneity has resulted in their continued reluctance to publicly discuss the persistence of their unspoken skin-tone-based racial hierarchy not only of themselves, but also of their cultural others

The rise of trolls in the Philippines (and what we can do about it)

This chapter contributes to efforts at establishing a general account of the increasingly vitriolic online political trolling coming out of many democratically inclined societies. It pays particular attention to the rise online political trolling in the Philippines. We provide sociological explanations for this phenomenon and assess whether and how this plays a role in fostering a democratic media in the country. We begin by considering the definition of an online political troll. We argue that in the Philippines, as in many other contexts, one needs to be careful in approaching such a contested term. We then look at the role of the online political troll in Philippine politics. We attend to how they have gained unprecedented popularity through the distinct dynamics of the country’s democracy but also to how they have undermined the possibility of making better this very same democracy. We conclude by turning to normative frameworks that might help the public sphere move away from the pernicious predominance of toxic online political trolling